Transforming into a digital business analyst

- What if business analysts no longer wrote requirements documents? Maybe you're already seeing this in your organization. It's not about no documentation needed. It's because your collaboration and team practices, as well as organizational agility, are strong enough to deliver high quality solutions under highly volatile and changing circumstances. This is already a reality in many organizations, and there is one thing that these organizations are all doing well. They're doing really great analysis while bringing on the speed and agility under changing conditions. They embrace continuous learning while still delivering valuable solutions to the organization and their customers. The business analyst role of the past and what makes a BA successful is changing, and in many ways will continue to change. Looking at the overall customer experience and business value chain, understanding data insights, and the facilitation of decision-making is overtaking creating documents. Facilitating outcomes from the big picture to the details is what comes into focus working in digital transformations. Historically, business analysts have been called on many projects to look at individual touchpoints or individual interactions to improve upon. Or perhaps you've been a system expert in an application area. Maybe you've been a business analyst working on data feeds or your role has been more of a documenter. Well today's business analysts and those in digital transformations are called to look more holistically at the organizational goals, customers experiences, and how to leverage enormous amounts of data to make the organization more efficient and delight their customers. The business analyst role must change for digital transformations to thrive and to meet their desired outcomes. Analysis in a digital landscape requires the team and business analysts to be nimble, lean, and never forget the customer point of view in everything we do. It requires a strong focus on the end-state vision and the measurements that matter to meet the end goal. No matter if the change is visible to the customer or not, it impacts their experience with your organization. Many are predicting that the changes coming in the next few years will outpace what we've seen in the last 50 years. The business analyst role is about facilitating change to create better business outcomes, and that means, business analysts, be ready because change is coming. The work we do with requirements in this digital age will not only leverage our past skills and experiences, but it'll also add new skills and challenge us to keep learning. And it'll have us rethinking who our customers are as well. Our role in business analysis, product ownership, and requirements work in this new digital landscape becomes more about discovery, experiments, hypotheses, outcomes, customer experiences, and the facilitation of active collaboration. This means facilitating decision-making and being a manager of value to the organization and the customer. This will require us to keep up to date on the various digital capabilities and how they can potentially change the customer experience for the better, while creating outcomes for the business strategy and goals. Aligning all of this together will be the crucial focus.