Background

Tech World

The tech world is the place where geeky people live. They talk about JAVA, Algorithms, SQL etc. They are well capable of produce any kind of business application in any range. They have solid knowledge about information technology applications and their architecture. In most of the cases they are more comfortable with machines than people.

Business World

Business world is where thinkers live. They have great imagination. Talk in simple English. They want to implement a business idea and they have it in mind. They are very good with people and know how to control them to implement his ideas. Most of the cases they have general knowledge about technology and information system architecture. Due to that in the case of ICT implementation they won’t be able to express what they really need.

Business Analyst

It’s clear that there is a huge gap between business world and tech world. But the collaboration of those two worlds is essential for modern businesses. That’s where Business Analyst come to the picture. He has solid knowledge about technological applications, at the same time he has wide knowledge about various Business and its requirements. He can identify the problem, specify it and make it visible to both tech world and business world in a common format. Furthermore he can be a bridge between two worlds to enable active communication and better understanding in order to perform tasks together.

Knowledge

Business or IT Graduate

As The primary requirement the Business Analyst must have a degree in Business or IT. As long as he is going to make a communication bridge between Business world and Tech world it is essential to be an expert in one knowledge area first. If you planning your carrier as Business Analyst you can choose your subjects in Degree program accordingly. If you are following ICT program you can choose related Management subjects like ICT Project Management. If you are following Business degree you can choose related ICT subjects like Management Information Systems.

Business Analysis BOK

Business Analysis Body of Knowledge is the dominant framework introduced to the process of business Analysis. It contains few knowledge areas which explain the process of Business Analysis.

• Enterprise Analysis: This knowledge area is about how to analyze organizational context, understand its structure, policies and other boundaries for the proposed system.
• Requirement analysis: This knowledge area is about how to capture the exact requirement of the proposed system.
• Solution Assessment and Validation: All the above two knowledge areas would come to this before proceed to the next step in order to asses and validate the information captured.
• Elicitation: This process will be applicable in all the main knowledge areas and it’s about how to elicitate the requirement correctly.
• Requirement management and Communication: This knowledge area is about how to manage the captured requirement and maintain active communication.
• Business Analysis Planning and monitoring: In order to carry out the whole process there has to be a plan and monitoring mechanism and this knowledge area is about that.
• Underlying competencies: Analysis process is not always about knowledge. In order to perform that there has to be a various competencies possessed by the professional and this knowledge area is provide support to improve those.

Modeling Tools and Techniques

In order to make the requirement visible to all the stakeholder there are various representation of requirements. There are various tools and techniques developed to serve that purpose. Business Analyst must have good knowledge about those tools and techniques. There are various PC application are developed to model and specify requirement using above mentioned tools and techniques and business analyst should have good knowledge about those as well.

Skills and Competencies

Interpersonal Skills

The most important skills that Business Analyst must have are interpersonal skills. He should be able to get on with any one from any background. Furthermore he must have the ability to understand the untold Business requirement and make it visible to Business world as well as tech world.

Communication

Communication is his greatest tool and it has to be very sharp. In order to communicate effectively business analyst must have updated technological and business understanding, otherwise the credibility will be low of information which will communicated. Furthermore communication doesn’t end in speech and documents. To perform an effective analysis process business analyst should be able to read the body language properly. That will be a great advantage to understand the people and give what exactly fit for him.

Gather Wisdom from Many Sources

Business Analyst will have to deal with various set of business people. In order to get in to their world and understand what they need business analyst must have knowledge about that context. This is an active learning process of capturing wisdom from many sources which is highly essential for a successful business Analyst.

Problem Solving Ability

After the elicitation of requirement the Business Analyst will have to propose a solution supported with solid logical background. In here Main task to identify the main problem and figure out where to get the solution. Then develop active communication between the person who has the problem and who can implement the solution for him. During this process the business analyst will have to carry out many tasks simultaneously and he has to be well capable of that.

Pending Problems in Projects

According to the statistics 2008 is the worst year of project completion for decades. The frailer rate was 68% and the main reason behind that was poor requirement analysis which is the duty of Business Analyst. Furthermore 45% of the features in developed systems are never used and huge amount of money was wasted to develop those. Due to those facts this is a challenging time for all Business Analysts to focus more on those areas and never let those errors happen again.

Evolution of Business Analyst

Due to the evolving complex business requirement the duty of Business Analyst is becoming even challenging. Most of the modern business demands agile development when it comes to information systems. Most of the case the requirement is frequently changing and Business Analyst have to put extra effort to keep the project boundaries within the limits of Cost and time. In order to become successful in this competitive environment Business Analyst will have to be sharp and flexible. Completion of the project mainly would depend on Business Analyst and it’s proven since 50% of the projects frailer are due to poor requirement analysis according to statistics.

Current Social Networks

Facebook

Facebook is at the top in when it comes to the popularity of social networks. It’s providing all the common features of any social network including personal profile, multimedia sharing etc. In addition to that Facebook API provides facility to develop 3^rd party application which can share facebook member details. This is the one of critical success factor of the facebook. In addition to that it provides highly performance tuned streamlined interfaces with a chatting module. In past few years facebook was doing so many developments and so many new applications were introduced. It leads facebook to highly sophisticate at the same time highly complex social network. However traffic ranking was continuously increasing for facebook.

Twitter

Compared to other popular social networks Twitter is new. But it gained exponential popularity due to its highly simple functionality. The major feature is members can write a message which contain maximum 140 characters and other member who follow can read it in their main page. In addition to that your message will be added to twitter main time line if your profile is not protected and the entire world can see it. Due to this simple functionality so many user were attracted to twitter and it was showing nearly 300% member base growth in past few years. And it won’t collect your personal data like facebook and other social networks. So there are lesser chances of privacy issues to occur. These days most of the online marketers using Twitter to promote their products and services to large crowd.

Ning

Ning is a special kind of social network concept. It allows its members to create their own social network on Ning platform. And they have made it so user friendly, so any non-technical use and create their own social network within few minutes. They also providing major functionality for the social networks and users can easily configure them by drag and drop development interface. At this moment Ning supports large amount of social networks on their platform. According to Alexa ranking it’s gaining its popularity in a decent rate along with the number of social networks on it.

There are so many other social networks including MySpace, Hi5, Flicker which is specially designed to share images, Orkut which is prowled by Google and LinkedIn.

Features

Networking

The most common feature in any social network is Friends network. It allows you to create your own profile and add your personal data in to that. After that you ne send request to other member, the one who confirm it will become your friends. Your selected private data will be shared with all the members and other may shared with your friends. It provides features to communicate with members through text messages and various other ways. Multimedia sharing is one of the popular features. There you can upload image or video and your friends can

Micro Blogging

This was a pretty old feature in social network. It was there in almost all the social networks including hi5 and Facebook with different names. But Twitter took only that feature and creates a new social network with lead to huge success and popularity. It allows you to write a message with limited length and share it with your friends.

Applications

So many social networks provide API which can be used to develop 3^rd party application which can be interact with it. Facebook is showing major success in there with Facebook API. In the Facebook there is millions of application developed and so many users are addicted to them. In Addition to that Twitter is also providing highly sophisticated API to control Twitter using 3^rd party application. However this has its negative effects, why so many people develop robots to spam and do other harmful things in the social networks using their APIs.

Future Of Social Networks

Privacy And Security

These days’ main concern in all the social networks is Privacy and security. In past few years there was so many incidents reported about the breach of privacy in social networks and sometimes they led to huge disasters as well. If you take a look at those incidents most of the time it about “Not using” provided security and privacy features. Due to that all the social networks providing highly simplified privacy and security controls. More creatively some social networks don’t collect member’s private details as far as they can. In future social networks will provide more sophisticated privacy features and users will be able to control each and every parameter as they want. And the privacy groups will be well defined like they have in Facebook now as Friends, Friends of Friends and Public. In the other hand when you increase privacy it will be difficult to share things freely. In order to solve such a problems social networks will provide clearly defined public data and more comprehensive searching to connect with each other. There may be search which shows a relationship between you and another member who is not your friend in a tree structure like graphical representation, but still you can see his personal details.

Simplicity

Twitter became success it selects only one feature which is micro blogging. At the same time Flicker is a huge success it select only image sharing. This is the future trend in social networking. People need them to be simple and highly user friendly rather than full of complex features. And most of the social networks provide mobile interface where users can control it over the phone or its browser. This further increases the interaction and simplicity of the social networks. In near future there may be dedicated mobile devices which can be used with Social networks.

More Personal Details

With the improvement of the security and simplicity of social networks people will share more and more probate information with them. Even now Google Latitude provides a facility to update your location via mobile phones GPS unit. And social networks already have your email, its password and large part of your personality details. In future if they manage to get your DNA structure online? There won’t be any privacy and it can simply re create you not just with physical features but with personality features as well.

There will be continuous and increasing impact on human civilization by online social networks. They can be positive or possibly negative according to current observation.

• Google Products
  • G Mail
  • Calender
  • Reader
  • Maps
• Yahoo Mail
• Facebook (Partially)

Normally a traditional web 2.0 web site refresh on every dynamic change. But rich internet application never refreshes the whole page. Look G mail, once you go in there, read e mail, compose or edit settings. It refreshes only the necessary section of the web page. So in there user can’t see a “Flicker” on every change on the web page. This is the main goal of creating rich internet applications. Furthermore it utilizes the bandwidth and provides smooth browsing experience to their user. In other words, user doesn’t feel that he is browsing. It acts like normal software installed locally on the PC.

To develop rich internet applications the base line technology is “JAVA Script”. When a JAVA script calls the web server to get some data from the database to update the web page dynamically, we call it AJAX (Asynchronous JAVA Script and XML). Traditional web 2.0 web page is “Synchronous” means it waits till the server response comes and can make only one response at a time. In AJAX its “Asynchronous” means only a part of the web site wait till the server response comes and many server response can be made at the same time. Whole page never waits till a server response comes. (Never refresh as whole). To make the developers life even easier there are some AJAX frameworks.

• GWT – Google web Toolkit
• Adoby Flex
• IceFaces

Using above framework the developer can make the web site is a agile manner. If someone chooses to write AJAX come manually, it will take very long time though he has the total ultimate control. The above mentioned frameworks provide IDE integration with “Drag and Drop” tools which saves lots of time.

This trend is walking toward a new era of software development. In near future there won’t be setup.exes. Instead of that there will be online software, like G mail for all the day to day needs. Furthermore this will end (almost) software piracy. All the users who need to use the software must pay the subscription fee. No installation, no cracks. And I think current speed of internet is good enough to run rich internet application. But the reliability should be improved. The last thing I need to see is, I can’t type a document because there is no internet. Smart developers will come up with smart solutions for this as well. There are already some offline versions for some Rich internet application which solve the problem up to some level. Let’s look forward.