Why Good Business Analysis Is a CIO’s Best Friend

A CIO needs a trusted partner to facilitate joint ownership between business and IT to deliver business value, reduce risk, and remove project blockages.

Business analysis is about improving business performance. It is the foundation for innovation, business agility, cost reduction, cyber security, and risk control. Good business analysis allows you to deliver better products and/or services to your customers, often through leveraging digital technology.

Related Article: The Business Analyst’s Best Friend: The CIO

To deliver a successful strategy using technology, good business analysis is a must. By working with an expert in business analysis, your projects or initiatives will be created for you to the highest of standards, and you’ll also have a far lower risk of failure.

You’ll achieve peace of mind knowing your business will have:

• greater engagement with IT
• a very good result in alignment with your IT strategy
• a better chance of making new changes stick
• decisive project decision-making at a portfolio level
• improvement of projects or initiatives and a lower chance of failure
• change in support of improved technology
• improved results
• a higher return on investment.

Effective business analysis engages and empowers stakeholders, allowing them to find better ways to deliver value to customers.

A great business analyst can cost the same as an average one—so why would you settle for less?

Here’s the thing about business analysis

Business analysis is all about helping your company to think about the “why” before going ahead with a strategy, which will prevent technology initiatives from providing little or no value to your organisation.

Here’s an example of proper business analysis. A client sought a solution to manage their approval process and documents. These were associated with their major energy capital projects, having a value of up to $100 million.

We analysed the business process automation, mapped the future state processes, and explored the business and functional requirements through a series of stakeholder workshops. Using aspects of our method and customised templates was in line with the Business Analysis Body of Knowledge (BABoK®).

Based on these documented processes and requirements, we developed an automated workflow solution.

The outcomes of the process automation solution were:

• increased consistency of the approval process
• an automated audit trail for the approvals
• an increase in document tracking, resulting in a greater efficiency with approvals
• a reliable mechanism for staff to determine the status of payment requests and payments
• reduced time spent on approvals by eliminating manual approvals
• reduced resource wastage on printing
• reduced physical file storage.

In the final analysis, we found that minimised delays for approvals reduced the external contract resources required for approval processes. Within six months, the cost of developing the solution was paid for by the benefits of the automated workflow.

An expert business analysis requires a unique skill set that many senior executives have never experienced. However, you need to engage in a proper business analysis to provide a greater chance of project success.

As increasingly competitive organisations look to become more innovative to survive and prosper with technology, business analysis is critical.

If you want to stand out as a CIO from the rest, then you need good business analysis!