What Exactly is a Business Analyst? A Critical Role in Improving Business-IT Efficiency

Business analysts (BAs) are tasked with closing the gap between IT and the business by evaluating processes, identifying requirements, and delivering data-driven suggestions and reports to executives and stakeholders.

To better understand how data-driven changes to processes, goods, services, software, and hardware can increase efficiencies and provide value, BAs interact with business executives and users. They must express these ideas while weighing them against what is technically, financially, and functionally realistic. You may use data sets to enhance products, hardware, equipment, software, services, or processes, depending on your function.

The International Institute of Business Analysis (IIBA), a nonprofit professional association, considers the business analyst “an agent of change,” writing that business analysis “is a disciplined approach for introducing and managing change to organizations, whether they are for-profit businesses, governments, or non-profits.”

Business analyst skills

The business analyst position requires both hard skills and soft skills. Business analysts need to know how to pull, analyze and report data trends, and be able to share that information with others and apply it on the business side. Not all business analysts need a background in IT as long as they have a general understanding of how systems, products and tools work. Alternatively, some business analysts have a strong IT background and less experience in business, and are interested in shifting away from IT to this hybrid role.

According to the IIBA some of the most important skills and experience for a business analyst are:

• Oral and written communication skills
• Interpersonal and consultative skills
• Facilitation skills
• Analytical thinking and problem solving
• Being detail-oriented and capable of delivering a high level of accuracy
• Organizational skills
• Knowledge of business structure
• Stakeholder analysis
• Requirements engineering
• Costs benefit analysis
• Processes modeling
• Understanding of networks, databases and other technology

Business analyst salaries

The average salary for an IT business analyst is $67,762 per year, according to data from PayScale. The highest paid BAs are in San Francisco, where the average salary is 28 percent higher than the national average. New York is second, with reported salaries 18 percent higher than the national average; Boston comes in third, with a 7 percent higher annual pay.

Certifications

Although business analysis is a relatively new discipline in IT, a handful of organizations already offer certifications to help boost your resume and prove your merit as an analyst. Organizations such as the IIBA, IQBBA, IREB and PMI each offer their own tailored certification for business analysis. These include:

• IIBA Entry Certificate in Business Analysis (ECBA)
• IIBA Certification of Competency in Business Analysis (CCBA)
• IIBA Certified Business Analysis Professional (CBAP)
• IIBA Agile Analysis Certification (AAC)
• IQBBA Certified Foundation Level Business Analyst (CFLBA)
• IREB Certified Professional for Requirements Engineering (CPRE)
• PMI Professional in Business Analysis (PBA)

Boot camps

Unlike certifications, which are designed to prove the skills you already have, boot camps are designed to teach you new skills or improve your current skillset. Boot camps can be anything from traditional workshops held over the course of a few days or full-fledged, instructor-led courses that run for weeks or months at a time. No matter what your preferred learning style is, you can find a boot camp to suit your needs.

Courses are often offered both in-person and online; alternatively, your organization might bring a boot camp to the company to run a four-day workshop. Some boot camps are free, while others might require a subscription fee or a one-time fee that ranges from $100 to $2,500, depending on the program. They’re all designed to give hands-on experience and help you build your resume and portfolio — some even offer career guidance and mentorship.

Master’s programs

If you have a computer science or business degree, you might want to look at a master’s in business analysis. Exactly what type of degree you go for will depend on what area of BA or IT you want to work in, but there are plenty of programs designed to give you a formal business analyst education.

Business analytics tools and software

Business analysts typically rely on software such as Microsoft Excel, Microsoft PowerPoint, Microsoft Access, SQL, Google Analytics and Tableau. These tools help BAs collect and sort data, create graphs, write documents and design visualizations to explain the findings. You won’t necessarily need programming or database skills for a business analyst position, but if you already have these skills, they won’t hurt. The type of software and tools you’ll need to use will depend on your job title and what the organization requires.

The role of business analysts in software development

Business analysts use real-time user data and analytics programs to identify user trends, successful functions and potential user adoption problems with the applications. As data becomes more valuable to organizations, so do business analysts.

Given the expanding list of responsibilities put on the position, some organizations have created product manager positions that work with BAs or have teams of BAs reporting to them, Hammond says.

Similarly, the expansion and the faster, more iterative pace of software development has changed the timing of the BA’s involvement with a given development project. A BA working in a classic waterfall development environment is more heavily involved at the front end, when gathering, analyzing and prioritizing user requirements, before handing those off to developers and then moving on to another software development project. Meanwhile, BAs working on agile projects generally stay with the project through implementation and even through multiple releases.

Organizations often assign BAs to several projects at a time if the projects are small enough, or they may assign a BA to a single project if it’s complex. Hammond notes that organizations also assign multiple BAs to very large software development projects. But some IT departments today are not involving their business analysts in all in-house application development projects, Emo says.