Enables councils to understand their current state, to design changes and to make data-led decisions that work towards the achievement of desired outcomes.
What is business analysis?
The ability to define business needs, identify areas for improvement and recommend solutions to organisational problems.
Business analysis enables councils to understand their current state, to design changes and to make data-led decisions that work towards the achievement of desired outcomes.
Why is it needed?
Business analysis is essential to support the identification, quantification and analysis of service improvements and savings. Business analysis helps to inform opportunity analysis, options appraisals, and business cases.
Business analysis is also used to capture business requirements, or the needs of the organisation, to inform decisions about technology and solution selection and design.
In local government it is common for business analysis to be linked with other service design and / or data and digital capabilities.
What capabilities does it need?
To deliver business analysis, councils need to be able to:
- analyse costs and benefits
- analyse change
- analyse and design processes
- analyse systems
- define requirements.
Each capability is defined in more detail in the sections that follow.
Capabilities have been defined to be read both in isolation (i.e. if you need to know only about a certain aspect of business analysis), or in combination (to understand business analysis in the round).
For this reason, there is a necessary overlap between some of the capabilities.
Related roles
There are multiple roles within local government that deliver elements of business analysis.
- Business Analyst
- Systems Analyst
- Service Designer
- Process Analyst
- Change Analyst
- Process Analyst
Essential enablers
Other than having the right capabilities in place, there are several essential enablers that also need to be in place for business analysis to have maximum impact.
Business analysis – maturity index
A related business analysis maturity index has been created to enable councils to understand their current maturity and to set, and work towards, a target state. This can be downloaded below.
Resources
The following resources have been suggested by councils as references or tools that they have found useful in relation to business analysis. The LGA is not able to endorse any particular resources or any individual supplier.
- Business analyst – Government Digital and Data Profession Capability Framework (ddat-capability-framework.service.gov.uk)
- IIBA UK: The International Institute of Business Analysis, UK Chapter
- The Green Book and accompanying guidance and documents (www.gov.uk)
- The Local Government Digitalisation Almanac | Local Government Association
