Comparing the BABOK and the SEBOK, Part 2

Business Analysis and Systems Engineering seem to share a substantial in their perceived areas of scope, so it might be informative to see what their respective BOK Guides say about the other discipline.

Do They Know Each Other?

It is interesting that neither the term “Systems Engineering” nor its variant “System Engineering” appear in the BABOK.  This is strange because the BABOK authors are evidently aware of the SE discipline, since the BABOK Bibliography includes these two SE-centric books:

Stevens, Richard, Peter Brook, Ken Jackson, and Stuart Arnold. 1998. System Engineering, Coping with Complexity

Forsberg, Kevin, Hal Mooz, and Howard Cotter-man. 2005. Visualizing Project Management: Models and Frameworks for Mastering Complex Systems

As for the SEBOK, it mentions “business analysis” three times, each time using it as a synonym for mission analysis, such as in this extract:

MA, in some domains called market analysis (glossary) or business analysis, is the identification, characterization, and assessment of an operational problem or opportunity within an enterprise (p. 253).

Judging from this, the SEBOK considers business analysis as limited to mission analysis, which is only a part of the Concept Definition Phase

What is Business Analysis?

If Business Analysis is synonymous to Mission Analysis (according to SEBOK), it should be useful to compare and contrast BA as understood by the BABOK with MA as understood by the SEBOK. 

The table below lists the functions of BA as described by BABOK, and the functions of MA as described by SEBOK.  I tried to match them, with some degree of interpretive freedom on my part.

Business Analysis According to BABOK	Mission Analysis According to SEBOK
Liaison among stakeholders
Understand the structure, policies, and operations of an organisation
Recommend solutions that enable the organisation to achieve its goals	Analyse the solution space
Understanding how organisations functions to accomplish their purpose
Defining the capabilities an organisation requires to provide products and services
Definition of organisational goals
Define how goals connect to specific objectives
Determine courses of action that an organisation has to undertake to achieve those goals and objectives
Defining how the various organisational units and stakeholders within and outside the organisation interact.
	Establish a set of stakeholder requirements for a potential SoI (System-of-Interest)
	Focuses on the identification of the primary purpose(s) of the solution
	Part of the larger set of concept definition activities -
	Understand a mission / market problem or opportunity
	Initiate the life cycle of a potential solution that could address the problem or take advantage of an opportunity
	Define operational actions, not hardware / software functions; that is, it is focused on defining the problem space, not the solution space
	The primary products of MA are the revised ConOps of the enterprise, the operational concept, the operational scenarios for the mission, and the context in which the solution will exist.
	MA evaluates alternative approaches to determine which best supports the stakeholder needs (among both materiel and non-materiel solution alternatives, also known as product solutions and service/operational solutions).
	MA defines the problem space and analyses the solution space alternatives using quality attribute constraints driven by the enterprise objectives.

I could not match the two sets of functions and find very little, almost no direct intersection between what Business Analysis is according to BABOK, and what Mission Analysis is according to the SEBOK (which treats business analysis as a synonym for Mission Analysis.

And yet, my instinct tells me there is a strong intersection, it’s just that the two BOKs use very different terminology and very different ways of explaining.  (I find the BABOK a bit more refined in its explanations, while the SEBOK tend to ramble a bit).

Number of Pages

This is an easy comparison.  Version 2.0 of the BABOK has 253 pages.  The SEBOK is primarily laid to for reading online using a Wiki platform, but a PDF version is available for download.  This PDF runs to 850 pages.  Better have a full ream of office paper ready if you decide to print this.

Authors

The SEBOK lists 70 authors, some of whom I recognise as respected leaders in the SE discipline.  The ones I know by reputation include: Barry Boehm (but I know him from the software engineering field, not the SE field), Erik Aslaksen, Edmund Conrow, Dov Dori, Kevin Forsberg, and James Martin.

The BABOK also credits as Content Contributors about 19 names, of whom the only one I recognise (but recognise only the name, not what she’s about): Ellen Gottesdiener.  They do have an Expert Advisory and Review Group, from which I recognise the following names: Scott Ambler, Dean Leffingwell, Meilir Page-Jones, James Robertson, Suzanne Robertson, Steve Tockey.