We all have worked with her; most every project has one. She's not technical, most likely not a manager, and usually we all try to avoid her. Most technical team members scratch their heads when it comes to her. What does she really do? She doesn't code, doesn't manage, but she is omnipresent in all of our development meetings. Most of the time she is on the phone, talking to far-flung colleagues across the building and across the world.

She is definitely well connected. Not only does she refer to corporate officers by their first name, she knows the names and birthdays of their children. From Paul in St. Charles to Charles in St. Paul, she knows them all.

Our friend is a business analyst whose job is to do nothing - yet everything. Most techies snub such a role as nonessential. But isn't it important to have a liaison between the user community and the programmers that serve them? And, oh, this person has 30 years of experience with the company and has been involved with every information system it has ever used. As my intelligent daughter would say, "well duhhhh." Like them or not, as far as business analysts go, we can all agree on one thing - there are fewer of them.

The business analyst has been caught in a numbers game. Back in the bubble there was little or no distinction between a business analyst and other nonessential button pushers. When the market tightened, many "big picture" people were simply eliminated. The problem is that essential business analysts went along with them. Talk about throwing the baby out with the bath water. Actually it's easy to distinguish a business analyst from other nonessential "big picture" staff. The big picture guy has soulless pictures on the wall with bumper-sticker phrases like "winning" and "perseverance." The desk of a business analyst is cluttered with drawings from co-workers' children.

The past few years have been especially difficult for the business analyst. When layoffs and outsourcing started, the business analyst's position looked relatively safe - at first. Coding positions were the first to go. Admittedly, a foreign programmer can write programs that are as good as American ones - and cheaper. The business analyst would always say "you can't offshore experience." Perhaps not. But you can eliminate it. Pure analyst jobs have simply disappeared.

Cutting back on experienced analysts is effectively severing a bridge from the past. Invaluable experience, insight, and instincts are being discarded. This attitude is puzzling to me. Not unlike cutting off a limb to lose a little weight. There really is no substitute for experience. While engineering talent can be easily replaced and capable, highly educated managers can be easily found, the loss of experience is permanent. Once experience is lost, it's gone forever.

The result is what's called "self-managed teams." On the surface, this system looks like a good cost-cutting move. With a streamlined development process, smaller teams can get the job done faster, cheaper, and with fewer people. Imagine all the money saved by reducing meetings and other "wasteful" administration time. The truth, of course, is different.

Without analysts, development teams can lack direction. On one of my current projects, our team would often spend hundreds of hours building features that were not required, needed, or asked for. It's not that we just made things up as we went along, but we would add features based on an offhand comment from a junior-level manager, or in one case a single e-mail from an end user. There was a definite break in the communication chain between the people who wanted the application and the ones who built it. An analyst would have spotted this disturbing trend and refocused the team. Often it's the job of the analyst to remind the techies that their job is to solve problems, not just play with the code. Surely a good business analyst would have paid for himself.

The future of pure analytical positions is unclear. With information technology getting back on its feet, the position of business analyst has been slow to recover. At some organizations, it may be gone for good. But as the recovery continues, and companies start investing in their information infrastructure, there may be new jobs for analysts. I, for one, hope to see them again soon. Believe me, we need them more than ever.