Accelerated Expectations

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A Digitally Transformed Battery Purchase

I had a pleasantly surprising experience buying a key fob battery. I needed the battery immediately, unable to wait for delivery from an online retailer. That meant picking up the battery at a local store. I wanted to avoid calling around or going from store to store looking for the battery. I went online and found three local stores showing the battery in stock. I bought the battery online, walked to the store, and picked it up. 

The store didn’t just sell a battery. It delivered the benefits of online convenience with local timeliness.  A good business analyst made these benefits a requirement for the online store. A good solutions architect designed or upgraded the store to realize the benefits.

Pivoting to Meet New Customer Expectations

I wonder if most retailers had long-term plans to show and sell their local inventory online before the pandemic hit in 2020. Did they accelerate those plans to reduce contact between people at their stores?  

Accelerating digital transformation was a theme of Dreamforce to You 2020. One session, “4 Key Pivots Growing Businesses Are Making this Year” emphasizes that businesses need to catch up digitally to meet new customer expectations brought on by the pandemic. It points out that 35% of small and medium businesses are accelerating digitization.

Customers demand online services replace services they received in person before the pandemic hit. They call a company, experience a long wait time, and want to know why they can’t get the service or information they need online. Companies lagging in online services risk losing customers, or their business altogether.

Expectations Accelerating Downstream

As customers expect businesses to provide more services online, those businesses will expect their online solutions to easily provide those services to their customers. These businesses expect to rapidly add and change services to meet customer needs. 

For example, if I buy the last battery in a store, their online store should show it out of stock at that location. A large retail chain may want to show other nearby stores that have the battery in stock, like Home Depot or Target does in the United States.

A Challenging Balance

Businesses need solutions that adapt to the accelerating demand for online services. They expect a business analyst to discover what they need to meet that demand. Business analysts and architects need to understand changing customer expectations and what the business intends to do to meet those expectations.

An architect should design solutions that adapt to customer demands for information while limiting complexity that would slow deployment. At one extreme, trying to anticipate and solve every possible customer need will lock up solution development with analysis paralysis. At the other extreme, a one-off solution to meet the most urgent need will require continuous rework, wasting time and effort when the business can least afford it. 

The business analyst should curate requirements to make a solution good enough to meet critical customer needs. The architect should design a solution that meets those needs and can extend to meet future needs.

The business analyst who wrote requirements for the online store where I bought my battery hit the sweet spot between “call for item availability” and a virtual reality tour of the store. The architect did not settle for reconciling local store inventory with their online store overnight, hoping the local store wouldn’t sell out the next day. They met the needs of customers who would like to purchase items in advance, certain they’ll get the items when and where they want.

Businesses expect solutions to deliver online services comparable or better than an in-person or phone call experience. Business analysts and architects need to understand and curate requirements to develop a solution meeting these accelerated expectations.

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Business Analysis with Agile Software Development

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Discovery Journey to Understand Requirements