Business analysis glossary
Elicitation
What it is
Elicitation is the set of activities used to draw out information from stakeholders and other sources so you can understand needs. Techniques include interviews, workshops, observation, document review, surveys and prototyping. The analyst chooses techniques to suit the stakeholders, the topic and the time available, and often combines several of them.
Why it matters
People rarely hand over complete needs in one conversation. They forget routine steps, describe solutions instead of problems or disagree with colleagues. Skilful elicitation uncovers what is actually needed. Using more than one technique also cross-checks the story: what people say, what they do and what the documents record are often three different things.
Example
To understand how returns are handled at Lumen Retail, the analyst interviews two supervisors, watches a warehouse shift for an hour and reviews last month's returns spreadsheet. The spreadsheet reveals a manual step nobody mentioned in the interviews. Combining three sources in this way gave the analyst a more accurate picture than any one source alone.