Career implications for the Business Analyst in the age of digital disruption

The Adaptive BA in the age of
Digital Disruption
How will the IT professions - in
particular, the BA - be redefined in
the new Digital era?
© All rights reserved – Rob Livingstone Advisory Pty Ltd
Presentation by:
Rob Livingstone – Principal
LivingstoneAdvisory.com
IIBA® Australia Chapter
Sydney Branch
Thursday 27th October

Agenda
1. Challenges facing business leaders in the ‘new world’ of IT
2. The changing role of the IT department
3. Emergence of new disciplines such as data science
4. Explore some of the challenges and opportunities facing
today’s BAs, and
5. Some practical guidelines to build future career resilience.
6. Open discussion

1. Challenges facing business leaders in ‘new world’ of IT
Enterprise IT’s complexity and high rate of
change is :
• Mostly acknowledged, yet
• Poorly understood
Yet it
• Underpins business life as we know it.
• Just like sub-atomic particles!

Conventional business leadership
practices are failing today’s
organisations1
1 Bersin, J., (2015), “Global Human Capital Trends 2015”,
Deloitte University Press (Identified a 36% gap between
leadership’s importance and readiness rating.)

As a BA can you see the realizable potential in YOUR
organisation’s information assets?
*PWC “Seizing the information advantage”
Sept 2015 (Survey of 1,800 North America
and Europe business leaders )
Reality Check
• 43% of companies surveyed* "obtain
little tangible benefit from their
information
• 23% "derive no benefit whatsoever,“
• Just 4% fall into the ‘information elite’
category that derive realizable value by:
o Well-established information
governance insight capabilities
o Culture of value realization
o Granting secure access to those
with the necessary skills.

The challenge facing modern
business leaders is in proactively
and carefully striking the optimal
cost – risk – value balance for any
IT or digital initiatives – and
keeping it right in the face of
constant change.
“36% gap between the importance and readiness rating,
leadership is the leading factor that underpins organisational
excellence and performance”
Deloitte Global Human Capital Trends 2015

http://livingstoneadvisory.com/2015/11/executives-digital-literacy/

• Varied opinions and no longer a single ‘source of the
truth’ in respect of IT
• Who do business leaders trust when it comes to IT or
new ‘digital’ initiatives?
o Compelling vendor proposition, spellbinding
demonstration?
o ‘Trusted’ consultants?
o Influential, apparently
knowledgeable internal experts
o Technology evangelists?
o Golf club buddy?
o CIO?
http://www.theperceptionconundrum.com/

Up to about 2005…… After about 2005
You must use this
application!
I’ve just installed this great cloud
application – without IT’s
involvement!

Today’s world of IT is substantially different to that of a decade
ago.
• Modern digital technologies are transforming markets,
industries, organisations and reshaping careers.
• It also is creating growth opportunities for organisations that
have the strategic, tactical and operational capability to fully
realize this potential.
• Yet organisations still struggle1 to fully exploit the real
business potential that both Digital and Information
Technologies can offer.
1 Arandjelovic, P., Bulin, L. and Khan, N. [2015], ‘Why CIOs
should be business-strategy partners’, McKinsey & Company.

1 Arandjelovic, P., Bulin, L. and Khan, N. [2015], ‘Why CIOs
should be business-strategy partners’, McKinsey & Company.

• ‘The digital world,
however, runs faster than
the typical IT department’s
default speed.’
• ‘The IT crowd worry that
haste has hidden costs’
• ‘Corporate budgets
everywhere are under
strain, and IT is often still
seen as a cost rather than
as a source of new
business models and
revenues’
https://goo.gl/wz8PIZ

Value trumps cost and perfect ‘performance’ –
i.e. Meeting all KPIs
The business case for shifting
IT from being largely a cost
center that is subservient to
the demand of the business to
a high value, strategic enabler
for the entire organisation
should be clear.
…. But it is often not

Integrating and aligning business, IT, Digital and analytics
strategies

Build it Broker Drive value
1990s 2000s 2010s
Speed of
delivery /
User
impatience /
Market agility

https://livingstoneadvisory.com/2014/06/shifting-from-broken-it-services/

SOFT SKILLS ARE HARD
Importance of Brand, Marketing and Communications
for effective brokerage of IT and digital services
• Technologists (engineers, scientists, etc) do not always
recognise the relevance and importance of acquiring
‘soft skills’ and related capabilities to their projects,
initiatives and even their own careers.
• If IT does not sensitively and deliberately control its
brand through effective marketing and
communications initiatives, others will.

IT reputational damage within the enterprise
• Enterprise IT plays a critical part of most organisations and exposed to
adverse criticism. (ie: Outage, hack, late project, etc..). Criticism
undermined IT’s reputation.
• Question is: Who is saying what about your IT department (or you, for
that matter)?
• Identify what ‘success’ look like in the eyes of your customer groups,
then develop specific strategies to test IT’s reputation from time to
time. Correlate results
• Identify any significant change and look at what’s behind it (ie: What
key elements constitute and are driving the change? Change drivers?
Economic? Political? ….)
• What do you see?
• What can you / can’t you influence?

The new IT: From Cost Center to Value Driver
If the IT department is seen primarily as an expense in the eyes
of the business, the focus will be on cost reduction.
• This may lead to missed business opportunities.
• Valuetrumpscostinanyinvestment,andenterpriseITisnodifferent.
• In many instances, the ‘value’ of IT cannot be clearly and
precisely defined in the eyes of the business.
• IT bears the ‘cost’ – Business drive ‘value’
• Critical success factor: How is IT’s ‘value’ perceived across the
organisation and its customers?
Old: Technology-centric cost centre.
New: Sustained business relevance

https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2016/06/
10-jobs-that-didn-t-exist-10-years-ago/
Recently created IT / Digital industry
roles:
• Big Data engineer
• Mobile App developer
(iOS/Android)
• CX/UX analyst and designer
• Digital Analytics
• SEO
• Social media analytics
• Digital marketing
• Cloud services specialist
• Data scientist
• Augmented reality engineer /
developer
• IoT architect

“The data scientist role is critical for organizations
looking to extract insight from information assets
for “big data” initiatives and requires a broad
combination of skills that may be fulfilled better
as a team, for example: Collaboration and team
work is required for working with business
stakeholders to understand business issues.
Analytical and decision modeling skills are
required for discovering relationships within data
and detecting patterns. Data management skills
are required to build the relevant dataset used for
the analysis”
http://www.gartner.com/it-glossary/data-scientist/
“Data Science is an
interdisciplinary field that
combines machine learning,
statistics, advanced analysis,
and programming. It is a
new form of art that draws
out hidden insights and puts
data to work in the cognitive
era.”
http://www.ibm.com/analytics/
us/en/technology/data-science/

From Data to Information to Insights
INSIGHTS
THE HARD
BIT
JOIN THE DOTS
GATHER DATA
- Organisational culture
- Multidisciplinary
collaboration
- Analysis (qualitative,
quantitative, statistical,
optimization, stochastic )
- Context
- Identify actions
- Risk
- Experience
- Correlation, causation,
independent &
dependent variables, etc
- Hypothesis Testing
- Simulation, testing,
validation
INCREASINGVALUE

Cartoon by Mark Stevenson

Who is responsible for what? Overcoming the challenge of role
confusion
4. Challenges and opportunities facing today’s BAs

https://livingstoneadvisory.com/2015/08/digital-strategy-challenge/
What does ‘Digital’ mean to your organisation?
Who ‘owns’ the digital strategy in your organisation?

Where BAs can be a game changer
Fact #1: Majority of established organisations structured along functional
lines
Fact #2: The enterprise-wide interdependencies between differing systems,
technologies, information taxonomies, governance and risk profiles,
are not well understood at the leadership level.
Fact #3: BAs have expertise in the architecture and governance of complex,
interdependent enterprise technologies and processes.
Result: Do BAs offer untapped potential to add substantial business value by
harnessing these insights?

BABOK V3 Page 27
Proactive in:
• Identifying business
value drivers ….
• Triggering innovation
initiatives ….
• Driving business
transformation
• ……..???
PROACTIVE??

Adding the last – most critical step – in ‘Design Thinking’
From Data to Information to Insights to sustainable actionable
results
EMPATHISE
DEFINE
IDEATE
PROTOTYPE
TEST
Key ingredients in Design Thinking
‘Direction through Disruption - A guide to career resilience during rapid technology and
workplace change’. Rob Livingstone ISBN-13:978-1500136819

The reality is that we are all living in a complex
system with many confounding influences at play.
• The Internet of Things (IoT)
• Blockchain (underpins Bitcoin)
• Drones
• Big Data
• Cognitive computing
• IoT
• Advanced analytics
• Mobility
• Cloud
• Social
• Apps
• Platforms ………
5. Some practical guidelines to build future career resilience

TRUST
Key attributes that underpin IT career resilience

Democratisation rules!
How will the
march of
democratisation
impact your
future career
prospects?

Democratisation rules!
http://www.oxfordmartin.ox.ac.uk/downloads
/academic/The_Future_of_Employment.pdf

SOFT SKILLS ARE HARD
Acquire ability to influence those over whom you
have no authority
Influence? Authority??
Key ingredients include:
• Professional and personal resilience –
always have options.
• Hone skills for empathy
• Critical thinking – not criticism!
• Professionalism
• Perceptiveness
• Dissociation – It’s not your business!
• Build trust

1. Don’t think of yourself as an employee: Your career is your business
2. Taking control over your career is a prerequisite in the evolution towards
your own individual career empowerment.
3. Recognise that:
• Being an excellent employee does not automatically result in you having
a resilient career.
• While your current employer may dictate the terms of your
employment, you should be the one in charge of your career.
4. If you are employed as an expert in a specific domain of knowledge, how can
you increase your effectiveness in bridging the divide between your
expertise and those that don’t see it as intrinsically valuable?
5. Ask yourself: “If this was my business, what would I do with my job to make
it better, cheaper, faster and more effective?”
6. Validate the fundamental assumptions you have made about your job,
employer or career (If you've made any, that is!)

These
competencies are
fundamental – and
go well beyond the
Agile Perspective

Assess your own mental model of the world –
and it’s impact on your career.

Open Discussion
Visit us at: Livingstoneadvisory.com

Career implications for the Business Analyst in the age of digital disruption

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Career implications for the Business Analyst in the age of digital disruption