Tools for the Business Analyst? Better Late than Never

In the 90's the Standish Group with their "CHAOS Report" quantified the alarming rate of project failure in the software development industry and the associated costs businesses incurred as a result. It also identified poor requirements as a primary contributing factor. Over the last twenty plus years, the CHAOS Report has consistently told us that the project failure rate has not dramatically improved and poor requirements continue to play a leading role.
RM or Requirements Management was a term coined to cover the entire problem set at the time and a push was underway to convince development organizations to stop relying on office automation tools (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Email) to document and communicate their project's requirements throughout the SDLC. Solutions such as DOORs, RequisitePro, and CaliberRM were introduced to the market as RM repositories. Textual requirements were typed directly into these tools instead of a Word document and they could be used to track each requirement's priority, status, due date, risk factors, etc. Edit histories were automatically recorded and trace relationships could be established and maintained between requirements for more meaningful analysis of both requirements coverage and the impact of proposed change. The focus moved from the document to the individual requirements themselves.
However, this early RM approach assumed the correct requirements were entered into the repository to begin with and that was a false assumption. As the old adage goes "garbage in, garbage out". It doesn't matter how well you version, baseline, trace requirements to each other. If the starting requirements are incorrect, incomplete or missing altogether then the team will surely encounter some unpleasant and very costly surprises further down the line.
RD or Requirements Definition was born of the acknowledgement that requirements had to be discovered and defined properly before they could be managed forward through the SDLC. As you might expect, solutions appeared in the marketplace to help facilitate the accurate definition of requirements: DefineIT, SteelTrace, and Profesy (later renamed "Requirements Center").
Additionally, there was focus placed on the visualization, prototyping, simulation of requirements to enable true validation that requirements are correct, complete, and aesthetic concerns, important to the business users, were not left to developers to figure out. Again, solutions like Apptero, Simunication, and others appeared on the scene.
Today the industry knows this collective space as RDM: Requirements Definition & Management and it includes visualization/simulation. However, the desired goal is not a collection of standalone products each addressing their own specialty but rather, a single integrated solution that addresses all of the challenges analysts face day to day, effectively becoming their workbench.
Developers have had their IDEs and integrated source code repositories for decades. Likewise, QA has had their test management and execution platforms for years. Finally, emphasis has been placed on the intrinsic importance of requirements and getting them right and the BA community will get the attention they deserve in the way of holistic solutions catering to their needs as a defined profession. It seems we're the last in line but better late than never.