There are many situations that Software Analysts (SA) fall into and comming out is a dream. Undrestanding what is going on in an organization and how it could be done in the future by the help of a trusted computerized process, is the primary duty of an analyst.
SAs usually try to find out processes, data structurs, relations and many new factors based on Human Resource like usefulness and simplicity of an activity in order to build a software platform to automate part of or the whole process.
Refering to these statements, SAs use some usual tools to achieve the final destination "What's the problem?" like interviewing their custmers/users or analysing their data structure through studing customers'/users' workflow documents and archive.
I'm concerning about the last. Its about 5 minutes, I've started to write this post according to a 2 hour meeting I've just finished.
It was a harmonizing meeting based on our study over a customer's documents in order to build an online timesheet-based cost management system.
First they rejected our proposal on the solution, cause according to their viewpoint we didn't undrestand what they are doing now with their running manual paper-oriented system; and why was that? Just because customers documents were untrustable. Actually the organizational culture and glossery of terms was undocumented and denyable.
I just mentioned it to myself to put the issue on my checklist for future :).