The world is becoming digitized. Skills to interact with the virtual world is becoming almost second nature to everyone. The BA role is also evolving along with these changes. A digital BA role, a technical BA role - are examples of how BAs are adapting to lead the changes in the new world. What are some of the skills they acquire? Let's take a look.
Tech savviness
From understanding how Facebook works to how API calls and DB SQL queries work, BAs are becoming experts at peeling the layers and making it work for them. They de-code and break down system processes to understand the mind of the machines… and enjoying it. Apart from product experience, they also need to have experience working with the systems that deal with the products.
User Experience
Real experiences are different from virtual experiences. Within real experiences, a human is able to assess the customer and modify their approaches accordingly. However, with the virtual world, the experiences have to be pre-empted and guided. This means they need to understand how the end customers / users react to the applications and how UX analysis can tackle that. While there are separate teams to manage UX, having a understanding of what they are trying to achieve will lead into better requirements.
Translators
BAs are actively translating the business needs into system requirements. They are reading between lines and facilitating conversations between the reality and virtual. They come up with a variety of tool kits to express the details in the right light.
Simplification
System requirements and business needs are two different sides of a coin. However, for someone not exposed to the details, the conversation can become complex and disengaging. BAs act as intermediary in assessing the level of understanding of the stakeholders and ensuring that the right amount of information and right analogies are provided to get everyone on the same page.
Process flows to system flows
BAs have one more tool in their kitty to express the system flows alongside process flows. Information exchange and system interactions can get complex and de-coding these for the business world, yet keeping them informative enough for the technical world is key.
As new improvements and advancements keep coming along, BAs will have to become the leads in these areas, since they happen to be the first within an IT team to get exposed to it, in terms of eliciting the requirements. In order to do that, above all, they will always need an open mind, high level of adaptability and a curiosity that can only be satiated through communication and research.
