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.”
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.
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.
PayScale offers data on similar job titles that fall under the category of business analyst. The average salaries for those positions are as follows:
Job title Average salary
Business management analyst $60,428
Business performance analyst $60,678
Business analyst II $64,981
Junior IT business analyst $65,330
Application business analyst $66,882
Business intelligence analyst $66,791
ITSM business analyst $66,891
Technical business analyst $71,489
Agile business analyst $74,000
IT business analyst $74,000
Business solutions analyst $75,243
Systems business analyst $78,095
Business analyst III $78,107
Senior IT business analyst $90,201
For tips on boosting your salary, see “7 steps business analysts can take to earn more.”
valuable to organizations, so do business analysts.
“One of the key values in the concept of the BA moving into being a product owner, as the whole line between IT and digital and software development and business shifts, is that this role has become more and more exciting,” says Kelly Emo, director of product and solutions marketing for application lifecycle and quality at HPE Software.
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.
According to Emo, organizations are less likely to assign BAs to development work on new classes of applications such as mobile marketing apps and apps for temporary sales promotions “because they’re operating very lean or doing DevOps.”
“It’s all happening very rapidly in continuous delivery mode, and it’s data-driven and not [driven by] lengthy requirement documents. What I see today, especially in the digital first applications, like digital e-commerce, it’s not the traditional business analyst involved.”
On the other hand, BAs are almost universally used for the development of back-office applications and core business software products, where identifying and documenting requirements is particularly critical, Emo says.
“A lot of those applications are under a lot of regulations, so [organizations] need that BA interface to document and ensure compliance,” she says.
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