Tools for the business analyst - an unaddressed market?
by
Charlie Bess
One of the sad facts of the dot com era was the demise of the business analyst in many organizations. For some reason, the business analysts' skills in a specific industry and their ability to talk with clients in their own language was no longer viewed as critical and everyone felt they must be valued as a coder.
With the advent of service oriented architectures, I believe there will need to be a significant revival of this role. The head down coders - who write the services to be leveraged - will be separated - probably by oceans - from the people who assemble these services into custom solutions for the client.
The type of tools needed will be quite different than the UML based tools that the coders prefer. I saw a demo of a tool from Serena - composer - the other day that took me back to the late 1980s when EDS had a tool (code name apache) that was built for business analysts. It was focused on the process and documenting its related metadata. Unfortunately, it was written for the Macintosh and SOA concepts were not even a glimmer in anyone's eye. The intent was very similar though.
Most of the BPEL tools I've seen are clearly a first generation product written for coders. They're on the right track, but may need requirements gathering from a broader potential user community.
We'll see more tools in this category as the development process bifurcates between component/service creation and assembly and the focus really shifts from data centric to process centric, if the vision of a model driven approach is to be fulfilled.
Once we get to Model Driven Architecture, the question will then be: "Who actually drives the process, the person who understands the value of the activity and the best way to assemble the model from a business perspective or the person who understands the underlying code???"
