For anybody who is curious or confused about my new business title, you’re not alone. Even people who are actually in this industry aren’t quite sure what the various titles and job duties actually entail. Today I found a great article that finally explains the names and the overlap. Here’s me:

IT Business Analyst – This is the analyst who is generally associated with requirements elicitation/analysis and solving problems using information technology solutions. This role is the bridge between business & IT.

I love that last quote. That’s the key, really. The business and marketing guys have a goal they want to achieve. I take these Feature Requests and turn them into functional requirements and specifications that the tech guys can work from. When the tech guys have an issue – like a technology or resource limitation – I can be an advocate and make a case to the business for what they need. It’s fun! I get to be a bridge, contact point, and translater between lots of different areas of the business. And since we’re so small, I get to have a lot more input in setting up new processes and documenting existing ones that I might have in a big corporate environment.

I’m supposed to be spending these four days working on porting the Morris & Sons site to the new version of osCommerce. Unfortunately, I’m being hampered by the fact that Quadrahosting‘s servers have now failed 3 times in the past 24 hours, each for at least an hour. That is really unacceptable. And everybody says, “Switch hosts!” But seriously, name me one that doesn’t suck. I’m totally disillusioned at this point. They all suck.

Major power outage in Sydney CBD. Now that was fun! At about 4:45pm this afternoon, everything went ZAP! And all the computers shut off. We all looked around. There was a few minutes of joking while the office manager ran to find out what we should do. I sent an SMS to the Snook saying that our power was out. His reply: “Ours too!” Okay, THAT changes things! (His new office is at the Rocks.) Somebody noticed that the traffic lights were all out on William Street. We stood at the windows and looked down at the growing rush hour traffic chaos. Somebody joked, “You should be twittering this.” HELL YEAH, I should! I grabbed my iPhone but the 3G network kept crapping out before my tweet went through. I called my friend Kunaal whose office is at Wynyard, but oddly they had power! (But no Internet, so he had no idea what was happening.) Eventually most of us decided to leave, so I shuffled down ten flights of fire stairs with everybody else. Then I hiked up to the park and towards the city. While waiting for a bus on Castlereagh, I managed to get through to Twitter and did a search on blackout. That’s when I discovered that everyone was attributing it to zombie attack. Oh man, that was fun. I tweeted* all the way home. Snookums managed to train it to Central and met me at the house. Thankfully, Chippendale seems to have power (and Internet). And now here we are, enjoying a beer and feeling sorry for all those still trying to head north over the bridge!

* I really think this may have been a turning point in my relationship with Twitter. The explosion of the zombie blackout meme was fun and addictive. I told the Snook it was like this amazing spontaneous virtual chat room with folks from all over the city. Plus I picked up seven new followers thanks to my tweets!