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The Business Analyst is the key mediator between the technical and business communities. The Business Analyst translates the needs of the business in to a language that the technical teams can understand and vice versa.  He bridges the gap between the programmer, developer, and architect on the one side with the business stakeholders on the other. He works closely with the Project Manager to establish the initial project requirements (scope) for the work that will be undertaken and facilitates communication with stakeholders to ensure that all needs are being met.

In large Data Centre Transformation Programmes, Software Development and other Information Technology (IT) fields, the Business Analyst plays an important role in bringing structure and organisation to the process. He is a liaison determining how business models can best leverage technology.

What tasks do they perform?

The Business Analyst works with all stakeholders to define the requirements, functional and non-functional specifications, deliverables, timelines and budget for a project. He must have an overall vision of the underlying processes (both business and technical) which will drive the project whilst understanding the competing needs of the different stakeholders.

In some organisations, the Business Analyst will be involved in strategic planning, market penetration and customer prospecting. He might analyse the business model, organisational structure, operations and information technology in order to improve the efficiency of business processes. The Business Analyst defines and clarifies the business function.

As the project is being established, the Business Analyst works closely with the Project Manager to identify the goals, timeline and budget, which must be followed. He aids the Project Manager to scope the rules, standards and requirements for delivering a product or service to the wider business. He might need to use documents, diagrams and charts to communicate his goals. He plays an overall composite role and responds to challenges.

What is the difference between a Business Analyst and Project Manager?

A Business Analyst has the wide overall day-to-day vision of the stakeholders in mind; he ensures guidelines are followed by the various teams delivering a project whilst translating information between stakeholders as the project proceeds forward.

The Project Manager has a more specific focus on fulfilling project goals, which have been established. All projects have a well-defined beginning and end, along with its goal. The Project Manager has the primary duty of organising people, money and equipment in order to achieve project objectives.

What skills should a Business Analyst have?

The Business Analyst should have the following skills:

• Analytical
• Leadership
• Logic
• Organisational
• Problem-Solving
• Spoken and Written Communication
• Technical (to a point)

The Business Analyst must have a good understanding of the business model of his company, the underlying processes and the needs of his customer’s. He must be able to facilitate discussion when problems arise in order to find answers.

What is the best way to keep a Business Analyst motivated?

Good Business Analysts should be rewarded financially, given more responsibilities and enabled to further develop their skills. Business Analysts can be inspired when they are managed by forward thinking project leaders, given more advanced roles in decision-making, client communication and financial planning. They should be given the opportunity to expand their technical, strategic management and project skills. A Business Analyst remains motivated by seeing his job as a way to better himself and the organisation he is working within.

The role of a Business Analyst is both rewarding, diverse and dynamic.  One which bridges the gap between the technical and business communities both in language, processes and understanding.

Virtualisation Desktop Infrastructure is becoming an integral concept behind many business technology infrastructures. Commonly abbreviated as VDI, it is the client-server computing model that drives desktop virtualisation.

Desktop virtualisation is a computing setup in which the personal desktop experience is physically separated from the underlying hardware and its processes – using the client-server model. The desktop is run among many on a remote server, and the user’s computing device serves as a “thin client” whose only function is to send requests to the server. The processes, applications, and data that make up the desktop are run independently of both the user computer and the server hardware. The system can be so seamless that the user may not even be conscious of the fact that the desktop is not running on the client hardware.

One advantage of VDI is that it allows for far greater portability and versatility than a traditional desktop computer. A user could access and use a virtual desktop from almost any modern personal computing device, such as a smartphone, tablet or laptop. They could use the virtual desktop to access information that would otherwise be unavailable to them, or to execute processes that their device’s hardware would be too weak to handle.

VDI is also convenient when one wishes to enable many simultaneous computer users without dealing with the cost and maintenance issues involved with many separate computer systems. For this reason, many offices, web cafes, libraries, classroom computer labs, and other shared computing environments use VDI. In a normal centralised computing situation, demand for more computers would require entirely new desktop hardware. VDI, on the other hand, makes it easy to add more virtual desktops that only require new input and output peripherals.

However, VDI has some disadvantages. Although setting up and managing software is easier with VDI, it can be difficult to maintain hardware peripherals such as printers, faxes, and modems. Initial deployment of VDI can be much more expensive and difficult than a traditional computer network. Also, because all the real work is done on the server, network failures could mean that the user is cut off not just from network data but from doing almost any computing at all. VDI can be seen as reducing the user’s autonomy and increasing their reliance on a corporate or public network.

Many different companies offer virtualisation solutions such as Ulteo.  Ulteo is behind the completely free open-source VDI software soultion called Open Virtual Desktop. The free version is supported by the community, but users can also purchase a subscription support plan to get help from Ulteo themselves. VMware is another name in the VDI space along with Citrix.

Many businesses are now computing with VDI, and many companies offer different implementations of the concept. Though it does come with certain disadvantages, many believe Virtualisation Desktop Infrastructure is an ideal solution for the ever increasing demands placed on desktop services.

You can download this article in PDF format by clicking on the link below:

What is Virtualisation Desktop Infrastructure? (227)

Here is a quick list of all the articles that you will find on my blog:

1. Surviving Office Politics
2. Why do Projects Fail?
3. Open Source Software – The Reality
4. What is Network Optimisation?
5. How do you Attract, Retain and Manage Talent?
6. Your Smart Phone: Friend or Foe?
7. What is Web 2.0?
8. What is Green Computing?
9. What is Information Security?
10. What is Cloud Computing?
11. A Social Network within an Organisation
12. What is Business Intelligence?
13. What is Application & Server Virtualisation?