I started as a skeptic: as a developer I was cynical about the charts and documents that BAs produce. I mean, come on: we all know this thing is guaranteed to go out of date as business requirements change. "No plan survives contact with deployment", right?
What changed my perspective entirely was discovering executable system documentation in the form of BPMN - Business Process Model and Notation. With BPMN, the model is the code. If you're not familiar with BPMN, I'll give a brief introduction to it in this talk.
So, OK - you're sold on BPMN. But how do you get developers to start using it without having to sell the organisation on a BPMN monolith engine from the 90s? In a world of loosely-coupled microservices and autonomous development teams, "One Ring to Rule Them All" is a harder sell than a left-handed screwdriver.
I'll demo Zeebe, a modern, polyglot, horizontally-scalable workflow engine for microservices orchestration that will have the developers in your org demanding BPMN. It can be incrementally adopted with low risk, and provides an opportunity to expose developers to the "living systems documentation" of executable BPMN.
After getting my own feet wet with Zeebe and BPMN I discovered a new-found respect and appreciation for BAs. If nothing else, this is the opportunity to get developers and BAs on the same page - and deploy that page to production!