How Our Community Contributes: The Real Work Behind IIBA’s Knowledge

Welcome back to The Corner!

I decided to slightly push back our planned series on emerging thought in business analysis and business architecture, starting with Dr. Terry Roach. We’ll pick that up in the next instalment of The Corner.

In this edition, we’re joined by Susan Moore, who comes from a long career as a business analysis practitioner to her role leading our global community engagement as well as hosting IIBA’s bi-weekly podcast and other events.

As we were preparing internally for our upcoming Annual General Meeting, we sensed that it would be helpful to write a more extended piece on what has been a tremendous year of really meaningful contributions in a wide range of areas from the passionate community we’re privileged to work with globally.

Welcome Susan!

— Delvin

How Our Community Contributes: The Real Work Behind IIBA’s Knowledge

Consider what makes open-source software so resilient. It isn’t just that thousands of developers contribute code for free. It’s that no single organization owns the understanding of what the software needs to do. The people closest to the problems are the same ones shaping the solutions.

That distributed intelligence is the source of its strength. Take it away, and you don’t just slow things down. You lose the thing that makes the software worth trusting.

Professional knowledge works the same way.

The most credible, durable, and useful frameworks for any profession aren’t built in isolation by a small team of writers with a lot of academic research. They’re built through continuous contact with the people doing the work—in every kind of organization, across every region, navigating real constraints and genuine ambiguity. That contact is what keeps a body of knowledge alive and responsive to how the work is done and genuinely useful to the people doing it.

I don’t say this lightly: it's the central challenge our profession faces right now.

Business analysis is changing faster than at any point in recent memory. AI is reshaping what analysts do and how they do it. Agile and hybrid delivery models have changed where business analysis fits within organizations. The scope of the role and what it means to “do business analysis” has expanded in some directions and contracted in others.

In that environment, the value of our standards and certifications depends entirely on how closely they reflect the work as it's being done today.

Keeping pace requires something no small IIBA team can provide on its own: ongoing contact with practitioners across the full breadth of where business analysis is happening. That is what you, as volunteers, make possible—and why your decision to share your knowledge, experience, and time is how the profession keeps moving forward.

Built Together, Not Delivered to You

None of the work we produce at IIBA exists without community participation. Every standard, guide, certification, and learning resource we publish is built by and with business analysis practitioners.

This is a deliberate choice, and it matters to us. When practitioners are involved from the beginning, they shape what gets explored, challenge the thinking behind it, and ultimately test what gets published. Their involvement yields a fundamentally different outcome than what a small team could produce alone. It carries the weight of your experiences and reflects the range of contexts in which you practise business analysis. More importantly, it earns your trust in a way that top-down guidance rarely does.

Volunteers aren’t just contributors to IIBA’s work. They’re co-creators of it. The distinction matters because if volunteer participation were to shrink significantly, we’d lose the very thing that makes our collected body of knowledge across five distinct artefacts–and all of the other elements that are adding to that foundation–so enduring.

That’s not incidental to volunteering. More than giving back to the profession, volunteers get back a deep understanding of business analysis and how they apply it in their work. The trade-off is genuinely meaningful and profound, based on the comments that some of you have left us in your volunteer feedback forms.

“This experience reminded me of how powerful community-driven professional development can be. Serving as a volunteer deepened my commitment to advancing my business analysis profession.” — Chinenye A.

How the Community Builds the Work

Creating and curating community-based content is no small feat! Contributions take many forms, and all of them are essential to the process of getting that knowledge to you. It requires an ongoing cycle of sensemaking, creation, validation, and learning.

Here’s how each type of contribution works in practice, and what many of you have helped produce over the past year.

Sensemaking and Exploration

Much of the most important work starts before any content is drafted. Through focus groups and workshops, volunteers share with us what’s changing in the profession from their vantage points. That includes what they’re seeing in their organizations, where current guidance falls short, and where common language or clearer framing would be meaningful.

These conversations not only surface information, but they also help us understand context. That understanding shapes what we build and how we build it. Over the past year, you've contributed to that understanding in some very concrete ways.

Mapping the Professional Landscape

Understanding what business analysis looks like across a career—from junior practitioners finding their footing to senior leaders shaping organizational strategy—requires talking to people at every level. To understand this, we conduct work practice analyses.

Many of you have participated in surveys and interviews that have helped us map what you do, what you’re responsible for, and what capabilities are expected of you at each stage of your career and work. That picture is what allows us to define meaningful professional levels as genuine reflections of how the work evolves with experience.

KnowledgeHub

The KnowledgeHub contains IIBA’s standards and guides in digital form, along with the scenarios, templates, and applied resources that make those standards usable in practice. Almost all of that applied content has been built by volunteers over the past several years. And you may have noticed that it’s changing!

Over the past nine months, more than 150 volunteers participated in workshops and surveys that have helped us understand how practitioners want to find resources to support their work in real time. Based on what you’ve told us, what you need is something you can apply right now to the situation in front of you. That insight is driving how we redesign the KnowledgeHub’s structure—so the content connects to real work, in real time, rather than sitting in silos waiting to be discovered by accident.

Evidence and Validation

Where sensemaking tells us what questions to ask, evidence and validation help us answer them rigorously. We regularly test our assumptions through open calls for your input and feedback on what we’re building. These efforts help us identify broader patterns across business analysis practices, techniques, and roles, and they help us shape our plans for what to update, retire, and transform.

There’s no better example of that than our ongoing work with The Business Analysis Standard.

The Business Analysis Standard

As part of our ongoing work to evolve The Business Analysis Standard, we needed to understand how business analysis has changed: what practitioners are doing today, what concepts have shifted in practice, and where the current standard no longer reflects the work as it’s being performed in the field today.

Through seven rounds of focus groups, an expert review with around 20 volunteers, and a public review process that generated more than 1,000 lines of feedback, you helped us map where the profession has moved—and where the standard needs to follow. What we learned has given us a clearer picture of the profession, and what comes next will show it.

The Work, In Your Own Words

Some of the most valuable knowledge we have doesn’t come from structured research. It comes from you: a description, in your own words, of how you work. Through calls for your stories, we invite you to share how you’re applying business analysis skills across different industries, organizational contexts, and even situations outside of daily work!

Your contributions arrive as blog posts and articles, and they capture something surveys and focus groups can’t: the texture of the practice. In other words, what it looks like in action, what works, what doesn’t, and how you’re experiencing changes in the profession before any standard has named it.

Analyst Catalyst and Member Articles

Through Analyst Catalyst and Member Articles, many of you have shared how business analysis is being done inside your organizations (often candidly, and sometimes in ways that challenge the polished accounts in formal standards). Contributors bring forward what they’ve tried, what they’ve learned, and what they’d do differently.

Together, your articles give us a faster way to surface emerging practices and honest field experience, supplementing our formal publications, and even our webinars and podcasts, by showing how business analysis is being practised in real time.

United States Department of Labor Collaboration

That same impulse (asking practitioners to describe the work they do) drove one of this year’s most significant community contributions. When the US Department of Labor reached out to us for help updating the national definition of the business analyst role, which they refer to as a “management analyst,” we turned immediately to the community.

Nearly 200 US-based analysts raised their hands to describe their work in their own terms. Their collective input will shape how business analysis is understood and categorized at a national level, with implications for job classifications, hiring criteria, and how the profession is recognized beyond our own community.

Creation and Synthesis

Many of you have contributed formal content directly by authoring case studies, techniques, and scenarios that show how business analysis works in context. This is where your lived experience gets translated into usable knowledge for practitioners at every level.

You turn "what happened in my project" into "what others can learn and apply," bridging the gap between concept and daily practice. One of the most significant examples of that in recent years has been the work to rebuild how we prepare and assess foundation-level professionals.

ECBA Learning Materials and Exam Updates

In 2025, we completed a major refresh of the ECBA exam, moving away from a knowledge-based assessment toward one that reflects the real situations faced by foundation-level business analysis professionals. A small group of dedicated volunteers invested nearly 200 hours to ensure the updated exam was representative of what early-career analysts experience.

That shift in the exam also called for a new approach to learning. We needed resources that put core skills and real-world application front and centre from day one. Almost 400 of you raised your hands to help, contributing to a multi-month effort to create and review those materials.

Review, Refinement, and Reach

Not all contributions are about generating new content. Some of the most essential work is making sure what already exists is worth keeping—and that it reaches the people who need it.

Volunteers serve as reviewers and editors, challenging the clarity, relevance, and practical usefulness of content before it’s published. Their feedback ensures that what we release is grounded in reality and flexible enough to travel across the enormous range of contexts in which business analysis is performed.

Editorial Committee

A small group of dedicated volunteers support Member Article contributors directly, giving their time to provide meaningful feedback before any piece is published. These volunteers are the reason every published piece reflects the best of what its author had to say.

Translation Teams

Reach matters just as much as quality. If you’ve used IIBA materials in a language other than English, thank a volunteer. Translation teams, led by regional chapters, operate year-round to make business analysis content accessible in Standard French, Canadian French, Brazilian Portuguese, Chinese, Japanese, Arabic, and Spanish (coming soon).

Taken together, these contributions ensure that what you share with the community is as polished and accessible as possible.

Why This Matters Now

The business analysis profession is at an inflection point. AI is changing what analysts are expected to do. Organizations are restructuring how they deliver change. The definition of “business analysis” is being redefined in ways we haven’t seen before.

The only way to stay current is to stay connected—to maintain the kind of ongoing, honest contact with you, the practitioners, so that what we build continues to reflect your reality.

That connection is what volunteers sustain. And its value is personal as well as professional. Volunteering is, consistently, one of the ways practitioners most effectively deepen their own understanding of the field, build relationships across the global community, and develop capabilities they can’t acquire through coursework alone.

“Thank you for giving me an opportunity to be part of this great session, allow me to share perspectives and listen, learn other professionals’ thoughts.”  — Aparna K.

This is what we hear from volunteers, again and again: that giving back and growing are two sides of the same coin.

An Open Invitation

What the profession knows about itself (how it works and where it's heading) is built from the ground up—by you, with you, and for you. If you've contributed through a survey, a focus group, a review, a translation, a conference session, an article, or a chapter role—thank you. Your contributions are literally what this profession is made of.

If you haven't yet, the invitation is open. The entry points are many, and there’s a place here for you to share what you know.

We build this together. We always will.

— Susan

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Up next: Based on the feedback I’m seeing and lots of discussion in our community, I think we’ll be continuing to explore this “reframing and reshaping” theme! In our next edition, I’ll be joined by Dr Terry Roach to share some of what he has been learning (and working on) over the past few months on the intersectional areas between business analysis and business and enterprise architecture—including what some of those lessons are for leadership and the next generation of our craft.