Business Analysis:
Enough with the ‘what do you do’ questions
Organizations that provide services are quickly realizing how important business analysts are to the overall success of their companies.
Unfortunately, we don’t get much appreciation and that might because the role itself is misunderstood.
Business Analyst: Shepherding Innovation
As everyone knows, innovation is the hot button topic at the moment and maybe it isn’t just a hyper-buzzword. Innovation is what customers want, to be honest, it’s what they expect. Innovation is the thing that boosts profits, enhances reputations, and wins over customers.
How many nights do you lie awake thinking about how to more effectively deliver innovative products and / or services to market faster than the competition?
As un-sexy as knowledge management sounds and maybe is perceived, it is the foundation of an organization’s ability to innovate or be innovative. The truth is if you can’t gather and organize information, to provide knowledge then you cannot innovate. Taking a creative person, or a so-called innovator, and sticking them in a room will not produce more effective ways to deliver innovative products and / or services to market faster than the competition. All forms of creativity are very limited without purpose or direction.
Success Lives or Dies by Knowledge Management
This isn’t meant as a statement to create a scene of panic – study after study shows that the management of documentation and information (knowledge) is a top success factor. Based on that, it seems reasonable to suggest that anyone who manages a function that is this critical to the success of your organization deserves some kudos. Problems with poor knowledge management:
- Organizations spend more on projects
- Organizations inadequately analyze projects, which typically means that they are three times more likely to fail before implementation
- Organizations cannot replace members of staff effectively, knowledge is lost
Ideas alone are worthless…
Even people or consultants who can only offer ideas have limited value – but Business Analysts provide a glue, if you will, that holds the entire innovation process together – from ideas to products or services. So, without well-defined, well-managed, well-communicated and well-executed knowledge, innovation simply doesn’t happen.
Good ideas don’t just materialize; R&D investments go to waste and smart people get frustrated – all things that paralyze an organization. Thus, an investment in this key role will yield a higher Return on Ideas – think of it as a new kind of ROI to go with the financial one.
How about the bottom line?
Call it productivity. Call it efficiency. Call it failure avoidance. Whatever you want to call it, your business analysts save your company time and money.
…when knowledge get done properly, projects get delivered on time and products go to market faster. And, last time we checked, those were two things that great companies and senior executives valued. A lot!
