In early May, I had the opportunity to spend a few days up in the lovely (albeit rainy and cold) city of Toronto, Canada with my fellow core team members as we kicked off our efforts to produce version 3 of the BABOK. I am so excited that the IIBA could support bringing us all together, because it is going to be so helpful as we move forward as a truly global team.

It was a personally exciting experience in that I spent 3 full days with Business Analyst peers from around the world who are as passionate about business analysis as I am. We debated, agreed, debated more, joked with each other, debated more, proposed radical ideas, shot down radical ideas, and debated more. We went through pads of sticky notes and about every color of sharpie that one could imagine. And out of it we have a lot of ideas and plans – ranging from topics we need to reach out to the community to further research to areas we already know we just need to tackle some rewrites on. I have absolutely no idea what version 3 will look like when we are done, but I can already tell it will still be a great BOK for Business Analysts, and hopefully an improved one. In fact, if you have any comments you want to share on what you just love and don’t want to see changed from version 2, or what you really want to see more coverage on, please post back a comment here!

Now, before I finish, I’ll address the question I am already getting asked a lot: “When will it be out?” In a probably less-than-useless way, let me just tell you that the answer right now is simply “sometime in 2013”.

And while I can’t share much yet about where we are headed with this, I at least wanted to let you know, it is underway!