Accretion, lethargy, inertia, accountants...
All big organisations (indeed all organisations) accrete IT systems through natural growth, takeovers, changes of directions, changes in regulations, ego clashes, inertia, lethargy and general risk aversion, so it's probably a bit unfair to single BA out here. You look at the IT system diagram for any large organisation - if such a diagram even exists - and weep.
Even with systems now, the fashion is that writing from scratch is bad, so new developments are a hodgepodge of what looked cool in the open source world, what sort of works now, and developer glue - all held together with the sort of build systems that would've once been deemed systems themselves. I've seen people download huge open source frameworks just to use 5% or so of the functionality; hell, I've seen multiple frameworks in use at once, because no-one took the time to the money to properly integrate.
No traditional company spends enough time, money or skill on IT. That's because the accountants who run these companies don't understand what IT does, why it costs, and why really skilled (which usually means expensive) IT people are a valuable asset. By outsourcing and downskilling, accountants see easy cost savings - and they're probably correct as long as everything always works perfectly and no outside influences or unforeseen events change this. There are no black swans in an accountant's world.
So BA is certainly not alone here - not that this excuses them for an avoidable f**k-up of epic proportions, mind.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
