Industry Crisis
Applications are the Business
Business software has evolved from being solutions that merely help individuals improve their efficiency to become the “fabric of the business”. Today no company can operate without business software. It must work. It must be easy to use. It must serve business needs.
A shift is underway ... to Business Process Centric IT
Integration projects now dominate the IT agenda. IT organizations are under pressure to interconnect systems to create seamless applications that support end-to-end business processes. New technologies and infrastructures - such as AJAX, Web 2.0, SOA, Web Services, SAP, Netweaver, Oracle Fusion - simply add to the complexity and risk.
During the 1990s IT built homogenous client/server software. By 2000 IT was focusing on homogenous web applications. Today IT builds heterogeneous business processes through a combination of hardware, software, and open services.
Risks are greater than ever
Interconnected systems must work - or business automation fails. Compliance regulations demand strict adherence to business rules, legal requirements, and policy management. There is now increasing pressure to ensure application requirements are defined correctly, provide complete business context, and are accurately communicated to development and test teams.
In addition to these concerns we have the new reality of labor disruption due to globalization. With globalization, the Business Context becomes abstracted from development teams. Gartner predicts that this year a full 50%+ of New Projects will leverage distributed teams, outsourcing, or offshoring.
Traditional Requirements Management is simply not enough
Office automation tools like Word, Excel, Powerpoint, and Visio, are not rich enough to to capture end-to-end process requirements, they do not adequately manage requirements change, and do not provide inherent traceability. Traditional Requirements Management point tools lack requirement definition capabilities such as integrity verification, rich multi-aspect simulation, and automated test generation.
The rise of the Business Analyst
As IT struggles in this environment to support the Business mission, one role in particular is rapidly increasing in prominence and being recognized as pivotal. This role stands at the cross-roads of all stakeholders and is responsible for creating and maintaining the main "reference" on which all work will be based. We are witnessing the rise of Business Analyst.
Requirements Lifecycle Acceleration
In support of this newly prominent role, processes and technologies are emerging to support it. This new category of solution is being referred to as Requirements Lifecycle Acceleration or (RLA), and Blueprint is the global leader in this space.
To read more on RLA 
