At my last job, I pulled double-duty as BA and IA. I actually found
myself enjoying the BA aspects as much, if not more than, the IA aspects.
As a BA, I would sit down with the various users who did not speak each
others' languages--the techies, the creatives, the marketing folks,
operations personnel, administration, and those all-important executives.
Being a BA is like being a U.N. diplomat, listening to everyone's
requirements and then making some crazy sense of it all. Then you get
to write it up in a variety of ways so that the different groups can
each understand it. Obviously, the engineers want the specific details:
functional specs, use cases, etc. The executives couldn't care less
about that level of specificity. For them, a summary and some high
level process flowcharts would be fine. Creatives want a checklist of
functionalities, page organization, taxonomy, information layout...often
leading to site-maps and wireframes.
It often seemed the line was blurred--for me, at least--of where the BA
stopped and the IA started. But if the two positions were filled by two
or more individuals, I could see things working extremely
synergistically. The BA would gather the requirements from all the
stakeholders and summarize it, getting initial buy-in and overall
agreement. Then the IA would take over, having already had someone sort
through the mess and distill down the goals, objectives, requirements,
resources, etc. Then the IA can take the baton and organize that pile
of requirements...struc turing, adding usability principals, refining
process flows. I certainly wouldn't have minded having two of me at my
last job. :-)
- Jonathan
