In response to my recent posts of SOA-related job descriptions for SOA evangelists and architects, ("Job Descriptions: The People That Keep the SOA Engine Running," a reader, Jewell Griffith, asked if there was a description of "business analyst."
A couple of months ago, ZapThink's Ron Schmelzer posted a great overview of the role of business analyst in SOA, along with a discussion of how it differs from the similar roles that enterprise architects assume.
Business analysts serve an important role in the organization, helping to marry the needs of the business with the various capabilities and resources available to it. Ron cites several sources, including Wikipedia, CIO, and the International Institute of Business Analysis, to drill down and define the BA role:
“A business analyst is responsible for translating the needs of the business into specifics that can be acted upon by individual parts of the business.... the BA works as a liaison among stakeholders in order to elicit, analyze, communicate and validate requirements for changes to business processes, policies and information systems.... The BA scopes the system, interprets business need, translates technical issues into language that business can understand..."
Ron also notes that BAs existed before IT became such a huge force within organizations. "In the days before IT, the BA would have a set of principles and methods they would use to address risk management, facilitate inter-organizational communication, improve labor utilization, optimize processes, and perform other tasks that required connecting the strategic aspects of the business with the tactical parts that made it work. When IT was introduced into the mix, it just became another part of the mechanism that made things 'work.'"
BA roles may also come under the titles of business systems analyst, systems analyst, and functional analyst.
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