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Let's consider the example of an integrated library system (ILS), which is much like the library community's equivalent of an enterprise resource planning system. An ILS is a large enterprise software that drives a lot of the library's business operations. In this example, a public library system was migrating to a new ILS from its previous administrative system, which combined a vendor-supported and customized system with the library's original homegrown system.
The library's acquisitions staff was responsible for purchasing and acquiring books, movies, periodicals, and other items that constituted the collections, as well as entering all of that information into the ILS and establishing a unique barcode for each item. Under the old system, the staff members would barcode all copies of a single item, such as all copies of a particular book, at the same time, with each copy receiving a sequentially numbered barcode. For example, 12 copies of the Harper Lee novel To Kill a Mockingbird might be numbered 101–112.
During implementation of its brand-new ILS, the library discovered a significant and show-stopping difference in how the ILS handled the process for barcoding multiple copies of the same item. The Acquisitions module of the new ILS required the information for each unique item to be entered individually—meaning that the information for the library's collection of To Kill a Mockingbird would have to be entered 12 times—once for each copy of the book. If the library staff had to enter all the information for each acquisition one at a time, coding all the countless newly acquired items per year would simply be unachievable.
According to the ILS vendor, reworking the Acquisitions module to allow multiple items to be barcoded collectively—like the way that the library's old system worked—would necessitate customizing the module.
You (as an experienced business analyst) have been asked to facilitate the customization of ILS module. As a part of this assignment, your task is to present an abstract level view of activities that should be performed in six of the Core Knowledge Areas of Business Analysis - as listed below. You are also required to highlight the underlaying competencies and tools appropriate for conducting each of the knowledge areas.
Describe the following Points:
This is a report, which will portray the contemporary issues in business analysis. Business analysis consists of few core knowledge areas, which will be described, in the report. The core knowledge areas will include business analysis planning and monitoring, requirement life cycle management, elicitation and collaboration, analysis of strategy, evaluation of solution, design definition and requirement analysis. There are certain task and information, which the business analyst will have to understand in order to perform, and this can be considered as the knowledge areas in business analysis. There is no necessity that the knowledge management task will have to be in alignment with the project and its phase.
There is no specific order for the various tasks associated with the knowledge management but it had to be made sure that all the task areas are completed and made available for the analysis (Clarysse et al. 2014). It is possible for a business analyst to perform simultaneously the entire task associated with the knowledge areas and the analyst can start the task in one area and move on to the other. However, there is tendency of the knowledge areas to be overlapped with each other and be intertwined. There are certain tasks in the knowledge areas, which are iterative so it is possible for the analyst to start one task and then move on the next one and then circle back to the previous one and complete it.
This is the knowledge area which will determine the the various activities the business analyst will have to perform in order to complete the execution of the business analysis. There are various factors, which are associated with this knowledge area, and they are as follows:
The business analysis planning and the monitoring is the knowledge, which is used to govern the other areas of the knowledge management (Eva et al. 2014). This knowledge area will monitor the tasks that are involved in the planning of the business analysis process to receive the desired output. This process will ensure that the business analysis of the process will be able to meet the needs and expectations of the stakeholders.
This process starts with the identification of the type of the project and it can be process improvement, organizational change, feasibility studies, development of new software, enhancement of the software, development of outsourced software and selection of the software package. The business analyst will have to identify the project type and then proceed with the assignment (Rice, Martin and Gurd 2015.). The methodology of the project will have to be selected after the selection of the type. The type of methodology can be pre set, open, tailoring, plan driven and change driven and the selected methodology will affect the various elements that have been included in the project. The various elements are formality, level of detail, timing, prioritization, planning process, change management, management tools, analysis, communication with the stakeholders and project complexity (Vera-Baquero, Colomo-Palacios and Molloy 2016).
Elicitation and collaboration will describe the way analyst will work along the stakeholders by fulfilling the concerns and the needs of the stakeholders. The analyst will have to understand the environment for the work so that they could provide better output. The purpose of this process is to ensure that the analyst is able to understand the need of the stakeholders instead of focusing on the materialistic desires of the stakeholders (Pulkkinen and Kapraali 2015).
The analysis of the stakeholders will have to be done so that the analyst could identify the needs of the stakeholders. The stakeholders will have to support and agree with the change so the business analysis the environment and confirm it with the stakeholders. The business analysis will have to monitor the overall procedure so that the concerns of the stakeholders can be minimized (Vijayan, Raju and Joseph 2016). The analyst will have to develop the plan of action for the various activities, which will include the identification of the deliverables, and the scope for the business. The analyst will have to identify the activities that they have to perform and the time required for completion of each activity. The elicitation and the collaboration process will include the identification of the task and the roles of the analyst. Then the process will include the understanding of the task, role and the guidelines for performing the task. The elements, which will be used as the input for the task, have to identified and recognized (Rieu, Santorum and Movahedian 2017). The information that has been obtained from the analysis will have to be conveyed to the stakeholders in a meaningful way so that they are able to identify that the needs and desires of the organization will be fulfilled.
This knowledge area will determine the process by which the analyst are able to manage issues, conflicts and changes so that the interest of the stakeholders can be preserved and they remain in agreement with the scope of the solution (Rosemann and vom Brocke 2015). The requirements of the solution are communicated to the stakeholders and the analysis of the knowledge gained has to be conveyed so that the stakeholders can understand the process of using the gained knowledge in the future ventures of the organization.
The requirement of the business consists of the four parts, which are business requirements, stakeholder’s requirements, transition requirements and solution requirements. The requirement and the design component will include the management of relationship, relevance and accuracy, effective reuse, value, urgency, risks, change in the needs of the stakeholders and agreement with the stakeholders about the requirement. The various will have to be prioritized so that the analyst can move on with the goals and objectives of the stakeholders. The analyst will assess the whole situation to determine the exact requirement and the issues that will be faced during the commencement of the project (Gollenia 2016.). The analyst wil have to take approval of the board before proceeding with the projects so that they can reach an agreement. The requirement will analyzed based on the priority where the most important aspect will have to be taken in to consideration at first.
The requirements will have to be analyzed, traced and prioritize so that the design of the analysis system can be constructed. This will help to ensure that all the requirements are met and the issues and risks involved in the process are mitigated in a proper way so that they do not act as a hindrance for the project. This will help in gaining the results in a faster way, which would save ample amount of time, it will also help in identifying the gasp in the research and the insights on the complexities associated with the project. The requirements will be assembled depending upon the priority and will be set in ascending order in the decreasing order of priority (Chang 2016). The output will have to be measured to identify the deviation for the expected, which will help in analyzing the constraints in obtaining the desired result.
This form of knowledge area will help in the identification of the business need. The next part of the analysis will refine and clarify the need in order to define the scope for the solution of the project. The feasibility of the solution will have to be identified so the organization can modify the plan of action suit the needs of the organization (Zinke et al. 2017). This will help in identifying a different perspective on the analysis and the complex actions included in the project.
The strategic goals and plans for the execution of the project will have to be developed and collection of information will have to be done so that it can support the execution of the project. The final segment of this part is the analysis of the outcomes from this part. There are two dimension that are include in the study where the analyst ill have to make sure that execution, planning and controlling of the process cannot be done in a proper way. The project has an essential role for the sustainability of the organization and the quality of the project will have to very high so that it can have a positive impact on the bottom line of the organization (Krawczyk and Parsamyan 2017). The analyst will have to critically analysis the competitive market for the organization and at the same will help to set benchmarks for the organization. The analysis of the strategy will help in identification of the future strategies of the organization so that the organization can maintain competitive advantage in the market.
This will help in identifying the cost involved in the development of the project. The overall analysis of the various strategies, which are being executed, and the ones that in process will help in identifying the constraints and issues. Thus, it will facilitate in the mitigation of the risk factors and the various issues associated with it. The demand of business analytics has increased significantly and most of the companies resort to the help of a professional business analyst. This analyst will have to analyse the current strategies followed by the company and identify the ongoing issue in business so that they can implement the changes that is required for making improvements in the business model of the organization (Fraccascia, Albino and Garavelli 2017). This will help in increasing the efficiency in the business model so that the organization can use effective strategies for setting up the future goals and objectives.
This part of the analysis will help to identify the priorities and elaborate the requirements of the stakeholders so that the process can be designed to meet the needs of the organization. This will enable the project team to implement the requirements for the meeting the organizational goals and objectives (Kamath and Witkowski 2017). The needs of the organization and the stakeholders will have to be analyzed so that the project team will be able to design the system in accordance to the organization goals and requirements. The analysis of the requirement will help in bridging the gap in between the software design and the system requirements. This will also provide the designer of the model with the system information, behaviour and function. The data that has been collected for the analysis will have to be translated to architectural design, data and component design (Rojas and Rousan 2017). This part of the process will identify the needs of the consumers, perform technical and economic analysis, evaluate the feasibility of the system, establish the constraints and schedule, allocating function to the requirements of the system and creating definition for the system.
There are phases to this project, which will include recognition of the problem, synthesis and evaluation, modelling, specification and review of the design. The inclusion of business analysis in to the organization is easy for all scale of organizations but it is difficult to implement the plan as it will require resourses, which many companies cannot afford (Sadiq, Hassan and Nazneen 2017). Thus, the economic feasibility, technical feasibility and legal feasibility will have to be analysed in order to identify the possibility of success for this plan in a particular organizational setup. The focus of this part of the project will be on the needs and problems of the consumers; the requirement can be both functional and non-functional.
The functional requirement will include input, output, processing and error handling. The non-functional requirements will include physical environment such as multiple sites and equipment location, interfaces which will include data medium and human factor, which will include the information about the users and their respective skills. The performance of the system and documentation will also be included in the non-functional requirements. Quality assurance is another important aspect, which will be included in the non-function requirement, which will include the maximum downtime and MTBF (Seid, Robin and Mylopoulos 2017). The validation of the requirements will have to be done in order to find out that whether the assessment of the requirement is correct, complete and consistent.
This knowledge area will determine whether the business solution provide by the analyst is feasible or not. The organization will have to select from a set of solutions to indentify the solution, which is best suited for the needs of the organization and is able to identify the shortcomings and gaps in the solutions (Ma, Proffitt and Skubic 2017). This will help in making changes to the solution so that the organization will be able to implement the model to make improvements in the business need of the organization. the validation procedure will help to identify how the business model is working in the industry and whether it is able to mitigate the needs of the organization which will help in analyzing and assessing the effectiveness and performance of the solution.
The evaluation of the solution will help in assessing the potential and the existing solutions before or after the commencement of the operation in the business. The term solution consists of both IT and non-IT components which may include the systems, processes and the organizational structures. The evaluation of the solution will be based on some criteria, which has to be decided based on the requirement of the organization (Gu et al. 2017). The other parts of the analysis have provided the analyst with the goals and objectives of the organization. The analyst has been able to identify and understand the needs of the organization and based on that the evaluation criteria will have to be set. The analyst will validate the performance of the new design and system to check whether it is meeting the requirements so that the gap in the research can be rectified to make improvements in the business model of the organization (Badertscher et al. 2017).
Thus, the conclusion that can be drawn from the report is that the business analytics consist of multiple knowledge areas, which will be developed to make an analysis system for meeting the goals and requirements of the consumers. The identification of the various knowledge areas is the process which is being used by the all the organizations. There is availability of huge data, which can be used for analyzing the needs and requirements of the consumers. The business analysis tool helps in the identification of the gap in the research and predicts the market trends, which could help in providing the organization with competitive advantage in the market. The above-mentioned process can be considered to be cyclical as they overlap each other and it is possible to move from one process to another without completing the process. The analysis of the report shows how the various processes are interlinked with each other and failure of any one procedure will cause disruption in the overall procedure and the desired output will not be received.
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