Authored by Olumide Mosuro and David Reinhardt BSG (UK) Business Analysts recently attended the Business Analysis Conference Europe 2013. Shortly after the conference, the BSG delegates collectively identified a number of trends which cropped up across the conference topics. BAs and leadership There were a number of talks focused on the BAs role in organisational leadership and / or how leadership skills can improve the capability of BAs to influence change. Naturally, these positions go hand-in-hand because they, in effect, a virtuous cycle. Although – BAs and project practitioners – we’ve instinctively known this for some time, we take the [&hellip

Authored by Andras Rusznyak Consultants from BSG recently attended a Business Analysis conference hosted by Unicom. Shortly after the conference, the BSG delegates collectively identified some key themes which were evident in a number of the presentations. Talk to the customer Our world is shifting and decisions are no longer made behind closed doors between Business and IT. At least they shouldn’t be. Customers are increasingly using online channels and leaving their footsteps in the front-end systems of every organisation. If IT people can observe these steps they’ll get a better understanding of the customers. Profiles, personas and behavioural pattern data is [&hellip

David Reinhardt, BSG Principal Consultant, presented a talk titled “Did BA’s become irrelevant when business learned to code?” at a recent industry conference. The talk examines the progression of the relationship between Strategy, Business, IT and the Customer. We love to talk about this. Please make contact if you would like to discuss any of the ideas in this presentation.   In the run-up to the conference, David also authored a blog post talking about the role of trust and the transition from a specification/control world to a process/trust world. Read it here

Why is this important? Why is it happening? The retail investment market has been a lucrative space for many years, however over the last decade it has had its fair share of scandals. The key area of concern currently under scrutiny is the delivery of financial advice and the subsequent sale of financial products. With the current approach, financial advisers receive commissions on products provided to clients – a framework that can introduce a bias to the financial advice which is given. Product providers that offer advisors attractive commissions get favoured, very often steering advisors away from keeping clients’ interests [&hellip

by Michael Railton Challenges are just opportunities to think differently Offshoring has its horror stories. Many of them resulting from putting the desire to drive cost down ahead of the desire to deliver against business benefit. Throwing specs “over the fence” may be cheap, but there is often significant business upheaval in the wake of a poorly built software system. The cost of correction (in the software) and disruption (in the business) is often significantly greater than would’ve been incurred had a smarter approach to working as a team been pursued from the outset. Effective collaboration within distributed development teams is [&hellip

by Jacqui Newling, owner of our regulatory compliance service We’re helping many of our banking clients to effect the implementation of regulatory change. These programmes are extensive and complex. In order to help get our head around this, we took some time to reflect and identify key themes in these programmes. Taking a macro view allows us to consider how to implement these changes in a flexible and scalable manner. Our belief is that institutions that are setup to roll out compliance change effectively and quickly will be in a better position to focus on the business rather than the [&hellip