For a long time English school teachers were taught that the rules for English should be like Latin — a dead language — and that it should follow these rules in all aspects. They then prescribed how English should be taught and how students should write and speak English. Some people refer to this as the Queens English and everything else as Bad English.
We all know, though, that English is a living language. It changes based on who speaks it, where they are speaking it, and who they are speaking to. You wouldn’t use the same style of speech to your grandmother that you would use to the kid down the street. This fact is why English isn’t taught prescriptively any longer in Australia. It’s taught descriptively — taught according to the way people use it.
It would be good if some of the new organisations around Business Analysis took this approach. Maria Murphy recently blogged about this — how some organisations are struggling to define Business Analysis so they can prescribe what it is. While they believe it will bring standardisation to the industry, I think it will just be like telling people who don’t meet the standard that they are speaking Bad English.
Maria suggests that we should be describing, rather than prescribing “the scope of what is business analysis and then … look[ing] at what that discipline offers in the way of frameworks and tools to its members, as [well as] the specialists in this field”.
I agree with Maria, but I would go a step further and say that we also need to look at what the discipline offers to the community who don’t call themselves BAs, but still do analysis work. BAs know what they do, but there are many people who don’t know what theories of analysis to draw upon, they don’t know what frameworks to use and when, and they don’t know what tools are out there to help them get the job done.
Let’s stop prescribing what a BA is and isn’t and let’s get these messages out there!
M
24 October, 2007 at 6:05 pm
Oh, this is *exactly* what happened to the IA community in the early days. You can even search on ‘defining the damn thing’ and find a whole lot of the old argument. One of the challenges there was that people were trying to *define* based on what they did, rather to define based on principles. But as we know as IAs, describing is more effective and more flexible, than defining!
24 October, 2007 at 6:05 pm
Haha, I commented, then read Maria’s post which said exactly the same
10 December, 2007 at 9:46 pm
The PMI are still going through this process. It evolved out of an attempt to define the role through it’s unique attributes, but hey, these days what job has unique attributes.
On the other hand it is a useful exercise to create a standard toolkit and language for BAs to draw upon. This will help iron out the problems that occur when people are working across businesses, or move into new business. (This is what happens in construction for example.)