Statistics: (3289 Views) (0 Comments) Print Posted: Friday, June 22, 2007 Categories: Leadership & Management, Career as a Business Systems Analyst, Getting Started as a Business Systems Analyst

The talents, competencies and heroics of project managers and technologists alone cannot drive value into the organization. For business needs and goals to be converted into innovative solutions that truly bring wealth to the enterprise, a stronger bridge must be built between the business and the technical communities. Enter the business analyst.

Change is the norm, fierce competition is the driver, and lean thinking is the latest call to action. Information Technology (IT) has finally come into its own, now viewed as a value provider as opposed to a cost drain. With the stakes so high, IT organizations are faced with an extraordinary combination of pressures to deliver value to their organizations in terms of added revenues, avoided costs, lower taxes, higher productivity, less employee turnover, less risk exposure, etc. Competitive advantage is now linked to an organization’s ability to rapidly deploy IT solutions, and to change those systems as the business need evolves. IT projects must not only deliver high quality products faster, better, and cheaper (traditionally the responsibility of the project manager), they are also under intense scrutiny to positively impact the bottom line (increasingly, the joint responsibility of the project manager, project sponsor, and the business analyst).

Author: Kathleen B. Hass