Basic Principles for Business Analysis

Always seek to ask the right question in the right way of the right people at the right time.

Use no term in talking with business people about the business they wouldn’t use naturally.

• Avoiding all ITspeak is hard. Many familiar terms assume development of software systems. Two examples: use case and data model. Both terms originated from IT and imply a system. In developing business models you don’t need those terms(!).

Never say ‘user’.

• Here’s a related point. ‘Users’ exist only if you’re thinking about building an IT system. We avoid the term. In the business context, business people are not ‘users’, they are the central actors in the day-to-day drama of business activity. Anyway, everybody is a ‘user’ of some system these days, so ‘user’ doesn’t much discriminate anything.

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