Business analysts and the work they perform are becoming increasingly important to companies.

Over the last several years, the business analyst role has evolved and developed beyond eliciting, analyzing and documenting software requirements. Business analysts are now taking prominent roles across the enterprise, to perform strategic problem and opportunity identification, conduct gap analysis and feasibility studies, and drive business solutions within their organizations.

The International Institute of Business Analysis (IIBA) Business Analysis Body of Knowledge (BABoK) defines enterprise business analysis as a way for organizations to:

-- Identify, analyze and solve business problems and opportunities

-- Determine the feasibility of a solution

-- Define the solution scope and develop the business case

-- Continue to assess, refine, and validate the business need and solution

-- Evaluate the business benefits brought about by a solution

The work of business analysts does sometimes leads to a business case, but there are many other functions that enterprises business analysts perform, such as:

-- Driving business architecture discussion and development

-- Creating-functional decomposition of business areas

-- Providing thought leadership within their organizations

-- Assisting business areas in understanding the big picture (rather than talking in terms of project teams and business lines)

Tags: Storage Building Storage Locker Storage Shelf Moving And Storage Data Storage Devices

Virtualization Boosts Netapps Q1
NetApp posted strong first quarter results last night, reporting revenues of $869 million, a 26 percent hike on the same period last year. Although the first quarter figures were down 7 percent sequentially, NetApp comfortably beat analyst estimates of $861.6 million, underlining the comparative health of the storage sector.Like Brocade, which reported its third ...

Rackable Puts Rapidscale Storage Biz Up For Adoption
After suffering a disappointing second quarter, Rackable Systems wants to dump its RapidScale storage appliance business which the company purchased for nearly $40m only two years ago.The data center vendor said today it plans to sell RapidScale along with its development team, patent portfolio and hardware assets. Rackable has already taken a $1m charge to break its lease on the facility that housed the RapidScale ...

Virtual Iron Debuts New Twist
Along with the other updates Virtual Iron plans to ship at the end of this month is a feature designed to conserve electricity by moving virtual machines onto a small part of a server farm and power down the rest.The software, LivePower, is designed to monitor CPU capacity on the servers running Virtual Iron's server virtualization software and shift ...