The Volere requirements techniques were developed to answer the need for a common language for discovering requirements and connecting them to solutions. The language needs to be understandable by business people, customers, business analysts, engineers, designers, suppliers, testers or anyone else whose input is needed. All of these people have different skills and, not surprisingly, different views of what is important. A language intended for all of these people must recognise the differences in peoples’ viewpoints and yet have a consistent way of communicating and tracing the relevant knowledge. This realisation that requirements is a socio-technical discipline has a strong influence on the development of the techniques.
Author: Suzanne Robertson & James Robertson, The Atlantic Systems Guild
Failing to properly and accurately define requirements at the very beginning of the project lifecycle points to a distinct lack of business analysis competency. The role of the business analyst is an important one, and, sadly, one that is underutilized by many organizations around the world. In essence, a business analyst acts as a translator or liaison between the customer or user and the person or group attempting to meet user needs. But, that’s just speaking generally. What about the specifics? Below, I’ve put together a list of eight key competencies that every business analyst—or every professional performing the duties of a business analyst—should possess. I’ve included specific emphasis on tasks associated with junior, intermediate and senior business analysts. If performed effectively, the items on this list could save organizations millions.
In my last column I introduced you to the role of a typical security analyst, and explained that security is a part of the business lifecycle. In this column, I will dive into that concept, and I will highlight some of the areas a security analyst might play in determining the risk to an asset throughout its life span.
So what is a ‘lifecycle’ in business terms? There are many definitions, and if you ask any modern analyst you will get their own tweaked version of that answer. For our sake, let’s say a lifecycle is the cycle of life of a business asset from birth through to an end stage.
One of the issues high on the agenda of many CIOs is to align IT efforts with the company’s strategic goals. But how you do trace a line of code back to the strategic goal that caused it to be written? If we’re able to do this then, and only then, can it be said that IT is aligned with the business strategy.
In the past I have discussed the need to manage data (and all information resources) as a valuable resource; something to be shared and reused in order to eliminate redundancy and promote system integration. Now, our attention turns to how data should be defined. Well defined data elements are needed in order to properly design the logical data base as well as developing a suitable physical implementation.
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