Welcome to Business Analyst Views Blog

This blog is intended to promote discussion about Business Analysis, in particular, by highlighting articles on other BA Blogs such as Business Analyst Diaries by Colt Brunton and Business Analyst Mentor by Alex Papworth.

Sharing your views with your LinkedIn colleagues

Now you’ve got a network of colleagues on LinkedIn why not share your views with them all? The best way to do this to create a blog. Your network colleagues can now be alerted to your blog posts on their Network updates page, read them and comment. However if you just wish to have discussions with a few other LinkedIn colleagues Huddle may be more appropriate.

There appear to be two approaches to linking blogs to LinkedIn – either WordPress as a LinkedIn application or Bloglink.

I’m using WordPress.com so I’ll explain how to go about it.

You’ll need to create the blog first then connect it to LinkedIn subsequently.

Network colleagues will see any post which has a ‘LinkedIn’ tag.

WordPress can be run on your own domain or domain.wordpress.com. The following relates to setting up a blog on wordpress.com.

Note that once created the domain name cannot be changed or deleted so select it carefully. Although the domain name defaults to ‘Username’ this can simply be changed before the blog is created. The Username will be shown as the writer of your posts.

After following the instructions to create your blog go to the LinkedIn WordPress Application and follow the instructions.

Once you write a post and tag it ‘LinkedIn’ an alert will appear to your colleagues.

I see that the titles of posts are displayed on Colleague’s ‘Network updates’ page when WordPress is used but in some other cases only the fact that a new post has been made is stated.

So go ahead and share your thoughts with your colleagues …

Note that when you comment on another persons blog your own blog domain may be used as the default website name.

LinkedIn offers video overviews about its various applications.

A confederation of sites is emerging whereby they can feed each other, Martin Stone provides an excellent  diagram (pre-LinkedIn) in his article Joining up my Web spaces 2 which he updates to include LinkedIn with Joining up my Web spaces 3. Mike Fruchter provides a history of the subject in We’ve only just begun to Syndicate our content.

IIBA London meeting – November 2008

The recent meetings held by the IIBA in London have highlighted the existance of Business Analysts with 230 attending the most recent evening event. I have attended one previously and the numbers attending are clearly growing rapidly. I was very pleased to be able to talk with other BAs to here their views.

Alex gives his opinon of the evening here. The first talk was on Requirements. Personally I am skeptical that producing a list of Requirements is the right approach. Ian’s framework was indeed interesting although rather basic I thought, especially for someone who has studied the subject for many years. His final slide seemed to be a route map of discovery approaches and althought this idea seems to have potential the actual content was not convincing.

For the second talk Chris Potts’ ideas that IT Business Analysis is, or should be, part of Business Business Analysis made a lot of sense to me and validated some of my recent work where I facilitated a business team to help them explore what would assist them to do their team job better, interestingly only half the needs were IT based.