At Last!! Creativity Takes Priority Over Business Analysis
Thursday, May 15, 2008 at 06:21PM Finally, creativity gets recognition in business althought the author dresses it up in the guise of "design". This article by
Michael H. Hugos principal at the Center for Systems Innovation author of The Greatest Innovation Since the Assembly Line (Meghan-Kiffer Press, 2007) takes an interesting slant on the value of analysis. The author acknowledges the fault of relying on analysis as the only way forward and then takes takes a stab at creativity and what he says is the resulting outcome "synthesis". Whilst I think his case is weak generally, he does make some good points about the importance of the emergence of creative thinking in business.
Is there a place for business analysts in IT today? Not if their primary function is just to analyze business needs. As the pace of change accelerates, business people want more than analysis; they want workable solutions to their problems.
Analysis is only part of the job that needs to be done. It can clarify situations and trends, identify problems and make recommendations. But most analysis serves only to educate the business analyst. Business people who live with the situations being analyzed already know 98% of what the analysis will tell them.
There are two other important parts of the job: creativity and synthesis. Analysis is where we determine business needs, specify performance requirements and find out what resources we have to work with. Creativity is where we come up with ideas for combining available resources to create systems that could meet performance requirements. Synthesis is where the best ideas are evaluated and modified until good solutions are found.
A single person who does all three of those things isn't really a business analyst. He or she is a systems designer.
And designers are what businesses need today. Increasingly, companies are encountering situations never seen before. Under current conditions, the value of analysis decreases rapidly unless it is combined with creativity and synthesis. If we overemphasize analysis, we end up relying too heavily on so-called best practices as we try to fit all the situations we encounter into categories that have well-defined answers. This can work for known problems, but not for problems that are new and different. No amount of analysis will ever produce a new idea all by itself.
Systems designers, who combine analysis with creativity and synthesis, need to understand that just four techniques that have been evolving in the IT profession for several decades are key to the design of information systems. These techniques are group facilitation, process mapping, data modeling and user interface prototyping. They transcend any particular technology or any particular industry, so they are a stable foundation to use for giving structure to the work involved in all three parts of the system design process.
Group facilitation is essential for getting input from everyone who might have relevant information and insights on a business process. As they gather this input, designers use process mapping to create diagrams that capture task sequences for existing and new workflows. And they use data modeling to diagram the structure of the data those workflows operate on. Then designers use prototypes of user interface screens to illustrate how people can interact with the system to do their jobs.
Since both business and technical people are able to quickly scan and understand these diagrams and screen layouts, those approaches are effective ways to communicate with the diverse groups of people involved in the development of any new system.
The four techniques work equally well to capture and manipulate the information and ideas generated during all three parts of the design process (analysis, creativity and synthesis). So teaching people to use them in appropriate combinations brings order and manageability to the work involved in designing new systems — and the systems that are designed using this method are the ones business people really want.
In today's economy, the most successful companies don't just follow best practices; they set them. For that, you need designers, not analysts.
Reader Comments (1)
I have just got back from holidays, and I have been catching up on the actKM posts on Hamlet (etc). Just thought I would drop a line to say that I have been enjoying your posts - particularly your comments on theatrical performance. I really think that Joe has lost the plot on this one... :-)
Just having a quick look at your blog, this seemed to be a good post to put the comment on. I have been doing a bit of reading on creativity - see my blog here:
http://delarue.net/blog/category/creativity/
Regards,
- Keith.