From the course: What Is Business Analysis?

Business analysis as a profession

From the course: What Is Business Analysis?

Business analysis as a profession

- For as long as we've had business, we've had business analysis. It wasn't always referred to as business analysis, but understanding customer needs in order to offer something of value that customers wanted has always been the underpinning for running a successful organization. To appreciate the role this profession plays, let's take a step back and look at the history, starting in the 1960s. In the early '60s, there was the role of requirements engineer. Engineers responsible for the construction of buildings, roads, and bridges needed requirements to build from, and it was the requirements engineers who developed those requirements. Since these requirements supported engineering-focused solutions, early requirement-focused analysis roles were quite technical. But by the 1970s, the need broadened beyond writing requirements for engineering-based solutions. Mainframe computing placed computing power outside of academia and government and into the hands of business. There was a large demand for business software, and with that demand came the need for someone to develop business requirements. Systems analysts served as a bridge between business and technical teams, taking responsibility for communicating business needs and specifying system requirements to address them. System methods were gaining popularity to model data, data flows, and processing concepts. It was the systems analyst using these methods to communicate to developers what needed to be built. But by the 1980s, we were experienced a number of computing advancements. Improvements in storage and processing power drove demand for personal computers. Businesses still relied on their large mainframes, but there was a large push to develop software for desktop devices. A significant change was the graphical user interface, or GUI for short. Eliciting requirements for software applications now involved feature requirements, as well as focus on the user experience. We began to see users who are also evaluating an application on its front-end look and feel, as well as the back-end processing. And with this shift came a host of new analysis techniques and modeling conventions to capture user experience requirements, as well as the new title, the UI/UX analyst. But by the 1990s, it wasn't a question of whether you owned a computer as much as it was about how many devices you owned. The internet created demand for a variety of new software for browsing and running web applications. Mobile devices and wireless computing brought computing power off the desktop and into the hands of the mobile consumer. Now business analysis as a profession was on the rise, as software was everywhere. We needed effective business analysis to ensure the right products were being built and built correctly. In the 2000s, business analysis was formalized as a profession with its own body of knowledge and professional certification developed by International Institute of Business Analysis, or IIBA. While organizations continued to hire business analysts in increasing numbers, we also experienced the creation of a number of specialty roles in our profession. Where business analysis was used to identify process improvement opportunities, we now had business process analysts. And where business analysis was used to understand business data, to support data-driven business decisions, we had data analysts and business intelligence analysts. And that brings us to today. As business analysis continues to deliver value and branches out into the new context over time, we'll continue to see business analysis as an in-demand profession.

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