Jesse James Garrett: ia/recon

Of course your eBusiness Analyst / Tech Writer deals with taxonomy!

What exactly is your concept of taxonomy? How do you know if your recruit has it if it's not blatently represented as a key word on the resume? You might not, so follows is some food for consideration.

Editing Meets Info. Arch

Jesse James Garrett brings to light just how it is a person under the vague and diverse title of Business Analyst does in fact deal with Taxonomy.

Jesse James Garrett: ia/recon: "When most people think of the job of being an editor, I think they imagine someone hunched over a desk, red pen in hand, marking up an endless stream of text, cleaning up split infinitives and dangling participles and the like. But the editorial role and the editorial discipline are two very different things. While there are definitely some people who specialize in this sort of work, there's usually much more to being an editor.

In the broadest sense, an editor's job is to help writers make their writing more effective. This involves grammar and punctuation and word choice, sure, but a huge part of any editor's job has to do with creating effective structures. An editor might be responsible for structures at many scales, from the encyclopedia down to the textbook down to the article down to the paragraph down to the sentence.

Like the editor, the information architect is concerned most fundamentally with creating information structures. But the discipline of information architecture views this responsibility in a very different light. In the world of information architecture, all structural challenges are currently viewed as variants of the same problem -- the problem of information retrieval."

What's a Business Analyst Anyway

In part it is the tech writing and process development that lends itself obviously to taxonomy and information architecture. When writing for instance, we address our topic and thesis, our main points, and supporting points. The dressing, or decoration, or design is that little important piece of marketing that gets and holds our readers attention, allowing/making them enjoy and leaves them wanting more.

Which Type of BA Do You Need?

Let me bring to light that traditional aspects of business analysis are also components in structuring information. A business analyst, traditionally growing from the business area as a subject matter expert, gets promoted as he or she demonstrates a capacity for thinking about what it is that they do. This person is able to consider the business, its key components, and what could work better. This person thinks about other ways to make the connections that ultimately (or directly) lead to sales or, in the case of education, shared meaning, learning!

Whether a person started in business or in IT, each likley has his or her areas of expertise, but regardless of topic, most business analysts (all?) require certain capabilities. They (as a group) must communicate with the subject matter experts, must gather direct information provided, and must gleen additional unspoken details. Much like the types of personalization available to web developers (see www.atg.com for more info) business analysts must acquire exactly what the business peeople think they need as well as what they ought to want, and finally, in combination, perhaps, of both, what it is that will deem them successful. (You might in fact change the order of these around, but let's leave that to a different debate for second guessing your users and customers, 'k'? Thx).

Let's for get generalizing about business analysts, especially in April 2006 when the definitions of such are readily dividing into categories of data analysts, process analysts, subject matter experts, and those that bridge several of these worlds.

Kateagorize

In my experience, I have spend some wonderful mind-blowing moments,months, and years, gathering, categorizing, and shaking up content.

Artifacts, Deliverables, Collateral

The content might come in the form of process methodology, parts of a written process guide or instructional manual, or site navigation and back end file architecture. They even have taken the form of requirements specifications!

Central Theme of Kate's Career

My job since 1998 has been diverse to the point of friends' and family's heads spinning, but within my career runs a common theme.

• Delving


• Researching


• Digging


• Asking


• Whoa, Data minging?


• Organizing


• Categorizing


• Restructuring


• Whoa, Taxonomy?


• Listening


• Trying


• Trading


• Observing


• Deciding...For now!

As you might guess, all BAs, be them traditional business analysts, process analysts, or data anlalysts, all use similar skills to identify and document business intelligence in terms of needs and whether developers have met those needs. The clear difference now seems to be their background of experience.. Did they grow up in mainframe with SQL and Data Architects? Or did they hang out with web design teams? Or did they get lucky enough to work with the folks shaking up the assumptions of business and architecting new strategies for making work better?

--Kate Out. Happy Fools Day!