How a Brisbane IT consultant turned its analysis on itself

You’d be forgiven for not realising Business Analysts was even in the technology space. Working across a wide range of customer verticals, the 12-year-old consultancy works with resellers and customers on digitising their workforces. 

Business Analysts earned the No.14 place in the 2015 CRN Fast50 by growing 89.25 percent and achieving revenue of $4.8 million. Chief executive Tim Coventry puts last year’s success down to customers realising that analytics and digitisation are an investment, not an expense.

IT folk will be familiar with the famous Microsoft cliché to “eat your own dogfood” (which is sometimes rephrased as “drink your own champagne”). It’s apt here – Coventry says the biggest revelation for his company came when Business Analysts actually analysed itself. 

“We as an organisation have done a lot of work on our internal processes – trying to practice what we preach. We’re making sure our own processes are understood throughout the organisation, and that all 50 consultants live and breathe our business analysis methods and tools, which are highly successful.”

He also learned you can’t cut corners on consultancy, even if you’re analysing yourself. “Analysing our own business was really interesting because we wanted to skip some of the things we do on the client’s side and just jump into getting on with it. We found ourselves getting into trouble and had to bang our heads together and do what we would normally do.”

Coventry touts the firm’s vendor-agnostic positioning, another vital skill for business consultants. While a search through its website turns up no brand names, Coventry says the company mostly works with Microsoft, SAP and Oracle.

With an eye to the future, Coventry says innovation in “bi-modal IT” is the next step for his company. The term was coined by Gartner to refer to “the practice of managing two separate, coherent modes of IT delivery, one focused on stability and the other on agility”.

This will be the next big thing for the firm, he says. “We’ve developed bi-modal business analysis where we divide the business layer from the functional IT layer by looking at both functions differently.

“You can be extremely innovative if you separate the business layer from the functional IT layer. We use [agile] to deliver at the functional layer, but concentrate on innovation at the business layer.

 “Separating the two layers allows you to perform large-scale innovation, utilise reuse and connect technology to new customer delivery.”

As many CRN Fast50 companies do after a year of explosive growth, Business Analysts plans to hunker down over the next 12 months. “The whole tech industry is about to explode. Companies will do things completely differently as a result. These aren’t just going to happen, they’re already happening now, and we see ourselves being a big player in that.” 

Fact file

• Head office Brisbane
• Top executives Tim Coventry (CEO), Peter Ebborn (COO)
• Sectors Consultancy
• 2015 CRN Fast50 position 14
• 2015 revenue $4.8 million
• 2015 growth 89.25%