Business Analyst (BA) Job Description : Business Analysts and System Analysts FAQ

"Business Analyst" is no doubt the very important and significant role in any industry because he is the one who needs to know both technological skills/knowledge & Industry specific domain knowledge/Experience.

There are many Business Analysts who gets confused about their job description in the industry. To put in simple terms the job description is to improve the business in all possible ways. But if we elaborate the Business Analyst job description, it is going to take a while to understand the actual tasks that a business analyst has to take care of.

Business Analyst has to face challenges continuously on a daily basis, i.e everyday is a challenge for them in order to compete with competitors and to meet the latest demands of customers/consumers, and to meet the technological demands according to today’s speed world.

In old days System Analysts were taken the task of administering the daily tasks such as converting the paper work into electronic documents, but then when the real IT development comes into the picture, organizations started realizing that they are not meeting the goals as they intended. That is when they thought about the Business Analysts who are aware of both Business and IT development.

The term "Business Analyst Job Description" is a bit confusing because when you search for Business Analyst jobs in job boards, you get to see so many job profiles with various requirements and with various job titles such as Business Analyst, System Analyst, Requirements Professional etc.. etc..

They all come under one hut called Business Analyst, but in some firms, System Analyst is mostly sits in the IT section and takes care of IT issues, where as Business Analyst takes care of purely business needs. But to put in brief the average profile or job description of a business analyst are below:

1) Who should know domain / business knowledge (insurance, healthcare, banking, mortgage etc..)

2) Who should know little to medium technical knowledge such as programming languages, database, system architecture etc..

3) Should know how to design and draw use case diagrams, business model diagrams, flowcharts etc..(Should be familiar with MS visio tools).

4) Should be familiar with Rational rose suite such as clear quest, clear case, etc..

5) Should be familiar with version control tools such as subversion etc..

6) Should have enough knowledge of Bug reporting tools(Quality center), QTP, SDLC,

Test methodologies..

7) Should know full life cycle of software development.

Apart from the above, the main Job Descriptions of a Business Analyst are:

A) Understanding the client requirements and putting them on paper in a language that is understandable by developers.

B) The solution that is recommended by him should be really good to be accepted by all top management.

C) Act as a bridge between Business team and technical team. Some firms needs Business Management qualification with technical skills, but a computer graduate with real time industry experience will also fits the bill.