History of IIBA

IIBA^® held its inaugural meeting in October 2003, in Toronto, Canada with 28 founding members from 21 different organizations. Here is a brief history of the organization's annual goals since inception, starting with the current year and working back to the very beginning.

2012: Stewarding the Global Community of Practice

To continue to grow the association and gain even greater recognition for the business analysis profession, IIBA has introduced the Global Community of Practice (GCOP). The purpose of the GCOP is to engage every member of the BA community who cares about the success of the profession in order to move it forward. IIBA is facilitating this initiative by creating a consistent message around the products and services offered by the association, which will add even more value for important stakeholders. In March, IIBA achieved the major milestone of reaching 25,000 members worldwide.

2011: Building the Business Case for Business Analysis

Even though IIBA had over 16,000 members at the beginning of this year, business analysts are still faced with the challenge of communicating the value of business analysis to their organizations. Using the business case, a key tool from the BA toolkit, our goal this year is to help BAs develop the Business Case for Business Analysis in order to demonstrate to the leadership in their companies how important business analysis is to the company's success.

2010: Taking Business Analysis to the Next Level

To take business analysis to the next level, our focus this year was on engaging business analysts from around the world. An important initiative to achieve this was the introduction of the Global Membership Program designed to make IIBA more accessible to all business analysts. Membership jumped to more than 11,500 members. We also continued to work towards gaining recognition from companies across all industries about the value of the BA role.

2009: The Year of the Brand

In the Year of the Brand, the focus was on building awareness of the value of business analysis. We wanted to help organizations understand how business analysis can help them do business better, and to get the word out about how IIBA can help organizations improve their BA practices. Membership grew to over 7,700 members.  

2008: The Year of the Chapters

For the first few years, our focus was on publishing A Guide to the Business Analysis Body of Knowledge^® (BABOK^® Guide), implementing the certification program, building our membership which reached over 5,000 members, and putting in place the organizational infrastructure as we continued to grow IIBA. We knew that our chapters played a huge role in getting the word out about IIBA to the global business community. In 2008, our main goal was to help the chapters improve their operations and remain viable.

2007: The Year of Sustainability

One of the challenges for a new organization is how do you keep going when almost all of the work is being done by volunteers, with a few paid contractors? How would we endure after any of the leaders needed to move on? This year we put in place key processes and procedures to ensure the long-term viability of the organization. We saw our membership increase to more than 3,500 members.

2006: The Year of Expansion

This was an exciting year as IIBA moved beyond North America to expand our chapter network into Australia, New Zealand and South Africa. We were able to spread our wings and truly became a global organization that year, expanding to more than 2,300 members.
2005: The Year of Growth

In year two, we worked hard to build up enough momentum to keep going. We had lots of ideas and were developing important initiatives, but there was much work to be done. Our challenge was to encourage our 181 members to hang in there with us to the point where we could deliver A Guide to the Business Analysis Body of Knowledge^® (BABOK^® Guide) and the Certified Business Analysis Professional^™ (CBAP^®) designation.

2004: The Year of Formation

In 2004, IIBA went from being a working group with a name, to a formal organization - IIBA was born! At our first Annual General Meeting in March of that year we had 37 members. Our first major deliverable was to participate in the inaugural BA World Conference in Toronto, Canada.