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More Opinions on the Business analyst role key in SOA software development projects

Gary E Smith - THE SOA NETWORK — Fri, 22 Aug 2008 20:07:13 GMT

More Opinions on the Business analyst role key in SOA software development projects

The traditional business analyst role needs to change if service-oriented architecture (SOA) is to successfully advance in organizations, according to two analyst reports released this week. At the same time, despite different backgrounds and responsibilities, analysts and enterprise architects must work together more closely.

For the complete article:

Business analyst role key in SOA software development projects

SOURCE: SearchSOA.com

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Gary E. Smith
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Data Modeling and Data Management in a SOA Environment

Gary E Smith - THE SOA NETWORK — Sun, 17 Aug 2008 07:09:51 GMT

Data Modeling and Data Management in a SOA Environment

Tom Haughey

Sept. 15, 2008

Woodbridge Hilton, Woodbridge, NJ

Tuition: $545

SAVE $50 if paid by Aug. 18, 2008

This one day interactive seminar will address the critical issues data and information management professionals encounter in a SOA environment.

How and why data modeling is different in a SOA environment?
Does the level of granularity of the data have to be adjusted for SOA?
Are there issues with data that is too highly abstracted?
What is a canonical model and why is one needed?
How important are standards?
Can data itself be considered a "service" under SOA?
How does SOA alter data warehousing?
How can organizations benefit from integrating the data warehouse within SOA?
Can SOA simplify delivery of business intelligence?

Early Registration Ends Aug. 18, 2008!

Seating is Becoming Limited

Additional information and the agenda

For other Public Data Modeling and Dimensional Modeling Seminars see:

The New Business Analyst.com

______________________________________________________________________

For more resources on Service-Oriented Architecture see: THE SOA NETWORK

For more resources on Service-Oriented Modeling see: Service-Oriented Modeling (Coming Soon!)

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Gary E. Smith
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Analyst Study Reveals 91% of Business Analysts Use Ineffective Tools to Define Requirements

Gary E Smith - THE SOA NETWORK — Sun, 17 Aug 2008 07:12:30 GMT

Analyst Study Reveals 91% of Business Analysts Use Ineffective Tools to Define Requirements

Business Analyst Role Explored in Detail by voke in Latest Market Snapshot; Finds Market for Business Analyst Solutions One of the Fastest Growing in the Application Lifecycle

SAN FRANCISCO, Aug 14, 2008 (BUSINESS WIRE) -- voke, inc., a modern analyst firm for the Web 2.0 world, announced today the publication of the voke Market Snapshot(TM) Report: The Role of the Business Analyst. This independent survey of the business analyst focuses on:

-- the role and interaction with others in the lifecycle

-- the communication processes and channels used to gather and define requirements

-- the market readiness of solutions expressly for the business analyst

-- a market forecast for solutions designed for the business analyst

The report found that business analysts are playing a greater role than ever in the success of IT projects. 74% of business analysts have been in the role greater than three years, indicating that the role is maturing and having a greater impact on the alignment of the line of business and the IT organization. The report concludes that organizations with business analysts are more likely to satisfy their customers in a more timely fashion, which translates to a competitive business advantage.

"Software drives the business and business analysts are the key conduit in delivering satisfaction to the line of business by effectively defining requirements to the IT organization," said Theresa Lanowitz, founder of voke. "The business analyst is critical to the overall success an organization will experience with its applications."

The report highlights the need for improved use of solutions to help the business analyst closely align requirements with the business needs. 91% of the study's participants say the solutions they use to define requirements are static and do not meet the dynamic nature needed for today's business analyst. The report also identifies a lack of integration between existing requirements definition solutions and the creation of test cases. A total of 76% of survey participants manually create test cases from their requirements.

"It is critical to the alignment of the line of business and IT, as well as customer satisfaction to eliminate time consuming and error prone tasks such as the manual creation of test cases from requirements," said Lisa Dronzek, COO of voke. "Dynamic creation of test cases from requirements frees up the time of the test engineer to focus on more strategic quality efforts. Incorporating modern and dynamic solutions for the business analyst will complement and enhance existing investments in testing solutions."

As a result, the report forecasts that the market for business analyst solutions will be one of the fastest growing segments within the application lifecycle market over the next few years, soon to be a billion dollar segment annually.

"The business analyst has been dramatically underserved for far too long," said David Nyland, CEO of Blueprint Systems, a leading provider of requirements solutions to meet the business analyst need. "As their role grows in importance, we have seen a significant increase in demand for solutions that help them closely align requirements with the business need. Our customers are seeing dramatic improvements in their development process by leveraging requirements solutions to enable the business analyst to succeed."

A detailed market forecast is included in the report.

The full voke Market Snapshot Report: The Role of the Business Analyst is available to subscribers at www.vokestream.com.

To learn more about this topic, register for the webinar "Business Analysts Empowered: Optimize Global IT Project Teams Through a Requirements Lifecycle" to be held on Thursday, August 21 2:00 PM Eastern / 11:00 AM Pacific. To register, visit www.requirements.net.

About voke

Founded in 2006, voke, inc. represents a new model in thought leadership based on fluid collaboration, discussion, and real-time interactions to deliver strategic advice in technology markets. By communicating, collaborating, and understanding the impact technology has on the world around us, voke delivers market analysis, trend observation, and insight. Companies of all sizes, financial firms, and venture capital organizations turn to voke to harness strategic marketing, independent and impartial market observations and analysis to move markets beyond the status quo. For more information about voke, visit www.vokeinc.com.

Targeted memberships in the vokeStream community are available for the enterprise, technology vendors, press, service providers, financial analysts and venture capital teams. Visit www.vokestream.com to request a membership.

SOURCE: voke, inc.

______________________________________________________________________

For more resources on Service-Oriented Architecture see: THE SOA NETWORK

For more resources on Service-Oriented Modeling see: Service-Oriented Modeling (Coming Soon!)

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Gary E. Smith
SOA Business Analyst - The New Business Analyst

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The Business Analyst vs. the Enterprise Architect - ZapThink

Gary E Smith - THE SOA NETWORK — Wed, 13 Aug 2008 21:23:45 GMT

The Business Analyst vs. the Enterprise Architect

Document ID: ZAPFLASH-2008813 | Document Type: ZapFlash
By: Ronald Schmelzer
Posted: Aug. 13, 2008

As adoption of Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) spreads in the enterprise, one of the most notable trends in the market, other than introduction of new products and services, are changes to the organizational structure of businesses that are successful with SOA. In addition to the growth of Centers of Excellence (CoE) and competency centers focused on SOA, we’re also seeing a greater focus on enterprise architecture (EA) groups that lead and guide SOA initiatives across the organization. However, EA groups are not alone in trying to help meet the wide range of needs of the business with IT solutions. Indeed, before the discipline of EA got the visibility it has now, another part of the organization held sway with the business -- business analysts.

Business analysts serve an important role in the organization, helping to marry the needs of the business with the various capabilities and resources available to it. However, now that the EA organization is getting its time in the limelight, what will happen to traditional business analysis and the business analyst organization? Are BAs a separate group that should be given a specific role in interacting with EA groups and SOA efforts, or are business analysts simply another type of enterprise architect that should be rolled into SOA initiatives? Furthermore, what’s the future of the business analyst? In this ZapFlash, we hope to bring the business analyst and enterprise architect roles into sharper focus so that we can help the organization maximize its resources for business success.

What is the role of a Business Analyst?
In order to understand how the roles of business analyst and enterprise architect might interact, we first need to understand what exactly a business analyst does. Wikipedia defines a business analyst (BA) as a person who practices the discipline of business analysis. Obviously. More insightfully, the entry continues: “A BA is responsible for analyzing the business needs of their clients to help identify business problems and propose solutions. Within the systems development life cycle domain, the business analyst typically performs a liaison function between the business side of an enterprise and the providers of services to the enterprise. Common alternative titles are business systems analyst, systems analyst, and functional analyst, although some organizations may differentiate between these titles and corresponding responsibilities.” Reading between the lines it seems that a business analyst is responsible for translating the needs of the business into specifics that can be acted upon by individual parts of the business.

Reinforcing this definition, the International Institute of Business Analysis clarifies that "a business analyst works as a liaison among stakeholders in order to elicit, analyze, communicate and validate requirements for changes to business processes, policies and information systems. The business analyst understands business problems and opportunities in the context of the requirements and recommends solutions that enable the organization to achieve its goals." To be relevant then to the area that EAs concern themselves with, we really are focusing on one sort of BA in particular: the IT business analyst.

An article on CIO.com refines the role of the IT business analyst as the organization that scopes the system, interprets business need, translates technical issues into language that business can understand, scopes out the project details and requirements, serves as the liaison between the development team and business representatives, helps the project team traverse the politics of the organization, creates test cases and scenarios, and acts as advocates for project stakeholders. In this regard, a business analyst isn’t a project manager per se, however they function as the business requirements role necessary in every IT project.

What makes the BA role interesting is that it predates the predominant use of IT in the enterprise. In the days before IT, the BA would have a set of principles and methods they would use to address risk management, facilitate inter-organizational communication, improve labor utilization, optimize processes, and perform other tasks that required connecting the strategic aspects of the business with the tactical parts that made it work. When IT was introduced into the mix, it just became another part of the mechanism that made things “work”.

Conflict and cooperation with the role of an Enterprise Architect
At first blush, it seems that much of the responsibility of IT BAs overlaps with the responsibility of EAs. In a number of previous ZapFlashes, we defined the role of an EA as providing executive-level management leadership to all architecture efforts across the enterprise, pulling together and establishing core architectural best practices for the entire organization, establishing business-focused Service Domains that bring together Business Services that share a common business context, creating, coordinating, and funding teams to run the Service Domains on behalf of the lines of business as well as IT, working closely with the VP of Project Management to insure close cooperation between architecture and project management teams, and to improve project management policies, and working closely with executive management within each line of business to communicate the process improvement and agility benefits of the SOA initiative, to coordinate process definition, improvement, and management activities, and to better align IT capabilities with business needs overall, among other responsibilities. And to make matters worse for the BA, according to Payscale.com, an average BA with 5-9 years of experience makes a bit less than $66k a year, while EAs with equal experience make over $100k.

Furthermore, in our discussion of the SOA Metamodel, we defined the EA as the person, or organization, that shepherds business requirements into Services and then manages the realization of those Services through the IT development organization. In this light, it would seem that the role of the EA eclipses, competes, or otherwise impedes the efforts of the BA in the organization. So, are the BA and EA different roles trying to accomplish similar tasks? Not exactly.

Even if we focus on the role of an IT Business Analyst, it is clear that the scope of the work and nature of their skills differ in significant ways. An EA’s role is to translate business requirements into capabilities that can be cost-effectively implemented, predictably managed, and reliably controlled. The central abstraction for the EA is the Service Model and other models that relate to information, process, system, and functional flow to enable the ongoing operation of the business. As abstract as this may seem, especially to developers, the BA acts at an even more abstract level.

BAs are primarily tasked with requirements generation and facilitation of communications with technical groups to make sure those requirements are reliably implemented. In this regards, while an EA has both feet firmly planted on both sides of the business-IT divide, the BA (even an IT BA) is weighted towards the business. Most organizations separate the roles of the BA and EA. However, organizations that are looking to maximize the benefit they receive from SOA and other architecturally-driven IT efforts should think more holistically about either combining the EA and BA responsibilities in the business or creating a new organizational structure that puts the business analysis and enterprise architecture roles into more intimate contact.

Part of the reason for bringing BA and EA closer together is that BAs often lack the technical skills to do the modeling part that is so necessary to making good architecture work. Second, most BAs have business metrics in mind (as they should) without having visibility into how IT will impact the realization of those metrics. Furthermore, BAs still think in terms of discrete business needs that need to be addressed in short timeframes. To achieve the promised SOA goals of reuse, reduction of redundancy, and business agility, the EA can provide the corporate memory and long-term strategic IT planning that most BAs lack in their tactical approach to today’s business needs.

The ZapThink Take
In most organizations, the role of the BA is far more developed and understood than the role of the EA. As such, it would be unreasonable to assume that the EA role will usurp, replace, or otherwise impinge on existing BA capabilities. However, the future of EA and the future BA are clearly moving in complementary directions. To the extent that BAs are dealing more and more with requirements for agility, reuse, and reduced cost of integration, they will find themselves mirroring the activities of the EA groups in their organization. Likewise, the more that EAs find themselves responsible for translating ill-defined business requirements into architectural models and Service definitions, the more they will find themselves filling a BA role in the organization.

Clearly, not everything in the organization that a BA will deal with is IT centric, and likewise, the EA organization won’t cover all aspects of business operation. However, we’re in a business environment that’s looking to squeeze every bit of value and inefficiency out of IT. In this environment, it only makes sense to rethink the role of the BA and EA together – an expanded, strategic, and operational role for IT planning that plays more in the hands of business than it does in the increasingly commoditized hands of IT implementation and operations. When this happens, architecture itself becomes strategic and can move out of the hands of the IT organization and into the hands of business operations.

This article was from the most recent ZapFlash from ZapThink

Did you get a copy of this forwarded to you? If so, click here to sign up for your free subscription today!

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For more resources on Service-Oriented Architecture see: THE SOA NETWORK

For more resources on Service-Oriented Modeling see: Service-Oriented Modeling (Coming Soon!)

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Gary E. Smith
SOA Business Analyst - The New Business Analyst

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Methodologies Corporation Launches the Green Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) Training Program for Business and IT Professionals

Gary E Smith - THE SOA NETWORK — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 06:45:10 GMT

Methodologies Corporation Launches the Green Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) Training Program for Business and IT Professionals

The Green SOA Training Program introduces powerful training strategies that focus on enterprise asset consolidation and reuse, acceleration of time-to-market, and reduction of organizational expenditure

MONROE, N.J., Aug 08, 2008 (BUSINESS WIRE) -- Methodologies Corporation, the leading SOA modeling and training company, announced the release of the Green SOA Training Program. This state-of-the-art training material has been gaining industry-wide recognition because it fosters software and hardware asset reuse and consolidation.

"Green SOA is all about savings, efficiency, and high productivity in the workplace. Our Green SOA courses encourage business and technology professionals to efficiently manage companies' resources and increase software and hardware reusability," states Lisa Nathan, Methodologies' SOA training executive. "It is a strategic endeavor that every enterprise should consider."

"We believe that business and IT personnel should shoulder equal responsibilities when it comes to SOA and service-oriented development," adds Michael Bell, Methodologies' chief architect. "Our Green SOA Training Program offers SOA development life cycle disciplines that promote business and technology agility."

The Green SOA Training Program offers courses to executives, project managers, business analysts, business architects, technical architects, data and service modelers, software designers, and developers in the following major topics:

-- SOA Fundamentals

-- SOA Adoption

-- SOA Roadmap and Strategies

-- Introduction to SOA Modeling

-- Service-Oriented Conceptualization, Discovery, Analysis, Design, and Architecture

-- SOA Virtualization (software and hardware)

To view a complete list of this program, please click here: http://www.modelingconcepts.com/pages/training.htm

About Methodologies Corporation:

Methodologies Corporation is an SOA Adoption company that provides SOA strategies, implementation, and training services to facilitate business agility and growth. Methodologies Corporation's mission is to assist business and IT organizations to increase software asset reusability, accelerate time-to-market, improve and manage business processes, reduce expenditure, and efficiently consolidate business and technological assets. For additional information visit: www.ModelingConcepts.com.

SOURCE: Methodologies Corporation

______________________________________________________________________

For more resources on Service-Oriented Architecture see: THE SOA NETWORK

For more resources on Service-Oriented Modeling see: Service-Oriented Modeling (Coming Soon!)

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Gary E. Smith
SOA Business Analyst - The New Business Analyst

IT RESOURCE NETWORK

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OSLO Architect.net - Service-Oriented Modeling in a .net Connected World - Coming Soon!

Gary E Smith - THE SOA NETWORK — Fri, 01 Aug 2008 06:11:45 GMT

OSLO Architect.net - Service-Oriented Modeling in a .net Connected World - Coming Soon!

www.osloarchitect.net

______________________________________________________________________

For more resources on Service-Oriented Architecture see: THE SOA NETWORK

For more resources on Service-Oriented Modeling see: Service-Oriented Modeling (Coming Soon!)

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Gary E. Smith
SOA Business Analyst - The New Business Analyst

IT RESOURCE NETWORK

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UML Modeling for SOA - News on Further Developments and Support for the SAE-UML Profile

Gary E Smith - THE SOA NETWORK — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 06:24:50 GMT

UML Modeling for SOA - News on Further Developments and Support for the SAE-UML Profile

UML Profile Now Available for Download

Worked example of Simpsons Parcels Case Study deliverables using the UML Profile in Enterprise Architect now available as an HTML file

Both of these deliverables are available to all members at: http://www.cbdiforum.com/public/uml_profile.php

The UML Profile for SAE^TM enables users to model SOA design and architecture using diagrams that are UML compliant and to record relevant metadata that can be exported to the repository and registry. The Profile provides a set of structured model elements that are customized to support the SAE implementation of SOA. This allows organizations to follow the CBDI-SAE methodology and guidance in any UML compliant tool.

If you have attended the CBDI Fast Track or DBSA education class then you will recognize the worked example instantly. This set of example deliverables takes the Simpsons case from business model to traceable specification, implementation, deployment and technology architecture diagrams.

Did you see the UML Profile Webcast?
A recording is now available of our recent web event covering the UML Profile for SOA developed by Everware-CBDI in support of the CBDI-SAE Meta Model for SOA.

In this webcast you will learn

What is a UML Profile?
What is the CBDI-SAE UML Profile for SOA?
How to Install the CBDI-SAE UML Profile for SOA in UML tools
How to use the CBDI-SAE UML Profile for SOA, including a walk though of each of the main diagrams, showing how objects are modelled, the deliverables that can be produced, and how the model may be used in downstream activities
Duration: 1 hour

You can watch the recording by visiting http://www.cbdiforum.com/public/news/index.php3?id=1533

Information provided by the CDBI Forum, for more information sign-up at: www.cdbiforum.com

______________________________________________________________________

For more resources on Service-Oriented Architecture see: THE SOA NETWORK

For more resources on Service-Oriented Modeling see: Service-Oriented Modeling (Coming Soon!)

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Gary E. Smith
SOA Business Analyst - The New Business Analyst

IT RESOURCE NETWORK

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Executing SOA: A Practical Guide for the Service-Oriented Architect

Gary E Smith - THE SOA NETWORK — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 05:58:32 GMT

Executing SOA: A Practical Guide for the Service-Oriented Architect

Book Description

The Expert, Practical Guide to Succeeding with SOA in the Enterprise

In Executing SOA, four experienced SOA implementers share realistic, proven, “from-the-trenches” guidance for successfully delivering on even the largest and most complex SOA initiative.

This book follows up where the authors’ best-selling Service-Oriented Architecture Compass left off, showing how to overcome key obstacles to successful SOA implementation and identifying best practices for all facets of execution—technical, organizational, and human. Among the issues it addresses: introducing a services discipline that supports collaboration and information process sharing; integrating services with preexisting technology assets and strategies; choosing the right roles for new tools; shifting culture, governance, and architecture; and bringing greater agility to the entire organizational lifecycle, not just isolated projects.

Executing SOA is an indispensable resource for every enterprise architect, technical manager, and IT leader tasked with driving value from SOA in complex environments.

Coverage includes

· Implementing SOA governance that reflects the organization’s strategic and business focus

· Running SOA projects successfully: practical guidelines and proven methodologies around service modeling and design

· Leveraging reusable assets: making the most of your SOA repository

· Enabling the architect to choose the correct tools and products containing the features required to execute on the SOA method for service design and implementation

· Defining information services to get the right information to the right people at the right time

· Integrating SOA with Web 2.0 and other innovative products and solutions

· Providing highly usable human interfaces in SOA environments

Chapter 4 is of particular interest to the SOA Business Analyst and focuses on Service-Oriented Modeling and Design. Service-oriented modeling and design is a discipline that provides prescriptive guidance about how to effectively design an SOA using services, service components, and flows. This chapter discusses service modeling, object orientation, the SOMA technique and explains how it helps in the identification, specification, and realization of services, service components, and flows.

Free Download Chapter 4 -

A Methodology for Service Modeling and Design

______________________________________________________________________

For more resources on Service-Oriented Architecture see: THE SOA NETWORK

For more resources on Service-Oriented Modeling see: Service-Oriented Modeling (Coming Soon!)

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Gary E. Smith
SOA Business Analyst - The New Business Analyst

IT RESOURCE NETWORK

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SOA tools hit UML Tipping Point

Gary E Smith - THE SOA NETWORK — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 19:29:03 GMT

SOA tools hit UML Tipping Point

Service-oriented architecture (SOA) developers will find Unified Modeling Language (UML) support in virtually any development tool they chose, according to Richard Soley, chairman and CEO of the Object Management Group Inc. (OMG).

Microsoft's announced plans to support OMG's modeling standard in Oslo, the code name for its Visual Studio 10 wave release, means last major vendor hold out against UML is coming into the camp, the OMG executive said.

"Every major software development tool in the world supports UML," Soley said. "All of IBM's tools, all the Borland tools. The Eclipse toolset has complete UML support. There are something like 75 UML tools available on the market."

SOURCE: SearchSOA

SOA tools hit UML Tipping Point

______________________________________________________________________

For more resources on Service-Oriented Architecture see: THE SOA NETWORK

For more resources on Service-Oriented Modeling see: Service-Oriented Modeling (Coming Soon!)

_______________________________________________________________________________

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Gary E. Smith
SOA Business Analyst - The New Business Analyst

IT RESOURCE NETWORK

THE BPM NETWORK | THE SAAS NETWORK | THE SOA NETWORK | THE WEB 2.0 NETWORK