Business 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.”

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 stake holders 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. 

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 

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 Business management analyst 

Business performance analyst 

Business analyst II 

Junior IT business analyst 

Application business analyst 

Business intelligence analyst 

ITSM business analyst