Latest trends in Business Analysis

Nowadays, the world is moving rapidly. In this speeding world, many innovative technologies are evolving across business environments. Continuous development has been observed in various businesses which have given rise to customer expectations. Because of these frequently developing social trends and the varying client’s expectations, the different organizations are working hard on adapting the innovative trends, so that they can quickly respond to the customer’s requests. Organizations are always in a risk of dropping their market share if they fail to handle the innovations and adjust to the variations in the business face.

Currently, Business Analysis is the latest technology domain which is changing at an amazing speed. Therefore, in order to stay relevant in the organization, business analysts should be able to enhance their skills and always ready to learn new things to get succeed and survive. They should be able to help organizations, recognize the problems and opportunities and work with the customers to build the new product as per their requirements. There are some latest key trends that are disturbing the various business processes and at the same time have the ability to guarantee a stable development route for the businesses in this growing technological business environment:

1. Emphasis on Organizational Agility: To retain in the unpredictable external environment, the organizations have increased dependency on their primary organizational agility. The business analysis plays an important role to enable the organizations so that they can react proactively and get familiarize with any opportunity or risk that affects their status. The organization must be able to experiment, test, and acquire knowledge from various situations. In an organization, the business analyst is responsible to carry out these agile practices, to adopt them, they have to face many challenges, they should consider the increasing pressure to be agile and provide the services to the customer as per their demand quickly with robust delivery.

Nowadays, business analysts are expected to take ownership of projects and provide additional value to the business by performing several roles like product owner and scrum master along with the business analysis. In addition to this, the business analysts should also approach the projects with an emphasis on business value, the functional and technical possibility, accompanied with the user experience. In certain organizations, the business analysts are contributing to agile projects dynamically, by working with the product owners, while some are joining development teams and executing functions like testing and change management. The Agile methodology is already adopted by many organizations. Thus, to help the organization in this regard, the business analyst has to develop their skills not only related to Agile but should also gain the complete knowledge about the application workflow and discover the new ways to cooperate with the clients to reach a record on future agile workflow states. This allows the business analyst to show a positive impact on the projects, solve any probable clashes, and think creatively.

2. Sufficient recognition of roles: It has been observed that some of the organizations and teams have identified the extent of business analysis roles, while other teams have lesser opportunities related to business analysis. Business analyst can enhance their skills by taking the business analyst training so that they can involve the problem analysis, strategic analysis, requirement allocation, etc. Most people believe that the business analyst only has to just note down the minutes of the project with extra awareness. The stakeholders identify that the business analysts read the context of the project before positioning it. Though not all business analysis is conducted by business analysts, the business analysis roles matter a lot in a project.

3. Increase in the recent Technologies and Processes: The business environment is gradually moving towards new technologies like machine learning, cloud computing, DevOps, and application portfolio optimization. Due to the introduction of these new technologies, it is required for the business analyst to not only get familiarized with them but should be adequately proficient so that they can guide their respective organization for the possible applicable solutions. The other enormous innovation, which is popular is the Internet of Things i.e. IOT considering how the number of interconnected devices and the sensors identified with them are set to surpass more than the number of people on the planet, this particular technology will result in an incredible amount of data which will be produced in the next couple of years. In order to draw any kind of meaningful results from this data, the businesses will require the power of big data tools and practices. The business analyst who knows the big data concepts and understands how to extract the data for business perceptions would be in great demand.

4. Effect of Digital Transformation: Cloud computing and mobile computing are the two evolving trends in this digital environment. These technologies are going to affect the business analysis, with respect to the functional and non-functional requirements together with the security, recoverability, usability, and user experience.

Cloud Computing: Nowadays, there is an increasing demand for the quick delivery of information in an organization. Most of the organizations are looking for a minimum cost solution, thus cloud computing has evolved as the best possible solution to enhance the efficiency and agility of the organization. In this frequently changing environment, the business analysts are now becoming the promoter of this modification and also guide the organization for the on-going transformation. The cloud computing deployment has a huge positive effect on the business organizations. Thus, the business analyst must show an acute role managing that particular change. The business analyst can perform the different cloud computing tasks such as managing technical requirements, re-engineering business processes, negotiating service level agreements with cloud providers, and observing the cloud performance to make sure that the businesses are running 24 by 7, without any delay.

Mobile Applications: The sensitive business analyst who is able to recognize the qualities of mobile applications quickly, can also be able to define the requirements which are developing to meet the business objectives, define the possible problems, and can re-invent the business processes.

5. Data and Analytics: The different abilities required to influence and apply the business intelligence and data into the organization’s operations involve data analysis, data architecture, data presentation and predictive analysis. Out of these roles, the data presented is the most feasible role which is relevant to a business analysis.

6. User Interface and User experience design: In order to make the user interfaces more attractive and providing with strong capabilities, it is required to enhance the user experience. It is required to include a discipline that applies a particular method, techniques, and processes to increase the user satisfaction while interacting with the technology. The design of user experience is an important topic in the present time as new technologies are continuously developing and modifying the way in which people are interacting with computers. In addition to this, virtual and augmented reality is a new and demanding technology of giving the instructions and interfacing with computers. The user interface design is the other way of guessing the business requirements and it is quite common in business analysis. Additionally, there are different business analysis functions that supplement user experience design containing the requirements, usability testing, and finally, make sure that customer satisfaction is achieved.

7. Learning of Business Analysis at the Fringe: It is expected from the business analysis experts to have profound analytical skills, including the complete organizational understanding. They should have fundamental knowledge about the different disciplines of the organization. To increase and execute the business strategy, the organization required support from various disciplines. The Business analysts are interacting with the other professionals frequently to build a shared space between different disciplines.

The experienced business analyst gets inspiration from the current trends to acquire knowledge from various disciplines and opportunities including the fringe of their role. The business analyst applies the techniques from one discipline to another, which helps them to grow their career with adequate knowledge. This will allow them to have a meaningful conversation with various experts covering different disciplines.

8. Thin and scalable business cases for the digital Business Analysis: It is observed that organizations are much more interested in leaner business cases. With the help of an Agile technique, the organizations may feel the requirement to justify the projects. The business analyst should choose thorough proposals and schemes, which include a cost-benefit analysis. With the help of a lean business case, associated with the product road map, the enterprises are receiving adequate funds to develop prototypes of the future application. Most organizations want to extract data and also utilize the power of predictive analysis, artificial intelligence, and machine learning. In order to make the organization successful in these fields, the business analysts are helping them to go digital and suggesting the best software solutions to achieve the business requirements.

9. Initial engagement and relevant results: At the present time, the business analyst is involved at the front end of each change in the project life cycle. At this stage, the problem is mostly not defined accurately. Before any solution requirements are introduced, the focus is given to analyze the business viewpoints and define the expected results. Business analysis now includes “doing the correct things” and enables the arrangement of results that should be achieved with solution requirements and appropriate ordering. This may be one of the recent trends that are going to spread further than this year.

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Conclusion:

Thus, it is observed that the process of business analysis and the role of business analysts both are going through rapid change. It is expected that the business analysis trends are going to reflect the varying technological methods as well as business requirements in the upcoming future. Due to the increasing need for cybersecurity, the attractiveness of crossover skills, the data-driven nature of technical projects, etc., there will be a huge demand for business analysts in the upcoming year.

I hope that by now you have had an overview of Business analysis. Before you enroll in ZaranTech’s certification course on Agile BA do check out this demo video: