Business Analayst & Outsourcing
Outsourcing has been around for a good time now. It has been successful in the BPO industry, the tech industry is yet to see the success. There are some significant reasons for it , the most being the lost form of Business Analyst being the most important one. With the DotCom bust, many of the business analysts transformed into developers and was a natural evolution, given the struggle for existence. Businesses also thought and pulled out funding and started firing the business analysts as the role was considered to be a redundant. Many developers started jumping into the role of business analyst- the domain expertise column you see in many developer resumes is clear reflection of it. The domains,technologies evolve and change regularly to keep pace with both the race horses is a juggling task, developers cannot keep running at the pace of both changes and expertise in the domain again started hitting rock bottom. Now let us shift the focus to outsouricng.

In the outsourcing, the newbies consider it as sending the "work" to some one,some where,some how to do some specific things. Most of the times the coding happens to be one of a candidate solutions for sourcing out as it is thought to be self-contained and given some compiled documents that list all the requirements, the developers will figure out the implementation. This is big mistake. For projects to be successfully delivered out of offshore, there is a pressing need for Business Analysts- The BA will understand the business context and will be the point of contact for the Offshore, operating out of offshore, he/she will understand the requirements and business context. So far many of the projects,I have seen, across various companies try to establish a tech-bridge between shores to establish project success. Projects have been successful in the past and will be in the future, but most of the times, the teams that deliver the project miss the context and it would show the impact during maintenance or enhancement. IT is time to get the Business Analysts role to enhance the offshore project delivery competency.
Don't agree? Wait and watch the projects falling apart for the wrong reasons- not knowing the business context...

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