When I was at school I had to write an essay on Lech Walesa. To do this I went to the reference library in my town. I went to the index cards, found three references. I then got the newsapapers with the articles in and photocopied them. It took me half a day to get the source material.
By contrast, I just did a search on Google and got ten pages of hits. The top link is a Biography. It took me less than 10 seconds to find.
We are now in a world where getting the answer is much much easier. No longer is the answer the difficult thing. Its now about getting the Question.
This means we need a new set of skills. One of these in analysis is detecting bad smells. We sniff out the source of bad smells by poking around where we are least comfortable. This is contrary to the traditional business analysis role where we tried to skate over problem areas. Now our job is to look for exactly the things that previously we chose to ignore in order to spend time polishing our weighty analysis documents.
Posted by chrismatts at January 14, 2004 9:08 PM