Business Analysis for Business Intelligence


Book Description

Aligning business intelligence (BI) infrastructure with strategy processes not only improves your organization's ability to respond to change, but also adds significant value to your BI infrastructure and development investments. Until now, there has been a need for a comprehensive book on business analysis for BI that starts with a macro view and




Building Business Solutions


Book Description




How to Start a Business Analyst Career


Book Description

You may be wondering if business analysis is the right career choice, debating if you have what it takes to be successful as a business analyst, or looking for tips to maximize your business analysis opportunities. With the average salary for a business analyst in the United States reaching above $90,000 per year, more talented, experienced professionals are pursuing business analysis careers than ever before. But the path is not clear cut. No degree will guarantee you will start in a business analyst role. What's more, few junior-level business analyst jobs exist. Yet every year professionals with experience in other occupations move directly into mid-level and even senior-level business analyst roles. My promise to you is that this book will help you find your best path forward into a business analyst career. More than that, you will know exactly what to do next to expand your business analysis opportunities.




The PMI Guide to Business Analysis


Book Description

The Standard for Business Analysis – First Edition is a new PMI foundational standard, developed as a basis for business analysis for portfolio, program, and project management. This standard illustrates how project management processes and business analysis processes are complementary activities, where the primary focus of project management processes is the project and the primary focus of business analysis processes is the product. This is a process-based standard, aligned with A Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK® Guide) – Sixth Edition, and to be used as a standard framework contributing to the business analysis body of knowledge.




Business Analysis


Book Description

The definitive guide on the roles and responsibilities of the business analyst Business Analysis offers a complete description of the process of business analysis in solving business problems. Filled with tips, tricks, techniques, and guerilla tactics to help execute the process in the face of sometimes overwhelming political or social obstacles, this guide is also filled with real world stories from the author's more than thirty years of experience working as a business analyst. Provides techniques and tips to execute the at-times tricky job of business analyst Written by an industry expert with over thirty years of experience Straightforward and insightful, Business Analysis is a valuable contribution to your ability to be successful in this role in today's business environment.




Managing Business Analysis Services


Book Description

This unique desk reference offers the information, models and guidance needed to plan and deliver complete, end-to-end business analysis services. Its step-by-step approach enables maximum utility of the business analysis (BA) role, development of more complete solutions for meeting the strategic goals of a business, and dramatic and sustainable improvements in project success rates. Managing Business Analysis Services: A Framework for Sustainable Projects and Corporate Strategy Success provides chief information officers, business analysis managers and consultants the information required to maximize the efficiency and productivity of technology projects, obtain higher returns on investment from BA services, reduce operating costs, and increase alignment of products to better serve the company or the client organization.




Aligning the Stars


Book Description

Most businesses rely on talent to succeed, but none so much as professional service firms. Within this rapidly expanding, trillion-dollar industry, professionals--and how they're managed--are the primary source of competitive advantage. In fact, success in this sector is determined more by the people you pay than the people who pay you. This path-breaking book provides readers with a practical and integrated perspective on how to win in the unique and tumultuous world of professional services. From strategy to organization to culture, it offers customized insights for businesses in which professionals drive bottom-line results and long-term company success. Respected academic Jay W. Lorsch and accomplished practitioner Thomas J. Tierney apply their broad experience to the realities of "Monday morning" decision making. Their work reflects decades of personal experience, combined with a rigorous study of outstanding professional service firms in industries that include law, information technology, accounting, advertising, investment banking, executive search, and consulting. Aligning the Stars explains what differentiates the "best of the best" within professional services. By describing how to attract, retain, motivate, organize, and lead the stars that shape a company's destiny, this book provides valuable lessons for the current and future leaders of every talent-driven business.




Aligning Business Strategies and Analytics


Book Description

This book examines issues related to the alignment of business strategies and analytics. Vast amounts of data are being generated, collected, stored, processed, analyzed, distributed and used at an ever-increasing rate by organizations. Simultaneously, managers must rapidly and thoroughly understand the factors driving their business. Business Analytics is an interactive process of analyzing and exploring enterprise data to find valuable insights that can be exploited for competitive advantage. However, to gain this advantage, organizations need to create a sophisticated analytical climate within which strategic decisions are made. As a result, there is a growing awareness that alignment among business strategies, business structures, and analytics are critical to effectively develop and deploy techniques to enhance an organization’s decision-making capability. In the past, the relevance and usefulness of academic research in the area of alignment is often questioned by practitioners, but this book seeks to bridge this gap. Aligning Business Strategies and Analytics: Bridging Between Theory and Practice is comprised of twelve chapters, divided into three sections. The book begins by introducing business analytics and the current gap between academic training and the needs within the business community. Chapters 2 - 5 examines how the use of cognitive computing improves financial advice, how technology is accelerating the growth of the financial advising industry, explores the application of advanced analytics to various facets of the industry and provides the context for analytics in practice. Chapters 6 - 9 offers real-world examples of how project management professionals tackle big-data challenges, explores the application of agile methodologies, discusses the operational benefits that can be gained by implementing real-time, and a case study on human capital analytics. Chapters 10 - 11 reviews the opportunities and potential shortfall and highlights how new media marketing and analytics fostered new insights. Finally the book concludes with a look at how data and analytics are playing a revolutionary role in strategy development in the chemical industry.




Digital Business Analysis


Book Description

This book frames business analysis in the context of digital technologies. It introduces modern business analysis techniques, including a selection of those in the Business Analysis Body of Knowledge (BABOK) by the International Institute of Business Analysis (IIBA), and exemplifies them by means of digital technologies applied to solve problems or exploit new business opportunities. It also includes in-depth case studies in which business problems and opportunities, drawn from real-world scenarios, are mapped to digital solutions. The work is summarized in seven guiding principles that should be followed by every business analyst. This book is intended mainly for students in business informatics and related areas, and for professionals who want to acquire a solid background for their daily work. It is suitable both for courses and for self-study. Additional teaching materials such as lecture videos, slides, question bank, exams, and seminar materials are accessible on the companion web-page.




Good Strategy Bad Strategy


Book Description

Good Strategy/Bad Strategy clarifies the muddled thinking underlying too many strategies and provides a clear way to create and implement a powerful action-oriented strategy for the real world. Developing and implementing a strategy is the central task of a leader. A good strategy is a specific and coherent response to—and approach for—overcoming the obstacles to progress. A good strategy works by harnessing and applying power where it will have the greatest effect. Yet, Rumelt shows that there has been a growing and unfortunate tendency to equate Mom-and-apple-pie values, fluffy packages of buzzwords, motivational slogans, and financial goals with “strategy.” In Good Strategy/Bad Strategy, he debunks these elements of “bad strategy” and awakens an understanding of the power of a “good strategy.” He introduces nine sources of power—ranging from using leverage to effectively focusing on growth—that are eye-opening yet pragmatic tools that can easily be put to work on Monday morning, and uses fascinating examples from business, nonprofit, and military affairs to bring its original and pragmatic ideas to life. The detailed examples range from Apple to General Motors, from the two Iraq wars to Afghanistan, from a small local market to Wal-Mart, from Nvidia to Silicon Graphics, from the Getty Trust to the Los Angeles Unified School District, from Cisco Systems to Paccar, and from Global Crossing to the 2007–08 financial crisis. Reflecting an astonishing grasp and integration of economics, finance, technology, history, and the brilliance and foibles of the human character, Good Strategy/Bad Strategy stems from Rumelt’s decades of digging beyond the superficial to address hard questions with honesty and integrity.