This is an experiment.
I am a business analyst for a large company that shall remain nameless. The BAs run the gamut from mainframe developers unwittingly drafted into the role, to born-and-bred analysts who can't imagine doing anything else. We all have in common the need to get information, move it around, and present it in different ways for different audiences. We analyze data, but more than that, we manage disparate groups with different, often conflicting ideas and distinct personalities. The *business* of business analysis is like herding cats...nasty, dirty work, and your source of income is apt to turn on you with claws extended. That's what makes it fun.
As a liberal arts major I was trained to see parallels among systems and to draw analogies, and the deeper I am into my BA practice, the more I see that areas of intersect and overlap between the real world and the world of IT are exciting, pervasive, and can inform the practice of business analysis itself. There are a lot of books out there that talk about how to elicit and model requirements, how to maintain requirements traceability -- the BA toolkit is large and growing. But like all disciplines there are the tools, and then the humans that must use them...and it's that I am most interested in here; I want to explore the "other bits" of business analysis, the parts that involve getting a bunch of corporate cats and kittens in a crowd, on their feet, moving in the same direction, and making good time. I hope you'll grab your lasso and ride along.
(I promise not to overdo the cat analogies.)
