The Alignment of Professional Business Analysis Techniques with SA&D Sources: Research Results

Business Analysis (BA) is a popular career track in the Information Systems (IS) field. The International Institute of Business Analysis (IIBA) identifies 50 techniques used by professional business analysts in its latest body of knowledge. If IS programs are to prepare students for BA positions, they presumably should address these techniques. While it is difficult to assess the actual coverage of BA techniques in courses, an approach that has been utilized in other research, textbook content analysis, is applied in this study to provide important insight about this issue. For textbooks exert an important influence on what topics get addressed in courses, and it is the Systems Analysis and Design (SA&D) course that maps most closely to BA techniques among the courses in the IS 2010 Model Curriculum. Accordingly, this content analysis research assesses the presentation of BA techniques in Systems Analysis and Design (SA&D) textbooks. The overall results of this study found that the presentation of BA techniques in SA&D textbooks was highly variable. While about one-third of the techniques were addressed with detailed coverage across all four sources, almost half (46%) were given little to no coverage. The effects of three independent variables on the outcomes were evaluated and found to be significant. The implications of the results for IS education and research are examined.