One comment that I often hear is that BABOK^® Guide v3 takes a different view about Strategic Business Analysis than version 2 had. Of course, that is true, they are different, but many folks imply that we lost something about Enterprise Business Analysis in the version changes. We have given that topic a lot of thought. This past year, we did some research on what is out there in the market today, and we began to think about what a new take at this would look like. Some prior work was done at IIBA^® to move to create a BABOK^® Guide extension for Enterprise Strategic Business Analysis. We looked at that, and it has some good aspects, but the scope and terminology need a refresh.  
 

In the KPMG study we commissioned a year ago, the expectation gap between what the strategic business analysis meant to an executive versus what it meant to a practitioner, was a large gap indeed. This observation got us thinking about how to approach the terminology gap, but it also got us thinking about a deeper business issue that many companies have. How to get a good strategy put together and then how to go from the strategy to the execution. This also embraces the aspects of business analysis and change management throughout the strategy to execution continuum. It embraces how to really bring in innovation, and creativity into the mix. These are not easy tasks and many transformation initiatives seem to underachieve, so why?  How can the BA profession help organizations do better? 
 

One set of issues is how do we pull all these approaches together and create an extension to our BABOK^® Guide that leverages our BA professional approach to good analysis techniques applied across that problem spectrum. What has worked in practice and why did it work?  Can we define the enterprise strategy approach to analyze strategy options, and work to introduce innovation into the strategy mix, and link the execution and change to meet the strategy objectives?  
 

We want to start to issue some discussion papers to drive this conversation and we want to throw out some thought-provoking questions to the community around this topic.  We will begin to look at the notion that for the last 20 plus years business management has been focused on efficiency, from the earliest days around manufacturing management, and carried on into service management.  It is how we were all trained and is embedded in much of our management culture.  Innovation is the opposite of efficiency. It is by its nature, not efficient. It is risky. So, the question is how do we use solid analysis in support of innovation and enterprise level strategy? 
 

I invite you all to start a conversation about this in your Chapter, or even with a group of friends over coffee. We will be saying more from IIBA soon, but the real engagement and real conversations you have is what is important for now.  So, listen, learn, share, and let’s pursue this.  Have fun with it.