It is not required that the technical team understand about business process discovery, definition, and KPIs definition. This is mostly part of business analysts responsibilities.
What is expected from the tech team, is the assistance that allows the organization to achieve business transformation through the use of proper development and delivery methods of decoupled and business-oriented applications.
Let’s deep dive on the details of the sentence above:
- Provide support that allows the organization to achieve business transformation: In order to do this, firstly, the team should be able to communicate effectively with the business team, who holds the information about the domain. They should be able to read and create executable versions of existing assets modeled with standard notations. The modeling notations (like BPMN, DMN, CMMN) are the common language that will be used by both areas to validate understanding of the requisites. By accurately communicating, the teams will be able to create software that automates human tasks and decisions.
- To “Provide support through the use of appropriate development methods”, is to use a development strategy and language that facilitates not only the communication but also the business assets implementation. Picture this simple example: how would you implement a set of eight hundred rules that might change frequently? How to do this is in a way that analysts can quickly validate the implementation, or update the rules by themselves?
- To use “delivery methods of decoupled and business-oriented applications“, the first step is to architect software in a way that the business requirements are decoupled. This will allow them to be deployed and scale independently, and consequently have its own lifecycle, its own delivery automated pipeline.
It is necessary to consider that advanced business analysts may also need to accelerate development by contributing to the project. They should be able to implement their needs in an easy and friendly way. Implementing this development culture allows shortening the time that counts from the creation of a new business idea until the featured publishing for final users.
Experienced IT team works with business automation technologies. They know how to build a safe territory, a place where the dialogue flows easily and effectively between the silos of IT and Business.
It is the responsibility of the tech role to understand the importance of business automation for the organization; to be aware of the available techniques and tools involved in BA projects. When architects and managers are aware of BA capabilities, they will add more cards to their stack of technical solutions, and this will raise their chances of conceiving successful projects.
This blog post is part of the first section of the jBPM Getting started series: Welcome to a Business Automation era.
Keep Kalm 