What is the difference between a subject matter expert and a business analyst?

Author: Morgan Masters is Business Analyst and Staff Writer at ModernAnalyst.com, the premier community and resource portal for business analysts. Business analysis resources such as articles, blogs, templates, forums, books, along with a thriving business analyst community can be found at http://www.ModernAnalyst.com

I took part at a fascinating debate at a recent IIBA event.  The debate focussed on the distinction between a Business Analyst (BA) and a Subject Matter Expert (SME), and the extent that the BA should “learn” the business.

There is an ongoing debate within the BA community over the level of industry (business domain) specific knowledge that a BA should be expected to have.   Some organisations require their BAs to have extensive business domain knowledge, and will generally only recruit BAs who have worked in the same (or a very similar) industry.  Others look for core analysis skills, and are happy to recruit BAs from completely different industries.

My view is that while business domain knowledge does matter, analysis skills and experience are far more important. It is certainly important to have a basic understanding of the industry in which you are working, as this helps you to know which questions to ask when starting a project.  However,  this knowledge is something that can be expanded upon over time as you gain exposure to more and more projects.  In fact, in my experience, new BAs from outside industries are often able to add a huge amount of value by “questioning” standard industry norms and conventions, and adding a new focus on true objectivity.

To draw an analogy, I view core Business Analysis work as a bit like driving a car.  You learn a core set of techniques up-front, and learn even more when you apply them in all sorts of terrains and adverse conditions.  You learn to be creative and use different tools and techniques when need to get a particular result.

Changing industries as a BA is a little like driving in an unfamilliar country.  You need to know the basic rules of the road and you need a map.  But once you have these things, you can drive as effectively and efficiently as you could back home (using all or most of the same techniques).

Driving is driving. Analysis is analysis. In both cases you need a map of the landscape, and you need to read the map before you set out. However you don’t need to understand the mechanics of the engine at the outset – and if you do eventually need to know this there will hopefully be a mechanic (SME) to help you!

However, I do believe that there are a number of core skills above and beyond the benchmark BA competencies that are of particular relevance when changing industries or projects:

1. Learning how to Learn: I believe that one of the core skills that a BA needs is “Learning how to learn”.  This is barely talked about within the BA community, but from personal experience I believe it is so important and it is a key differentiating factor.  A good BA needs to be able to pick up new project work quickly, and this will involve doing self-driven research.   The ability to very quickly assimilate the relevant facts from Google, Wikipedia and other more industry-specific sources is as much art as science!

2. Knowing which questions to ask: Another core skill is knowing which questions to ask. As analysts, we uncover the detail and the ‘tacit knowledge’ that has never been written down. We question the semantics, we ask people to explain exactly what they mean when they say “the item is processed“. Being new to the organisation may actually help here; a ‘fresh pair of eyes’ may help to see a new perspective on things. This helps us to challenge old ways of doing things, and get to the root ‘problem’ (rather than focussing on ’solutions’).

3. Stakeholder Analysis & Management: When entering a new company, project or industry it is especially important to actively analyse and manage stakeholders.   It’s important to understand their level of interest and influence on the project, and also their expectations.  It’s also key to understand their motivation; are they likely to be a keen supporter of your project, or will they need some convincing?  I could talk about stakeholder management for hours – perhaps I’ll write a follow-up blog!

What are your views on the BA vs SME debate?  I’d love to hear from you, please feel free to add a comment to this post, or contact me directly!

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Further Reading:

If you my blog post interesting, you might also be interested in the following article, published by Barbara at B2B training : Blog – When do you learn the business?

This mainly starts with a conversation I had with a recruitment agent a few months ago. They were looking for a Business Analyst with some experience in the Insurance industry. Strictly speaking, I don’t think it really matters if a good BA has previous experience in a particular industry, but I accept the argument that someone may be running a project that is a little bit behind perhaps and they want people to come in and hit the ground running. And I won’t argue too much with the logic that states someone with previous knowledge of the business processes and principles of that industry might have a slight advantage in doing that. (I don’t necessarily agree, but it’s a minor quibble so let’s move on).

In any case, I told the agent that yes, I have experience in the Insurance industry. Twelve months contracting with one of the UK’s biggest insurers, two years with an international insurance company, and a further three years indirect experience with a price comparison company selling insurance products. “Hmmm” he said, “hmmm, they were really looking for someone with extensive insurance experience”. To do what, I asked. To be a Business Analyst or to be Head of Underwriting?

I wrote a previous article about what I think a Business Analyst does - you can find that here - so I won’t go into all of that again. Suffice to say that a Business Analyst is not, to my mind, an SME - a Subject Matter Expert. Businesses already have them, they’re the people that do the jobs that make the organisation tick. If you think you need to bring a BA in to pick up the role these people play then you have a misunderstanding of what a BA is and, more importantly, you have serious problems within your business…

The Business Analyst and the SME

These days, more and more Business Analysts are choosing the role as a career path from the very beginning, coming into organisations from degree courses where they’ve already picked this specialism. That hasn’t always been the case. In the past, BAs have transitioned into the role from something else: from testing, from development, from project management. I transitioned across from being a BI/Reporting Analyst. A lot of BAs I’ve worked with have become BAs as a result of being an expert in one system, or one process area within a business, and have been given the job title because of their expertise. And I’m not saying that’s necessarily a problem. We all came from somewhere, and as long as we’re capable of recognising what our skillset should be and developing it, then there’s no issue.

I think the task is maybe a little harder for those that come in via the SME route though. Because at some point they have to move away from the system/process they know so well and it takes a bit of lateral thinking to extrapolate the way in which you became an expert from the knowledge you’ve built up. What I mean is, these BAs won’t be starting the next project from the same position of expertise they’ve been running with previously. They’ll realise very quickly that the core skill is in consuming information quickly, in building up an adequate knowledge base in a very short space of time, rather than in understanding the totality of everything immediately.

These days, I’m a contract BA although it wasn’t much different when I was a permanent employee. Whenever I join a project, I spend the first couple of weeks consuming every bit of information I can. Over the course of six months, or twelve months, or however long I’m there, I do indeed become an SME on that particular thing I’m working on. But only on that thing. I don’t become an expert in the business generally. As I said above, there are already people who perform that role. I leverage their expertise to get to a solid understanding on what the project needs to deliver to further support their ongoing work. At some point I’ll be gone, and ideally I will have left behind something that adequately supports their process for some time to come. Once I’m gone, I jettison all the knowledge I had of that project to free up my brain for the next thing. I’m like Johnny Pneumonic: a temporary expert, an information repository that can be rebooted and reset and then is ready to go again.

The Skillset

To be clear, what I initially bring to a project is not subject matter expertise. I bring a skillset. A skillset which enables me to break down specific business ideas into general logical concepts. A dataset is a dataset, a calculation is a calculation, a process is a process - it has actors and steps and functions and outputs. It matters to the stakeholder what the nuances of these things are, and it matters to me within the detail of putting these things together with those stakeholders, but I’m not guided by the terminology and the specific purpose of these things. I’m guided by the logic and the skill that enables me to recognise what the stakeholder is talking about and translate it into one of the delivery components I’ve come across before. I take their ask through the logical steps I think suit the purpose, and those steps drive out the questions that need answering and lead to the detail of the deliverable. The knowledge I then build up as a result of this is secondary.

We probably need a scenario to make this clearer. Let’s take one from the Insurance industry, as it seems quite apt. I was asked to look at the regulatory requirements for reporting on re-insurance. Now, without going into too much detail, because re-insurance is quite complex, this is essentially the mechanism via which big insurers mitigate the risk of their underwriting by themselves insuring parts of their liability with other insurers. There are whole teams of people who deal with this. There’s a lot to it. I wasn’t the first person to look at this, I think three or four had tried it before me, and they all fell into the trap of trying to become SMEs on re-insurance. Why? The SMEs are already there. All I had to do, ultimately, was work out what the reporting requirement was, look at how the different teams recorded how the re-insurance was allocated out, agree with the Head of department a standard that we should pull all this into, and then get the data imported and transformed via a set of rules so we could then apply the percentages we had in one place to the monetary amounts we had somewhere else and break it all out for the regulator. Easy.

In this particular instance, although it happens a lot, when a business area is complex it brings with it a lot of white noise and distractions. But following the analysis skillset lets you ignore them and work logically through defining what your goal is and then identifying the things you need to achieve this goal. As a BA you can focus while the SME gets on with the daily circus of a thousand complicated things. You can lean on their knowledge and extrapolate only the information you need to get the job done. It’s the skillset that enables you to see the wood for the trees in a way that your stakeholders often can’t, not because they’re incapable but because they have too many other demands to meet. Also, often, because you understand better than they do what a development team needs to know and, just as critically, what they don’t need to know. “Re-insurance rates” are just percentages to a developer. The “OCR” or “ARR” or “PTX” or whatever acronym you want to use is just a calculation that allocates that percentage to a monetary amount per Insurer to give a subtotal. It’s no different, logically, than any KPI calculation in any company in any industry anywhere. And that’s what the skillset gives you: the ability to recognise the commonality in what seem otherwise to be very specific things, and call them out for what they are so they can be tackled and built accordingly.

Before I looked at re-insurance, I had no idea what it was. It didn’t matter. The requirement was looked at previously by people who did know what it was. And that didn’t help them much. That isn’t so much to say I’m marvellous, and let’s blow my own trumpet, as it is to make the point that all I did was apply the skills and methods that come with my role - skills and methods that I know work. These are skills that belong to a Business Analyst, not necessarily to an SME who has different skills, different talents and a capacity for things that I certainly don’t have.

The recruiter who wanted a BA who was also an Insurance SME was barking up the wrong tree for me. It was a bit like asking for a plumber who could also do your tax return. Ok, that’s a deliberately ludicrous example, but you get the point. The ask is for two different skillsets. If the job is for only one role, then why ask for two different people? Do you understand what you’re asking for? Is that really what you need?

And for the SME who wants to become a Business Analyst (and why on earth would you want to do that? Are you mad?) I’d say let go of what you know. Focus on how it was you came to know it. Abstract the knowledge, turn it into context, use it as the basis for understanding different things that are actually the same thing but with a different name. Learn to focus and wilfully ignore the things that can so easily distract you. Put boundaries around what you need to know, and be prepared to jettison it all and start again, taking only that context and the learnings with you. That’s how you become a BA. And may God have mercy on your soul.

What is a subject matter expert in business analyst?

What does SME stand for in business analytics?

What qualifies someone as a subject matter expert?

Is SME a good role?