[Sigia-l] IAs vs BAs

[Laurie Gray]

Chris, I like your thinking here...
At OneSpring, we have BA's and IA's (in fact that's ALL we have - we don't
have visual designers or programmers) and we team on projects. Our
deliverables are simulations, built most often in iRise. There is some
degree of overlap at times, to be sure, but what I have found is that if we
start in the middle with, say, a set of high level requirements, that the
IA's tend to move in one direction (up?) with wireframes of progressively
greater detail, eventually spending most of their time in simulation mode
(interaction design, information design), and the BA's will tend to move in
another direction, producing progressively more detailed requirements or
detailed use cases, for example. Of course, our BA's can build simulations
if they are solo on a project, and we can produce requirements if we are
solo, but it works so nicely when we work together - not to mention that our
clients wind up with a VERY detailed product definition package at the
outset. If we use a tool such as iRise, it works very well, as the IA's tend
to spend most of their time on the design side of the tool, and the BA's
tend to spend most of their time on the requirements/documentation side of
that tool.

So yeah, I'd agree with you Chris, as this is how it works in our
organization. While I like the analogy of surveyors/engineers, I'm not sure
my BA colleagues will agree. ;)

Laurie


On 6/19/07, Christopher Fahey <chris.fahey at behaviordesign.com> wrote:
>
> > Information Architects vs Business Analysts
>
> How about Business Analysts *analyze* and Information Architects
> *architect*? Seems pretty simple.
>
> I know the line is blurry in many organizations, but there's something
> very design-centric and structurally-oriented about the "architecting"
> part of the IA title, while the BA title implies a great deal of work to
> understand a system and communicate that system to peers. It's like a
> surveyor versus an engineer.
>
> I know it's all semantics, but semantics set the tone for the actions
> you take and the expectations others have of you. If a BA finds
> themselves needing to invent new stuff more than they need to document
> existing stuff, then perhaps they are, in fact, information
> architecting.
>
> Cheers,
> -Cf
>
> Christopher Fahey
> ____________________________
> Behavior
> http://www.behaviordesign.com
> me: http://www.graphpaper.com
>
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