Business Analyst Solutions to Drive Application Lifecycle Market

August 15, 2008

Business analysts are playing a greater role than ever in the success of IT projects. 74% of business analysts have been in the role greater than three years, indicating that the role is maturing and having a greater impact on the alignment of the line of business and the IT organization. Organizations with business analysts are more likely to satisfy their customers in a more timely fashion, which translates to a competitive business advantage.

“Software drives the business and business analysts are the key conduit in delivering satisfaction to the line of business by effectively defining requirements to the IT organization,” said Theresa Lanowitz, founder of voke “the business analyst is critical to the overall success an organization will experience with its applications.”

A report authored by voke highlights the need for improved use of solutions to help the business analyst closely align requirements with the business needs. 91% of the study’s participants say the solutions they use to define requirements are static and do not meet the dynamic nature needed for today’s business analyst. The report also identifies a lack of integration between existing requirements definition solutions and the creation of test cases. A total of 76% of survey participants manually create test cases from their requirements.

“It is critical to the alignment of the line of business and IT, as well as customer satisfaction to eliminate time consuming and error prone tasks such as the manual creation of test cases from requirements,” said Lisa Dronzek, COO of voke. “Dynamic creation of test cases from requirements frees up the time of the test engineer to focus on more strategic quality efforts. Incorporating modern and dynamic solutions for the business analyst will complement and enhance existing investments in testing solutions.”

As a result, the report forecasts that the market for business analyst solutions will be one of the fastest growing segments within the application lifecycle market over the next few years, soon to be a billion dollar segment annually.

“The business analyst has been dramatically underserved for far too long,” said David Nyland, CEO of Blueprint Systems, a leading provider of requirements solutions to meet the business analyst need. “As their role grows in importance, we have seen a significant increase in demand for solutions that help them closely align requirements with the business need. Our customers are seeing dramatic improvements in their development process by leveraging requirements solutions to enable the business analyst to succeed.”