August 2020 - SFIA 8 consultation update

A 2 minute update on the SFIA 8 consultation - and a reminder of how you can get involved.

Estimated reading time - 1 min, 48 sec.

Behavioural factors in SFIA...

  • Out of the SFIA 8 scoping workshop in May came an initiative to explore how SFIA can represent behavioural skills.
  • A working group has done some detailed investigation and research into the options
  • Thanks to Phil Lovell and Penny Coulter for sharing their progress so far.
  • They have come up with an innovative way of showcasing the behavioural factors already present in SFIA 7.
  • The next step will be to share this for wider review. 

Testing skills...

  • We have included testing skills in SFIA since the earliest versions. 
  • Thanks to Angela Martland for providing insights into the impact of agile working practices, automation, data, security on the roles and skills associated with testing
  • We will summarise, suggest improvements and look to publish guidance for the application of SFIA to testing roles  

Business analysis skills and roles...

  • I listened to an interesting webinar considering the impact of digital technologies, business architecture and solution development approaches on the role of the business analyst.
  • I reached out to the panellists to help review SFIA's coverage of business analysis skills.
  • All of them offered to help and I had an initial call with Debra Paul and Christina Lovelock to come up with an approach. 
  • Both are very familiar with SFIA and have extensive experience of creating and managing business analysis services. 
  • We came up with several areas for further investigation.
  • We will progress and share these for review.

Information and cyber security skills and competencies...

  • The detailed analysis work continues and the draft documents are available for review and comment.
  • We feel SFIA as a framework is well placed to support an enterprise-wide view of security-related skills and competencies. 
  • This aligns with industry-led moves to ensure that security is treated as a responsibility for everyone - not a siloed speciality. 

Robotic process automation (RPA)...

  • There is a lot of market information and use cases out there to investigate.
  • The graphic below presents a broad view of automation.
  • We can see the connected nature of many of themes we are looking at for SFIA 8 - big data, machine learning,  RPA, business analysis, cloud computing. 

EMERGN automation landscape.png

(credit EMERGN)

We want to include more people…

You can invite others to join in…

Peter  Leather

SFIA Updates Manager & SFIA 8 Project Manager