UPDATE: Tried to make this post less of a rant *LOL*
Eric Reiss made a great comment during his presentation on effective E-Service at IA Summit 2008. He suggested that while it’s a wonderful thing that we’re celebrating our profession by formalising post-graduate courses on Information Architecture, we should never forget that there are other people, and other professions, who know more about information architecture than we do. This was something echoed by Andrew Hinton in his most-excellent closing plenary for the conference.
According to Andrew, Information Architecture emerged as a community of practice from intersections between other disciplines like Library Science and Cognitive Psychology and for a long time, there was a lot of grey and a lot of uncertainty about what IA was and who IAs were.
The profession of Information Architecture has come a long way since those days and information architecture activities are now held as a vital piece of a system’s design. This doesn’t mean, though, that as far as designing great user-experiences, or in helping to make information understandable by classifying it and structuring it, that we know everything about IA — because we don’t. And I couldn’t agree more — there are bound to be other disciplines and practices that have other pieces of the holy grail of perfect design.
Business Analysis is also going through change and evolving into a discipline of its own. As such, Business Analysts from all sorts of different communities of practice and other disciplines are finding themselves in uncertain territory as it grows to accommodate the intersections between practices. We’re certainly not all from engineering or systems design, some of us come from scientific method and research analysis disciplines. Some may suggest that this evolution brings uncertainty to the market about what being a BA is really about, but its all part of the dynamics of an evolving and changing community of practice.
What we’re seeing, though, is that some BA associations are attempting to standardise and fix in time what what a BA is, what a BA does. Their efforts have generally culminated in an attempt to define these issues (maybe even prescribe it?) in their publications:
“Discover the Business Analysis Body of Knowledge® (BABOK®), the accepted standard for the BA profession … the collection of knowledge within the profession of Business Analysis and reflects current generally accepted practices … defined and enhanced by the Business Analysis professionals who apply it in their daily work role … [describing] the tasks and skills necessary to be effective”
It’s great that, for Business Analysts (the role), we’re developing material for BA the discipline. But this is only one view of the BA. To suggest that people will be tested on this view and then be called BAs in order to differentiate those who are not ‘certified’ is a little dangerous. It suggests that those with different ideas on BA activities are not true BAs. From my readings on the history of the Christian Church, there are many parallels between this idea and the Reformation in England centuries ago.
If communities of practice are emergent, self-organising, then the nature of business analysis (the role, the activity, the discipline, the community and even the title) will change over time as it learns from other disciplines and amalgamates new ideas into its own. People will naturally come to business analysis from other disciplines and backgrounds and help to shape it over time. To suggest that, like the French language, this natural process can be controlled and defined in order to bring ‘clarity to the market’ is rather naive.
So why not give the artefacts that help shape the discipline over to the BA Community? Why not put the BABOK into a Wiki and suggest that the BA Community contribute the wisdom of its crowd? It may be because of control and/or money, because, ultimately there is much to be had in certification programs and courses from a community hungry to see itself legitimised against others like Project Management.
M
17 April, 2008 at 11:05 pm |
Never a truer word spoken, my friend. Formalising “qualification” in our discipline of IA, or of BA may have value. But to do it with information that is held back unless you pay the right fee reeks of opportunism rather than a true desire to open up and share the knowledge you possess.
18 April, 2008 at 11:36 am |
HI Matt,
Despite what you seem to believe, the IIBA is a non-profit organization that has not made a dime of revenue from the BABOK or from this Business Analysis symposium that has you so upset (we’re not even involved in the latter as an international body). The BABOK was developed entirely by volunteers who contributed considerable time and effort to develop it out of a desire to benefit the BA community, and have not been paid for their time. Over a hundred and fifty practitioners of business analysis have been involved in the development and review of the current edition. The IIBA Board of Directors are all volunteers who devote an average of 10-15 hours a week to the organization above and beyond holding down day jobs and are not recompensed in any way for doing so.
I’m saddened that you felt the need to impugn our motives, instead of assessing the value of what we’ve developed. In fact, the primary motivator for the formation of the IIBA was not training providers seeking to sell courses, as you seem to believe, but employers who felt that they needed a set of standards for business analysis practice and training so that they could reliably find and assess skilled candidates for their jobs. Most of our funding comes from memberships and member payments, and it’s still the case that we rely far more on employers of business analysts for institutional support than any other group.
For the record, and in the interests of full disclosure, I will state that I am the only member of the IIBA’s management team who is paid by the IIBA (for managing its information technology) although I still devote considerable unpaid volunteer time to the organization, and worked as a volunteer for four years before taking on this contract role.
19 April, 2008 at 12:01 am |
Very good post. And so true!
20 April, 2008 at 1:09 pm |
I wonder if you’d care to comment on this topic here.
Cheers
22 April, 2008 at 7:27 am |
@Kevin Brennan: Unfortunately, I think you’ve missed my point.
The IIBA is an effective body for rallying BAs and sharing knowledge about best practice on certain aspects of what some BAs do. And for that, it’s great.
Saying that, though, I would not want a business to dictate who and what a BA is about. Do we really want the day when the market says I only want an BA as defined by IIBA? What about those who are not IIBA cerfitied? Will the day come when they won’t be considered BAs?
And this is the argument being had amongst BAs right now — asking the question about who we are, what we do, the activities we undertake, the roles we perform, and the titles we’re given. Unfortunately, the BABOK only represents a small portion of what many of us consider to be BA-work. Yet, it’s approach is that, if you do the BABOK test you’ll be certified as a BA. And it’s this that just seems wrong.
I just don’t think that the BABOK has all the answers.
M
25 April, 2008 at 10:38 am |
Matt, I and the IIBA don’t claim that it does. The BABOK is intended as a baseline–it’s supposed to define a core set of skills and knowledge that should be shared by all experienced BAs. Can you go beyond that? Sure! It never states (and never will as long as I’m in charge) that this is everything a BA needs to know to deal with every possible situation they will confront, or that a BA must do these things and nothing more. The BABOK, by its very nature, can’t and won’t capture ideas on the cutting edge because those haven’t become “generally accepted” yet.
Frankly, if you’re a genuinely top-notch BA with a broad knowledge of the profession, the BABOK may NOT have a lot for you. The primary audience is people getting started in the profession, or people who have been doing it for a while but not been exposed to the full range of the job. It helps those people understand what they need to learn in order to be a reasonably well-rounded professional able to work in most industries and on most projects. But eventually, you’re going to master what it has to offer and move beyond that.