The mindset of a digital BA

- In digital transformations, it's more important than ever to listen to what the customer wants, and to truly understand the need, not just the want. The innovative technologies today are evolving so fast and it's nearly impossible for our stakeholders to express their needs in terms of the latest technology. We're in the position to truly understand the need, and recommend various ways to solve for it. Along with understanding the technology advances, and matching them to customer needs, we also need to evolve the process in which we work. We need to unravel large amounts of information, complexity, and uncertainty, which brings more change, and at a faster pace. These dynamics make it critical that we work in a learning and discovery mode, experimenting to cut through the unknowns and keep our focus on outcomes and business results as we experiment. This is very different from the traditional approaches of defining and writing up detailed requirement specifications. To make the maximum impact in delivering business results, teams and especially business analysts need to understand what the latest technologies are capable of and what problems they're poised to solve. This course is not meant to give you specific direction on how to apply every digital and artificial intelligence technology. Instead, we're offering a shift in your approach and thinking about your business analysis process and knowledge base when interacting with your business and technology partners. Having the knowledge of these capabilities and how they provide more options to solve various business challenges is an important part of providing ideas and solution alternatives to your stakeholders. Keeping up with the latest technology trends will help you facilitate better business outcomes. Understanding, analyzing, and evaluating the various digital and artificial intelligence capabilities as they evolve will bring new ideas and discovery to teams as you work together to solve for business problems and opportunities. Evaluating the various alternatives and approaches that are possible helps business teams get to real results and outcomes. Here are some tips as you embark on your journey to learn and discover how to best contribute to digital transformations. First, be curious of what's possible. There's always more to what we see and hear. Next, embrace a continuous learning approach. Continuous learning about the problem you're trying to solve and the technologies as they evolve. Also, as you learn about the technologies, don't lose sight of the customer. They are the very people you're trying to impact. Empathy with their experiences is key to selecting the right solutions. And last, have a ruthless focus on what the business and customer outcomes and measurements you're looking to move. Your role in digital transformations is to facilitate the team through a process of understanding the customer's needs and facilitating the discovery of the right and innovative solution. With the right mindset, curiosity, and outcome focus, your organization will build better products and solutions that drive customer satisfaction and business results.