Thesis (MBA)--Stellenbosch University, 2015. / ENGLISH ABSTRACT: Although business analysis has been around for a number of years, it is still seen as an emerging field. There are various efforts underway to formalise the business analysis practice. For example, the International Institute of Business Analysis (IIBA®) is widely accepted as setting the standards for the business analysis practice as well as raising the profile of the role. The IIBA first published their Business Analysis Body of Knowledge guide (BABOK®) in 2006 and extensively revised it in 2009. The IIBA offer two certifications based on this guide. Besides the IIBA certifications, there are also other business analysis and requirements engineering certifications available to South Africans. However, these are not all that well known locally and collectively the number of certified business analysts is very low. The success rate of software projects to date has been relatively poor to say the least. Business analysis is a critical component to the success of software development. One would expect that business analysts would welcome the opportunity to be certified in their profession and contribute to increasing the overall project success rate. However, in South Africa the low number of IIBA certified business analysts suggests otherwise. There also appears to be very little pressure or even encouragement from employers of business analysts to pursue certification. Besides improving software project success, there is growing opinion and literature asserting the view that business analysts will be playing an ever-increasing strategic role from what should be a professional function. To enable this strategic role, business analysts are required to have the necessary experience, skill and ideally certification. This research report sought to uncover the reasons behind so few business analysts taking up certification. Over and above the reasons for the low uptake, this research report also aimed to assess the business analyst’s and the employer’s attitude towards certification and the business analysis profession. Collectively this led to a high-level assessment of the maturity of business analysis from a practitioner’s point of view. As part of this research report, a survey was conducted amongst practicing business analysts across industries within South Africa. Additional research was undertaken with a select number of senior leaders and executives in business to understand the organisational view of business analysis certification.

This study investigates a dynamic model of analyst forecasting where the ordering of forecasts and analysts' information endowments are endogenously determined. Analysts are probabilistically informed, potentially biased, and can increase their informedness through information acquisition. I characterize the unique equilibrium which holds for general distributions. The results show that analysts with less bias, greater precision, or a greater likelihood of being informed forecast earlier. Moreover, the main results show (perhaps surprisingly) that analysts always choose to be imperfectly informed, even though information acquisition is costless. This arises from the incentive to induce more timely forecasting by the other analyst. Likewise, analysts choose a positive bias level in equilibrium in order to gain a strategic advantage in their forecast timing. I discuss a number of empirical implications and extend the model to allow analysts to learn over time.

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Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 2006. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references.

M.Phil. (Information Management) / This study was aimed at the discovery of in corporate advisory networks who act as agents to share information and knowledge. In the current competitive and often uncertain economic business environment, savvy executives need to leverage off the expertise of their company employees in order to service their customers effectively and remain competitive. Since not all employees in the company have expert knowledge, executives need to discover the advisory networks of expert employees embedded in formal organisational structures and encourage them to share and transfer their expert knowledge to novices and/or less experienced employees. In light of the current argument, a diagnostic technique known as social network analysis (SNA) was used to map out and measure the advisory relational X-ray patterns within organisational departments and across to other functional business units. Once the patterns are discovered and the key expert networked employees identified, knowledge sharing interventions are introduced to facilitate experts to share and transfer their information, knowledge, insights and experiences to other less knowledgeable employees within the departments and across to other functional areas in the organisation. The overall objective of this study is therefore to utilise the SNA technique to discover the experts in the corporate advisory networks whom will act as agents to facilitate information and knowledge sharing in the organisation to improve other employees’ work performance thereby enabling the organisation to meet and even exceed its strategic objectives...

D.Ing. (Engineering Management) / The requirements discipline is at the heart of systems engineering, software engineering and business analysis. When a solution needs to be developed, built or bought that will be useful to the users and that will achieve the intended business goals, the problem needs to be understood before a possible solution can be developed. This process of understanding the problem that needs to be solved and what the solution should achieve is referred to as the requirements process. Requirements are the input to the solution development process. If the requirements are incorrect, the developed solution will not be useful. The purpose of this study was to discover the social behaviour of practitioners that causes the communication breakdowns during the requirements engineering process. Requirements emerge from the social interaction and communication between the requirements practitioner and the various stakeholders. The main problems with the requirements engineering process are communication and coordination breakdowns, as well as the lack of domain knowledge or understanding of the problem. These challenges are all related to the social interaction during the requirements engineering process that impacts the quality of requirements. Researchers have made significant progress in the development of methodologies. Tools and techniques are available for improving the quality of requirements. However, in practice, requirements are still produced with errors which then leads to unsuccessful solutions to problems. The requirements engineering process is executed within a social context. These social elements should be taken into consideration to improve quality. Based on the results collected from real-world practice as well as people’s behaviour in the real world, a complete understanding of the influence on the requirements process was derived. This understanding was used to identify the social elements required during the requirements engineering process. A socio-technical view is provided of the social and the technical activities that should be facilitated by the requirements engineering process. This framework integrates the required communicative activities with the traditional requirements activity. This socio-technical framework for the requirements engineering process was developed based on a survey. The aim of this framework is to overcome the social behaviour that causes communication breakdowns and impacts on the quality of the requirements. The research contributes to the existing requirements knowledge base. The socio-technical framework developed for the requirements process concerns the communication breakdowns continuously highlighted as a contributing factor to poor requirements, by providing the social activities required during the requirements process as guidance. Secondly, the knowledge acquired provides adequate data on requirements practice for future research. Specific focus areas for practitioners and managers on how to improve the requirements engineering process without the adoption of any new tools or methodologies are also included in the results. Additionally, practitioners’ behaviour was determined. By determining these interaction and relationship patterns, communication can be improved and made more effective.

This dissertation examines the general research issue of whether the components of earnings are informative and specifically 1) how analysts consider earnings components when predicting future earnings and 2) whether the information content in, and analysts’ use of, earnings components have changed through time. Although earnings components have predictive value for future earnings based on each component’s persistence, extant research provides only a limited understanding of whether and how analysts consider this when forecasting. Using an integrated income statement and balance sheet framework to estimate the persistence of earnings components, I first establish that disaggregation based on the earnings components framework in this study is helpful to predict future earnings and helps explains contemporaneous returns. I then find evidence suggesting that although analysts consider the persistence of various earnings components, they do not fully integrate this information into their forecasts. Interestingly, analysts appear to be selective in their incorporation of the information in earnings components, seeming to ignore information from components indicating lower persistence, which results in higher forecast errors. Conversely, when a firm’s income is concentrated in high persistence items, analysts appear to incorporate the information into their forecasts, reducing their forecast errors. I also report that the usefulness of components relative to aggregate earnings has dramatically and continuously increased over the past several decades, and contemporaneous returns appear to be much better explained by earnings components than aggregate earnings (than historically). Finally, the relation between analyst forecast errors and the differential persistence of earnings components has also declined over time, indicating that analysts appear to recognize the increasing importance of earnings components through time. / text

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Mississippi State University. Department of Finance and Economics. / Title from title screen. Includes bibliographical references.