Introducing: The Corner

Welcome to The Corner! This is a new space on our website where we’ll share some perspectives on key issues along with insights from deeply experienced practitioners who have contributed to our profession so generously over the past two decades.

We’ll be posting regularly, every month or so. These articles will be more substantial than a blog post but less structured than the formal approaches we use to develop and support business analysis standards and practices.

Build, Extend, Modernize

I’m delighted to announce that IIBA will be releasing the next version of The Business Analysis Standard in a few days. This is a good opportunity to reflect on our community’s growth and the way forward in key areas such as the business analysis body of knowledge, standards, and publishing—an area that we’ve worked extensively at but not something we’ve written about in a lot of detail.

It’s easy to forget that professional associations supporting fields like project management or business analysis are young compared to their counterparts in say, accounting or medicine, which have existed for well over a century. While the early efforts of these associations to organize their standards may now be obscure or hard to trace, they were pivotal to the process.

These stories are clearer in hindsight, but much harder to see when we’re in the middle of them. In every professional body, lots of key questions arise in the early stages of formation. What is the essence of a body of knowledge? How much attention should be given to practice (versus theory)? How do enduring principles and ideas differ from those dependent on time, situation, or context?

Business analysis is no different. Our history can be viewed as three generations of work that try to address these questions, as shown in the diagram below. I’ve labelled them Build, Extend, and Modernize. Each generation hasn't replaced the previous one. Rather, they build on each other and overlap to some degree. This picture is far from perfect, in part because it doesn’t happen this neatly and also because this is just the IIBA story. There are other organizations that have contributed to business analysis thought over many years. But it does provide a way to look at our work over the two decades of IIBA.

IIBA’s founding community of volunteers worked really hard (and really fast, compared to many other professions) to build two substantial first drafts and then three successive versions of A Guide to the Business Analysis Body of Knowledge (BABOK Guide).

Even at the time of the last BABOK Guide release, there seemed to be a growing sense that a more modular approach—blending foundational thinking with extensions to address key areas of interest like agile, data, cybersecurity, and product—was important. I see this as the early stages of the second generation, ultimately marked by partnerships with the Agile Alliance and IEEE. This era brought more focused standards, such as the Agile Extension to the BABOK Guide, The Guide to Business Data Analytics, and The Guide to Product Ownership Analysis. It also introduced practical resources such as the Business Analysis Competency Model, white papers, and research.

Every year, members around the world tell me how useful, relevant, and valuable they find these artifacts to be. Others express a desire for more—more practical application, more industry-specific content, more digital ideas. Still others are curious about what might be missing or have ideas for new techniques or perspectives they believe could be valuable additions to the profession.

Our active global dialogue with chapters, partners, and members—coupled with the rapid evolution of digital learning models and media-driven communication—has shaped and continues to shape what we now see as the third generation. Below are three key elements driving this latest shift.

The Business Analysis Standard

The Business Analysis Standard is an intentionally “lean” book. Some professions use standards like this to summarize existing work, but we want the Standard to serve as the foundation for IIBA’s standards publishing. It’s designed to be as compact as possible, allowing for rapid updates. Despite its size, it captures the essence of business analysis and is curated through structured community input, followed by expert and public review.

The Standard references other IIBA resources where appropriate and, in its digital form, provides links to them. IIBA released the first version of the new Standard in late 2022 and the next version will be released near the end of January this year. Going forward, publication will follow an 18- to 24-month cycle. We want the Standard to be as broadly accessible as possible, which is why it’s freely available for everyone to download.

The KnowledgeHub

The heart of the third generation is the KnowledgeHub, the digital platform IIBA launched in 2021. Intended as a framework for digital-first, multimodal content delivery, the KnowledgeHub includes many of the core artifacts from the first and second generations, including the BABOK Guide. It also features an AI assistant as well as content, presentations, and videos from respected practitioners. All of these are curated to help members understand and apply key principles of business analysis to their work.

Since launch, we’ve been releasing new KnowledgeHub content several times a year and will continue to do so. Additionally, we’re working to enhance the user experience, improve search strategy, and build better integration across previous generations of published work.

Expanding Content

The final element is the portfolio of supporting components to help amplify voices in the business analysis community. This includes IIBA Publishing, which supports expert-level practitioners who want to do the hard work of publishing their thinking and experience in book form. It also includes IIBA research studies, our popular bi-weekly podcast (Business Analysis Live), webinars, community-based perspectives, and IIBA’s social media networks.
 

The Road Ahead

As we look to the near future, we have three primary goals. The first is to maintain our long-established rigour around foundational resources—community-curated and expert-reviewed—led by the new Standard and supported by digital resources. Where applicable, it also involves updating content originally found in publications like the BABOK Guide. The second goal is to be digital-first in all our work. This will enable us to be modular while benefiting from modern learning modes and technologies, wherever this makes sense.

The third goal is to support experienced practitioners in both “long-form” endeavours, like their books, and in podcast, webinar, and blog settings that reflect the modern range of ways we have to communicate and learn with each other. There’s still much to do, but I’m excited as I look forward to the future of our profession.

Which brings us back to the release of the Standard. The business analysis community has worked very hard at building this next version, with hundreds of volunteers involved in various aspects of the work. All of this is designed to help business analysis professionals achieve better business outcomes. I hope you’ll find it valuable in both your learning and your work!

See you next time in The Corner.

Stay connected,