Information is ever more critical to the success of organisations and information professionals should be hot property. But as information discovery begins to be perceived as automated, the power base is shifting to those who can analyse information that is ever more devoid of structure.

The business analyst, once an IT/business hybrid role, is evolving to fill this gap and this role looks set to overlap and overtake the traditional information professional role.

Richard Beveridge, director of library services at Tribal Group, says: “In my opinion a business analyst is not a seeker and discoverer of information, it is a person that actually does something with it. Information professionals would go off for information on someone’s behalf, but now organisations need people who are able to seek information and do something with it. If information professionals don’t evolve they will be under threat from business analysts.”

He adds: “Now you have to be able to make a contribution to the bottom line and that has to be measurable. I am stunned by the number of people in the library service who say, ‘I didn’t join to sell things.’”

Content as an asset

Ben Kiker, CMO at enterprise content management software provider Interwoven, believes the business analyst is in demand as organisations discover the value of content and treating that content as an asset. “We need to unlock the value of content and put it to work. There is a fundamental shift in how companies market and how people market to each other,” he says.

This is leading to an increase in the amount of information that is available about customers and competitors and some of that information is unstructured ­ comments in chat rooms, blogs and customer emails, for example.

Expectations have been raised about what information is available. Demand is rising for real-time data and information about the external market and competitors according to Ben Wilson, who heads Pera’s business intelligence practice where he runs a 20-strong team of business analysts and market researchers.

He has seen the role of the business analyst evolve over the past 10 years since he joined Pera as an environmental analyst in the business information team advising clients on IT environmental issues.

“The increasing recruitment of business analysts is driven by the increase in business risk and partly driven by the increase in information. People are struggling to find the information they are looking for,” says Wilson.

“It is laughable now, but when I started over 10 years ago we had a fax enquiries system. Once someone faxed a name of the company and its telephone number and asked us to find the name of a senior contact! That level of information request has gone. People don’t just want simple information, such as ‘How big is the wooden picnic table market?’ They also want to know what is happening in consumer trends and technologies, ethical and environmental issues, and ‘Who are our customers and who are their customers and what are they thinking?’”

Pera gets a mixed bag of applicants when it advertises for a business analyst. “We get people who understand marketing, business intelligence and competitor and company information and can pull it together and analyse it in the context of the market and that is what we’re looking for,” says Wilson.

“Other people have a more IT-based background and come in via financial services companies looking at information flow and how they can make rules and feed them into the management information process. These business analysts are really systems analysts.”

While business analysts have always had a role in bridging business and IT, today’s business analyst is reaching outside the organisation for information, bridging internal and external market information.

“You can understand how long calls take to answer and what the customer complaints are and you can use that information to drive your performance. To capture that information, you need an IT business systems analyst. But once you know what customers think, you can start to look externally and review the market. Then you can use that information to drive the internal and external data,” says Wilson.

Put it in context

There is a demand for more complex contextual information. For example, improving margin becomes much more than reducing costs in the supply chain by identifying information about costs and where they could be cut. This could be achieved by sourcing cheaper raw material or negotiating better rates with partners. The business analyst might identify customers and who is buying what and set this alongside external information, such as consumer desire for ethical purchasing, in order to decide company strategy.

Organisations investing in their development face an uncertain and risky market in almost all sectors and the desire to reduce this risk drives the recruitment of business analysts.

“There is a lot of venture capital money about to help companies to grow, but there is a greater risk. There are a lot of uncertainties and no one really knows what will happen with India and China. The internet has shown people how easy it is to access information and how powerful information can be,” says Wilson.

He adds: “Smaller companies have been making a five-year plan based on gut feeling. Business analysts can help people make more effective decisions. Smaller businesses are coming up with new ideas and listening to customers, but there is a lot of risk as a decision is only based on a small number of customers. Even larger companies, which have more internal information about customers, still want more information before going to market with a new product.”

As their role becomes more market-focused, business analysts are becoming aligned more closely with marketing than with the traditional IT and finance tie-ups.
Tony Heyworth, Interwoven EMEA marketing manager, says: “Marketers often have traditionally data-rich information with lots of numbers. The type of information is different now. It used to be mostly very structured data, numbers and statistic used to manage information to make business decisions internally.

“Now unstructured data is complex, diverse and difficult to manage. The business analyst needs to be capable of working with marketing people. When this information is used to better target customers, it becomes the responsibility of the marketing department to manage communication across diverse businesses.

“We need a department that has the strategic view of how we are going to use information. The role bridges the gap between business and IT and between different business departments in a company.”

Heyworth has seen a fundamental shift in the role of the business analyst, who is now much less silent and helps to integrate the business. “People who have the experience of being able to work cross-functionally will be critical,” he adds.

Stuck in the middle

Marketing needs to tap into customer relationship management systems and this has led to a view of the business analyst as an information architect sitting between marketing and IT. However, that position may not be entirely comfortable and business analysts may well find themselves refereeing a pitched battle between IT and marketing.

“Marketers have to adopt new tools and this is fairly challenging. All the trends around changing consumer expectations mean marketing is getting more aggressive with IT. Marketing departments are carrying the flag for establishing the company’s web presence as well,” says Kiker.

He adds: “In early 2000, responsibility reverted to IT and many IT executives found themselves managing the website. But now, marketers are aggressively going to take control. Yet marketing still needs IT because marketing doesn’t want to be in the business of managing the underlying infrastructure and, for compliance reasons, there are certain things that the IT department needs to validate.”

James Durrant, business analyst and secretary for the UK chapter of the International Institute of Business Analysts (IIBA), is typical of the new breed of business analyst, bridging systems analysis and a more strategic role. “I have input into corporate strategy and product direction, but my day-to-day job is requirements management and design,” he says.

Elusive role

Kiker describes the business analyst as an elusive in-between person, between marketing and IT: “There is not necessarily one department that they come out of. Business analysts have often been involved in change management.”

As well as taking on new demands for information analysis the business analyst is likely to continue fulfilling the traditional business process focus. “The business process from order to cash is very complex and massive. Implementation can take two to three years criss-crossing the organisation. To reinvent these business processes, the next-generation business analyst will look more like an information architect,” says Kiker.

“IT professionals will be responsible for daily management of the underlying technical infrastructure and applications. There is a more strategic role for the business analyst as the information architect. I think that role could end up reporting to one of a couple of places, to the CTO or head of sales.”

Aligning strategies

Peter Kovacs worked as a business analyst for almost 20 years and is now managing director of training, recruitment and consultancy firm Business Analyst Solutions. He has seen the rise of the business architect: “Some companies might call this role a business analyst, but a high-level business architect works at a strategic level and makes sure the IT strategy aligns with the business strategy. This would include content strategy.”

He adds: “The key thing is the fact that companies are recognising the need to have that role and that it is specialist and unique. But most business analysts landed in the job by coincidence and learn skills as they go. Anyone can be a business analyst but being a good business analyst is different.”

Recruitment agencies specialising in information professional recruitment have seen varying demand for business analysts. Nicola Franklin, head of information recruitment at Sue Hill Recruitment, says: “We rarely get people coming to us asking for business analysts; they will be more likely to go to an IT agency.

“The business analyst as a job function has been there for a long time and tends to be filled by computer applications people or people with a business degree with the systems element. It has been nothing to do with information.

“The research side of the information professional’s job has declined steadily over the past five years as people can do their own searches. However, while a non-information person can put three words into Google, the information professional’s job is to make the retrieval results for that person more sensible and structure the background to the search so that the keywords bring up meaningful results and the end-user sees a simple interface.”

Franklin believes the greatest change to the role of the information professional is convergence. “Roles used to be separate with their own skills. Information professionals were identified by their physical location and that has more or less gone. The systems can be called LMS, EDBMS or CMS, but they are all managing electronic content. People have to know about everything from web content management to record management now.”

Darron Chapman, director of recruitment at information professional recruiter TFPL, defines a number of areas of overlap between the roles of an information professional and new-generation business analyst. “Research, consolidation, synthesising, sense making, informatics and other processes/tools for making sense of information,” he says.

Some info pros are moving into business analysis. “There is an opportunity for information professionals to enhance their offering as more of the basic information gathering roles are being sent offshore or being done by the end-users,” he says.
Information professionals need to be prepared to come out of their bunkers if they are to compete with business analyst skills. Previously, organisations had functional groups and there were issues around battles between sales and marketing, IT, design and production. Increasingly, there is a need for cross-functional teams especially at the outset of the project and the team is likely to be virtually integrated.

CILIP, the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals, recognises that the role of business analyst shares some elements with the role of the information professional. “I am not bothered about turf wars,” says CILIP chief executive Bob McKee. “Information professionals, systems people and business analysts all have a stake in information management. For example, I am having discussions with the British Computer Society about the idea of a chartered IT professional including the concept of information management. We are interested in a broader definition of information management.”

McKee says the new breed of business analyst is likely to be found wherever an organisation is engaged in quantifying the value of embedded knowledge.
Business analysts have been around for a long time and can co-exist happily with adaptable information professionals. However, it is vital that information professionals recognise the increasingly strong contribution that business analysts make to the information service of an organisation, and the willingness of business analysts to put that contribution into a business context.