Business Analysis: The Question And Answer Book - Launch

Afternoon newspaper, a leading daily published in Mumbai covered book, 'Business Analysis: The Question And Answer Book' and author, Sandhya Jane.

Afternoon article excerpt: Based out of Hong Kong, Sandhya is quite a jack of all and a master of all. "The key to balancing work, writing and parenting is to focus on each and giving each my all in that moment. When I am spending time with my son, I am not thinking of work and when I am working everything else is switched off," she said.

A message for aspiring writers? "Discipline," she quipped. "That is one quality that can take you from point A to point B successfully. Many people have excellent ideas but struggle to implement them. The key to being successful is to go ahead and make that first draft before changing it a million times if need be. However, that first step is the most important and also the most difficult step," she added.

Here is the link to complete article: http://www.afternoondc.in/education-careers/business-analysis-for-dummies/article_203871

Automated model-driven BPMN approach for Business Analyst

This is my review to research paper “Resource-based Modeling and Simulation of Business Processes” written by Andrea D’Ambrogio. It is an interesting research paper that explores the simulation-based analysis of business processes that covers all the phases in BP lifecycle, starting from design to execution and improvement to post implementation enhancement phases.

The goal of the paper is to introduce a reliability in analysis that considers unexpected failures of resources to execute the process task due to unavailability of a resource allocated to a task.

The paper exploits both model-driven principles and Discrete Event System Specification, also known as DEVS.

This process requires first interpreting the BPMN model with the allocation of task resources described in terms of performance and reliability properties of the task resources and then transforming the annotated BPMN model into a DEVS-based model that in turn analyzes and produces the better outcome. This DEVS-based model can be used effectively by business analysts due to their unfamiliarity with or lack deep knowledge of the formalism. In addition, the author of the paper has proposed the automated model-driven approach, which would overcome the issues related to the manual building DEVS model, which are effort and time consuming, as well as error free. The mapping of BPMN elements to DEVS atomic models are later linked to the process control flow logic to get the final DEVS-coupled model. Work is currently in process to complete the specification of mapping rules for basic BPMN elements.

If this research is applied to advanced BPMN and becomes successful, it will have more scope in writing business requirements, business rules, and designing the systems.