The roll out of the BABOK 2.0 has been a Herculean project for the IIBA. 2.0 is a major change from 1.6 and is the commutations of a lot of leg work by the IIBA to wrangle in the ideas of requirements “gurus” into the framework of the 1.6 to come out with something the professional side of the industry can embrace. They did a fantastic job. Though the effort left a huge void for the IIBA. It is really a question that has been dealt with throughout business. Does a great product sell itself or must you sell something?
It has been difficult for me to find business leaders and IT leaders who know about either the IIBA or the CBAP certification. I hope the IIBA sees this as a concern and I that this is a major focus for them for the rest of 2009.
Marketing a certification to employers is tricky. You don’t want the employers to think you are certifying their staff so that those staff members ultimately ask for more money or they move on to “greener” pastures. At the same time you want employers to think about what they are missing if they don’t hire CBAP certified professionals, and how less effective their system will be if they don’t use consultants with CBAP credentials.
The first step in this process is the professionals should educate their leaders. The IIBA President is doing a great job of being available to any organization interested in hearing more about the IIBA and the Certification. Recently, she was in Raleigh-Durham speaking with executives at BCBS of NC. Professionals can take their manager to a local IIBA chapter meeting, have the Chapter President come speak at a lunch, or even learn at the office. Nothing in the world beats grass roots and internal marketing.
On the flip side the IIBA needs to hit the conference circuit and begin keynote and session presentations discussing why CBAPs provide value to a business. A good start at this would be for the IIBA to develop metrics that measure the impact of BA work on an organization.
No matter how great your product is, if no one knows about it or doesn’t understand its value, it is worthless. I am very hopeful a great product like the CBAP certification and the BABOK doesn’t become worthless.
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Hi JT,
We're working on it, although it's not as easy as it sounds.
One of the things I often find when talking to people about IIBA is that there's a tendency to assume we have much greater resources at our disposal than we actually do. We are a very small organization, with less than 10 full-time staff, only one or two of whom can attend conferences and speak--and both those people have a large number of other responsibilities as well and really can't be on the road to more than one conference or other event a month (plus which we have a limited travel budget).
Don't get me wrong, we agree that marketing both the organization and the certification to employers is critical, and we are doing what we can there. At this point in time, though, we really don't have the resources to do more than we are in that area.
Kevin,
Thank you for your comment. We understand the vast amount of work the IIBA has accomplished in a short period of time. We just don't want all that great work to go unrewarded over the long run. I have four suggestions.
#1 With a growing list of EEPs I would suggest raising the EEP rate to $2000 instead of $1500 a year. The extra $500 per EEP could go a long way to hiring a marketing specialist specializing in B-to-B marketing. This is much easier than sponsorship dollars because people expect something from sponsorship, aka some type of ROI. Making the yearly fee higher becomes a cost of business to a company.
#2 Add a volunteer VP position who's responsibility is to market to enterprise organizations to help set up web enabled conferences for IIBA executives with IT executives
#3 Provide an incentive to EEPs to get you connected to IT executives. You could write a white paper about the value of the BA in an enterprise organization and allow all your EEPs to offer this paper as a free offer
#4 Partner with CompTIA and get their support and assistance in reaching the business community about the value of a BA. Basically let them market the certification as a reseller and they can get a percentage of the exam revenue. That should give them enough incentive to help market the certification to managers and employees.
Please feel free to call me or email me if you want to discuss further:
David Mantica
919-816-1746
dmantica@aspeinc.com
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