Role? Discipline? Knowledge? Definition? What do we need from a professional organisation?

I wrote a rant last time about my personal feelings toward organisations like the IIBA. I’ve got nothing against the IIBA itself, just a philosophical and ideological point of difference that is about making knowledge free to everyone. I wasn’t expecting, however, the number of tweets that came my way regarding these issue, so I thought I would actually ask the question, in this modern era of free knowledge and communications tools from Wikipedia and Twitter to Gmail and Ning,what do we want or even need from specialised, professional organisations?

1. Do we need standardisation?

I’ve heard a lot of organisations over the last decade proclaim that standardisation brings certainty and a level playing field to the market. It is suggested that it means an instantly recognisable criteria for recruitment and measurement of skills along with which comes measures of market values and salary. It also provides a means by which trainers can make a living. The principle of standardisation is a good one, but unfortunately when ‘owned’ by a professional organisation it becomes hard to adapt and change as the professional community begins to move in different directions and takes on board new techniques and tools from closely affiliated disciplines. One only has to look at the Scrum movement to see how some areas, like traditional project management, have become unable to incorporate ‘agility’ into its methods. It also means professional bodies may be turning away the very people who are able to transform their organisations. Take Information Architecture, for example. The president of the Information Architecture Institute during 2008, Eric Reiss,  has no formal qualifications in IA yet is regarded as one of the organisation’s most brilliant thinkers.

In the end, standardisation by a professional organisation only serves to reinforce normalisation, the status quo, within its organisation, ensures that its members can memorise and recall off the tops of their heads in an exam situation the principles that the organisation adheres to (e.g. the IIBA’s version of business analysis, or PRINCE2’s version of project management, but not your own thoughts on project management), and thereby stifles growth and innovation by the very thinkers it should be seeking to engage.

2. Do we need definition?

Again, we just need to look at project management to see what definition does to a profession — it fragments it. This is the time old problem with taxonomical classification that goes back to the time of Aristotle — definition means classifying what a thing is and what it is not. In relation to professional organisations, what follows is that people will either identify with that definition or will not. If they don’t identify with how you define what they do then they’ll look elsewhere or create their own group. We only have to look to project management organisations to see what definition has meant for their profession. Now we now have many different flavours of what projects manager do, from PMI and PMBOK, PRINCE2, to MSP and most recently P3O. The Business Analysis community is not immune either, with an American-made international body called the IIBA and an Australian one called the ABAA both with their own ideas as to what makes a business analyst and what does not. Which one is the One True Faith? Does it matter? I always look to Jesse James Garrett’s essay IA Recon when debating the need for definition by a professional organisation for the sake of its professional community:

“Definitions based upon the role tend to creep naturally toward broadness. Because the responsibilities that correspond to the role vary so greatly from organization to organization, the definition of the role (and thus the discipline) grows larger and larger.

“The opposing approach is to define the role based on the discipline. Whatever the field of information architecture is, an information architect is the person who specializes in it …these definitions tend to creep naturally toward narrowness …but when this definition (intended for the discipline) is applied to the role, it creates for some the fear of being ‘boxed in’, trapped in a role so narrowly defined that many of the elements essential to the success of any given architecture are outside the control or influence of the architect.”

For me, personally, this is how I feel about where Business Analysis is headed. That BA is being so  “narrowly defined that many of the elements essential to the success” of business analysis is starting to become outside my control or influence. And I hear this often from PMs who claim that it’s not a BAs role to do X or Y, and I’m starting to hear it from the ABAA who suggest that business architecture has little to do with being a business analyst.

3. Who owns the body of knowledge?

Once you create a publication you can sell it and make money. When it comes to creating a tome of knowledge, capturing it as a book and selling it turns knowledge into a commodity for which there are gatekeepers. Someone must decide what is of relevance and what is not. The logical decision is to reach back to a definition and a standardisation to choose. The result is a subjective call, not an objective one, as to whether an individual, or a set of empowered individuals consider to be worthy of documenting. This is the gatekeeper version of knowledge management, rather than assuming that collective knowledge resides within the community itself and changes and evolves over time.

Again, I’ll take a leaf from the IA Recon and note that “only by being generous with our knowledge can we reap all of its benefits. And only by creating a culture in which these principles are fully embraced can we foster the growth of our field, and ensure our continued success.” Peter Morville goes further to say that community is of equal value, that a profession’s role in order to evolve is to take the role and discipline to those who undertake similar activities to aid them with their work. I’d like to suggest that knowledge for profession is the intersection of all the areas of role, discipline, and community.

In essence, knowledge must be an emergent quality of all three areas, not prescribed by a professional organisation or described by a select, powerful few. This is what makes wikis such a powerful medium for sharing knowledge , either within organisations or by the public. To me, therefore, we need professional organisations to support the community and through the community influence role, discipline and knowledge.

This means we don’t need professional organisations to define the community and all aspects of the profession, but support the community to explore and influence the aspects of role, discipline and knowledge that are of relevance to them.

Hopefully, food for thought.

M

Rant: Does the ‘buy now’ business model work for communities of practice?

When I was doing the interaction design for the new CHOICE website I advised them that continuing to put $ signs on items to buy wouldn’t encourage membership. When you assess the cognitive processes behind people and communities an individual needs to understand the value proposition before they’ll join. The CHOICE website now gives you many more chances to interact with members, non-members and staff, and get stuff for free, in order to establish the value proposition for membership.

When the Project Management Institute (PMI) was established in 1969, the world was a different place. Baby boomers ruled the landscape and knowledge was power. The model of spend money to join and we’ll give you access to our professional Body of Knowledge (PMBOK) seemed like the right business model. Today, with Baby Boomers nearing retirement and Gen-Xs and Gen-Ys being the predominant workforce demographic, is the ‘buy now before you know our secrets’ business model likely to work?

The world of the internet means knowledge is free and is a resource to share — this is what Gen-Ys in particular believe and demand. We have Wikipedia that holds the worlds knowledge as a result — much more than the ‘professionals’ would ever put into standardised tomes of knowledge like Encyclopaedia Britannica for example. Academics blog about their research so they can share it with others immediately rather than waiting for a peer review process that can take years. Professional bodies like the Information Architecture Institute (IAI) turn to wikis and blogs to share their knowledge freely. In this landscape, though, professional communities of practice like the IIBA continue to adopt PMI’s 40 year old business model. Their self-professed experts create what they believe to be the definitive body of knowledge in much the same way as Encyclopaedia Britannica is written. In fact, the president of the IIBA defined business analysts as people who did what was inside the BABOK, and defined the BABOK as the body of knowledge for business analysts …. the definition seems rather circular, no? They the IIBA asks you to join before you can see what a business analyst is or does. So I can only know if I’m a business analyst by reading the BABOK? What if I do something different to your definition? Am I no longer a business analyst?

Where’s the value proposition in this business model? Where’s the community in that?

Typically, when I twitter about these things, members of the IIBA immediately jump on me. I even had @IIBA_Australia suggest that asking to read the BABOK without becoming a member or buying it first was like going to a book store and asking to read a book before buying it. Strangely enough, that’s exactly what you can do. You can always take a book off the shelf, read it a little, see if you like it, and then buy it. And if you go to Borders you can order a coffee and sit down and read it.

Jesse James Garrett in his essay IA Recon posited the issues of community, definition and discipline back in 2002. It had a profound effect on me when I first read it only 2 years ago and shaped the way I now feel about these professional communities and turning into a not-for-profit business what is rightly the job of the community not the professional body. Definitions change over time. Practices grow and evolve. Disciplines overlap with others in messy ways. But it’s always the people themselves who need to consciously or otherwise make that decision. To the IIBA and other bodies who attempt to ‘own’ this knowledge and definition I say this (in a tone that reflects my rantiness about this whole issue of course):

• Open your so called bodies of knowledge to the community. Let the community contribute directly. Contribution engenders ownership and shared ownership builds trust and trust builds communities.
• Let the body of knowledge reflect the community’s direction, not the one you’d prescribe.
• Stop defining and prescribing the profession, the role and the discipline. Your efforts only serve to alienate the very people who you should be encouraging to join your communities.
• Start sharing your knowledge openly and freely. Become mentors and thought leaders, not gatekeepers of the BABOK.

M

ps – as a rant, so as to not incite riots and flame wars, comments and trackbacks have been disabled on this post

Reflections on Priming

I was exposed to priming by Jodie Moule of Symplicit at this year’s Oz-IA. It’s essentially an exercise designed to engage people’s right-brain (creative) that allows examination of how people feel and their emotional experiences about a certain subject before engaging their left-brain (logical) and asking them to analyse an experience. Having a means of engaging with people and analysing their wants, needs, motivations, expectations and experiences in both ways ultimately means you get a richer understanding of their context.

I’ve been reviewing an organisation’s business analysis capability these last few weeks, so I felt that rather than do a standard interview, I would get people to do a priming exercise instead. I simply asked them to create a mind map — a collage of words and pictures — to describe themselves and their personal feelings and experiences in relation to their work environment.

Each person’s A4 page was quite different. Some approaching the task from a completely creative perspective, some logically setting out and categorising their thoughts and experiences. Some used colours. Some just used black pen on the white page. At the beginning of the interview we discussed their A4 page and they explained each of the different parts they had created. It was a surprising insight into their work context and revealed much of the emotion they feel — their pride in their job, their work conflicts with other areas, frustrations with process, and their relationships with their colleagues. After this discussion, we then went through the standard questions. Even through these I felt that the personal exercise had openned them up somewhat, their responses were a little more personal, a little more emotional, and a little more honest than I would have normally expected.

When undertaking any form of analysis of people and their context I can see priming as a tool I will continue to use — whether in order to create a good user-experience as an Information Architect or just as a consultant eliciting requirements and creating a business solution for a client. In the end, it’s all about helping people and if we can gain a more holistic understanding of them I’m all for that!

M