What is a business Analyst? A key role for business-IT efficiency

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usiness analyst help guide businesses in improving processes, products, services and software through data analysis. These agile workers straddle the line between IT and the business to help bridge the gap and improve efficiency.

Business analysts (BAs) are responsible for bridging the gap between IT and the business using data analytics to assess processes, determine requirements and deliver data-driven recommendations and reports to executives and stakeholders.

BAs engage with business leaders and users to understand how data-driven changes to process, products, services, software and hardware can improve efficiencies and add value. They must articulate those ideas but also balance them against what’s technologically feasible and financially and functionally reasonable. Depending on the role, you might work with data sets to improve products, hardware, tools, software, services or process.

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.”

Cloud Technology as New Foundation

Cloud has become the new normal for nine of ten enterprises across industries. The average IT environment in both SMBs and larger companies is becoming increasingly cloud-based. Companies also diversify their delivery models, with Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and Platform as a Service (PaaS) gaining more and more traction. Plus, a slew of new job positions have emerged to manage different aspects of cloud in the enterprise, including architecture and safety.

Business analyst job description

BAs are responsible for creating new models that support business decisions by working closely with financial reporting and IT teams to establish initiatives and strategies to improve importing and to optimize costs. You’ll need a “strong understanding of regulatory and reporting requirements as well as plenty of experience in forecasting, budgeting and financial analysis combined with understanding of key performance indicators,” according to Robert Half Technology.

According to Robert Half a business analyst job description typically includes:

• Creating a detailed business analysis, outlining problems, opportunities and solutions for a business
• Budgeting and forecasting
• Planning and monitoring
• Variance analysis
• Pricing
• Reporting
• Defining business requirements and reporting them back to stakeholders

Identifying and then prioritizing technical and functional requirements tops the business analyst’s list of responsibilities, says Bob Gregory, a professor and academic program director for the business analysis and management degree program at Bellevue University.

“Elicitation of requirements and using those requirements to get IT onboard and understand what the client really wants, that’s one of the biggest responsibilities for BAs. They have to work as a product owner, even though the business is the product owner,” Gregory says.

“[They need to ask:] What do the systems need to do, how do they do it, who do we need to get input from, and how do we get everyone to agree on what we need to do before we go and do it? The BA’s life revolves around defining requirements and prioritizing requirements and getting feedback and approval on requirements,” says Jeffrey Hammond, vice president and principal analyst at Forrester Research.

The role of a business analyst is constantly evolving and changing — especially as companies rely more on data to advise business operations. Every company has different issues that a business analyst can address, whether it’s dealing with outdated legacy systems, changing technologies, broken processes, poor client or customer satisfaction or siloed large organizations.

Business analyst skills

Thus, adopting the same approach is a potent solution for retail banks that aim at adopting the latest trends in the banking industry quickly and impactfully.