Business Analyst: Are you designing for a disaster...

What intentional and unintentional errors in business analysis can lead to...and what impact it can have. This blog provides a guide to help the business analyst understand the consequences of errors in requirements and designs.

Unintentional:

One of the most unlikely incidents occurred due to a software bug in the Therac - 25 medical radiation therapy device in 1985-87. This machine was used to administer radiation doses on patients, and in several cases the faulty device administered excess quantities of radiation. In some cases, it exceeded 100 times more than the intended dose, and resulted in several injuries and three deaths.

(Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Therac-25)

Technology is like a 'Gift of Fire,' as correctly mentioned by Sara Baas in her book where she gave many examples of such disasters.


Correlating to her thought, it would be appropriate to ask a business analyst, “are you designing for a disaster?”


Many business analysts working on a project, especially a large project, fail to see the complete picture. This alone can lead their company or their client to the disaster.

Along with software design, development and testing, requirement analysis and design is key part of developing software solutions.


It is the business analyst who elicits a particular requirement or functionality document, confirms, and sign it off before communicating the requirements to the technical team. The requirement states precisely how it works under normal conditions, in an alternate process and possible error it may have.

What are the rules applied to the requirement? What is acceptable and not acceptable in terms of data, rules, format and so on?If the error lies in the requirement/functionality, intentionally and unintentionally goes undetected, could it lead to major disaster depending on the project/product it is used?For example, a decimal place mentioned incorrectly in a requirement document in banking software that deals with millions of transactions could potentially make a serious impact with loss of few millions dollars.

A particular requirement or function used in laser arm robotic surgery could be seriously impaired.

Defective transportation software could potentially cause loss worth millions and delay.

A space ship or flight software could cause an accident if any fault occurs in the system.

These are just a few examples of the thousands of potentially damaging situations that could arise if the software requirements are not documented and implemented correctly.


Intentional:


Of course, there could be intentional error in the requirements for designing the software solution to mislead authority. The most notorious example is how Volkswagen managed to manipulate the car emission system for two decades. Of course, when they are caught, they have to cough up close to 18 billion dollars in penalties, not considering the loss of face and brand value.

Oops...How brilliantly one can misuse the use of software... The team of business analyst/stakeholders/project manager who designed software never thought it would ultimately cost billions...

(Source: http://time.com/4046994/volkswagen-emissions-golf-crisis/)


Undetected hole in the ozone layer over Antarctica: This is another serious issue that impacts the whole world. The software that was used by NASA to map ozone layers had been designed to ignore certain values that deviated greatly from expected measurements.

Therefore, the hole in the ozone layer went undetected until 1985, even though the project was launched in 1978. It was only found after the scientists at NASA reviewed the data for abnormal results and found the error and the big hole.

(Source: http://royal.pingdom.com/2009/03/19/10-historical-software-bugs-with-extreme-consequences/)

The business Analyst's role goes far beyond the requirement lifecycle, as their role and responsibilities are not limited to just requirements or the solutions...but the total solution and its overall impact on the organization and beyond. Their contribution could possible make or break the organization.

Please read my book for more details: Business Analysis: The Question and Answer Book available on Amazon and other places in Kindle and paperback.

#BusinessAnalysis #Design #Disaster #SoftwareDevelopment #RequirementManagement #ProjectManagement

Business Analysis vs Business Intelligence

There is huge difference between Business Analysis (BA) and Business Intelligence(BI) because BA has larger scope as it is application to all types of projects (including BI) where as BI covers only software applications used to analyze an organization's raw data (data mining, analysis and reporting related project) to make effective decisions.

Business Analysis:
"A set of task and techniques to understand products, services, operations, organization structure, policies, and culture to recommend a solution to the stakeholders to achieve their business goals."

The business goals could be generate additional revenue, reduce operational cost, to implement new regulations, to reduce operational roadblocks,  faster and effective decision making process, improve customer services, improve brand value, to increase customer base...

These goals can be achieved either by enhancing existing solution by adding feature or functionality, fixing issues or problems in exiting solutions or implementing new regulations or improving the process, building a new solution for introducing new products or services or developing new decision support system to make effective decisions.

It covers strategy analysis, requirement engineering and IT analysis to define and recommend a solution to the problem or an opportunity within the organization.

Business Analyst primarily identify and define the problem using various BA techniques and recommend solutions for that so that organization can achieve its goals and objectives.

• Bottom up approach: There is problem identified by users/customer in existing system and it is reported to managers. After detailed investigation, there is a need to enhance the existing solution partly or fully
• Top-Down approach: There is new opportunity idenfited by management to expand the exiting product line or implement new products/services. After detailed investigations, the appropriate solution is defined and implemented.
• Peer-to-peer: There is productivity issue identified by mid-level managers and needed decision support systems. After detailed investigations, the appropriate business intelligence solution is need to make effective decisions. This is where BI will play a role.

The scope of Business Analysis is larger than Business Intelligence as it can be applied to any kinds of problems or opportunity including BI.

Knowledge and Skills: Business Analysis, Domain Knowledge (to collaborate with stakeholders and domain subject matter experts, and technical know-how (SDLC, Testing, Data modeling, data management and others…to collaborate with IT team)

Business Analysis vs Business Intelligence
Source: ANISAN Technologies (www.anisans.com)

Business Intelligence: "a set of techniques and tools for the acquisition and transformation of raw data into meaningful and useful information for business analysis purposes"

Whereas Business Intelligence job is more technical role that involves several related activities, including data mining, online analytical processing, querying and reporting to analyze an organization's raw data using a variety of software applications. The BI specialist will work towards putting up effective system to extract, load, transform (ETL) and generate reports from heterogeneous data source such as SAP, PREST, ETU, RH, ORACLE...

Knowledge and Skills: technical skills like coding and knowledge of data analysis tools/ languages like R, SaS, Python etc.

Business Analysts' knowledge-bank - Information Systems by Efrem G Mallach

The reason why I added this book to Business Analysis blog- Many Business Analysts come from domain or business background and they are required to know the basics of Information Systems. They need to know where to obtain the required knowledge. Read my detailed review about the book before you think of purchasing it.

The book provides comprehensive knowledge about most aspects of Information System, which is required by every business student. This comprehensive knowledge is quite valuable as there is no business or profession today that is untouched by Information system. Therefore, one can't remain aloof from the basic understanding of Information Systems and how it works. 

If they know how it works, they will know how best they can make it work for them effectively. It simply means, if they can understand what is needed, they can guide and monitor the entire development of business solution successfully.

Business technology management is big part of business today and is a key to its success. Professionals, who know what are the ‘Business Needs’, what is the suitable Information System required for that, and how to get that, will be able to optimize the business environment that decides the success or failure of any business.

Information Systems by Efrem G Mallach

In the first section, the book covers why Information System matters and the role of Information System within business environment. It also covers general concept of Information Systems.

In the second section, it covers technology part of Information System including hardware, software, database management, and network. This is basically explains what any business student needs to know about building a business solution or application or project.

In the third section, it covers the various Information Systems that is needed in the organization for different departments by different people depending on their role and responsibilities. It also covers the system and it’s usage of connecting with external stakeholders for their interaction with the organization as a customer or a supplier or a regulator…

In the fourth section, the book covers how to select these Information Systems from the various options available i.e. off-the-shelf product, customized product or developing the solution and so on... This is an important factor as it involves an analysis based on many criteria to take a correct decision.

In the last section, it covers the effective managing of the Information Systems after the transition phase.

All the topics are well elaborated with appropriate examples and illustrations. However, It doesn't cover the Strategy Analysis topic of Information System where most business students will be involved either as a stakeholder or a subject matter expert (SME) or as a sponsor in future. This part is extremely significant as it talks about how Information System solution are defined in detail and their role during requirement management to spell out the correct requirements. Otherwise, the business student may not develop the correct thinking process to visualize the Information System to contribute appropriately.

Another part is – author missed out on ‘Change Management’ that can be implemented through pre-defined or ad-hoc process depending on the project size, the complexity and the formality. So, projects don't get cancelled due to changes in requirements at the last moment as they can always be accommodated during next release or sprint.

Finally, requirement engineering has changed significantly and now, it is far more sophisticated compare to what it was a decade ago.

The book could have added a few UML diagrams along with process diagrams mentioned in the book to elaborate the requirements as they are current industry standards and business students (future stakeholders) are expected to know them.

On the flip side, the outdated information such as magnetic disk storage etc. could have avoided or explained in a line or two. Instead, there could have been greater emphasis on the process management or reengineering or others areas of business technology management that were more suitable to the business student.

Overall, the book is very useful as it provides all the required details in one place systematically using business language.

#IIBA, #BCS, #IREB, #requirementmanagement, 

#BusinessAnalysis, #BusinessAnalysiscourse, #businessanalyst, #businesstechnologymanagement, #InformationSystems, #Whatbusinessstudentneedtoknow, #EfremGMallach, #ANISAN, #ANISANtechnologies, #SandhyaJane, #CBAP