A Business Analyst is a person who helps businesses to analyze their processes, products, services, and systems to improve current processes and make profitable decisions through insights and data analysis. A Business analyst also helps organizations to document business processes by assessing the business model and its integration with technology.
A business analyst will likely be leaning in one of two directions. They will either lean toward the business, or lean toward information technology. If the analyst is leaning toward the business, they are going to be familiar with the business’ processes and how each department links to the other. They will be researching that and document that. They will also understand how the business makes money and what the goals and objectives of the business are.
IT-leaning business analysts are more involved in software projects. They will be doing research and providing requirements documents for application developers. They will be involved in knowing the hardware systems required to run the various types of software. Not all IT-leaning business analysts are linked to software directly, but they will be indirectly linked to it.
Business Analyst Roles
Below are five of the most common roles that a business analyst will have. There are many more. Many of these overlap. A single person may actually work in several of these roles in a particular organization, or they may specialize.
- Business Process Analyst
- Requirements Analyst
- Systems Analyst
- Data Analyst
- User Experience Analyst
- Business Intelligence (BI) Analyst
Business Process Analyst
A process describes how multiple people, groups or departments collaborate over time to get work done. Processes involve activities linked in a sequence flow. A process may have multiple paths to completion. A process is initiated by an event in the business domain. A business analyst will likely use workflow software to create process models. These models describe as-is and to be. They conduct a gap analysis. These models help business executive make decisions.
Requirements Analyst
This analyst works with project stakeholders and end users to elicit, understand, analyze, and document the requirements. They research the needs and wishes of the users. They usually bridge the gap between business and IT. They are always aware of the business problem to be solved. They may also be called a requirements engineer or functional architect.
Systems Analyst
These analysts don’t usually develop the requirements, but instead they take the requirements and help design a solution. They work with the application developers and programmers to put together the solution specifications. They create functional specifications and technical specifications. Their documentation describes how a system will do what. The what is given to them by the requirements,and the how is the information they develop.
Data Analyst
The data analyst focus of analysis and problem-solving relates to data, types of data, and relationships among data elements within a business system or IT system or data warehouse. They document the data and the flow of data. They analyze the data for insights and communicate those insights. They may mine the data for patterns or create machine-learning models. They would be called data scientists in this case. They design reports and dashboards. Data analysts may also be called data modelers, business intelligence (BI) analysts or data warehouse analysts.
User Experience Analyst
This role is also known as the user interface analyst (UI Analyst) or UX Analyst. This person is involved in computer interface design. They create documents that describe the interface, and mockups or prototypes or wireframes. They work with users and other stakeholders to design what the ultimate solution should look like. Their goal is to design a functional and intuitive user interface. They are also known as user interface designers, web designers, usability professionals, or interaction designers.
Business Intelligence (BI) Analyst
Business intelligence analysts combine data analysis, IT and business expertise to help companies make informed decisions that facilitate future growth. A business intelligence analyst works with data sets to create data visualizations to inform business decisions.
Learn with YouTube
Jeremy Aschenbrenner has a number of videos on what a Business Analyst is and does.