The job of the Business Analyst is changing as the field of software development changes. When involved in different projects in the same company, it gives you experience in strategic thinking, knowledge of certain overlapping functions, and interdisciplinary dependencies, offering the opportunity to begin to create solutions to problems affecting the whole organization, rather than a section or the area you are involved in.
In order to implement such a process, many businesses choose to reach out to professionals for help, with consultants such as the Six Sigma Champions and Black Belts who will help different team members to see the organization in an entirely new light.
Particular skills of this type of analyst are “soft skills”, such as knowledge of the business, requirements engineering , stakeholder analysis , and some “hard skills”, such as business process modeling Although the role requires an awareness of technology and its uses, it is not an IT -focused role.
The major difference is that the Business Analyst interfaces with Business Users while interface with the Software System is secondary while System Analyst’s primary interface is with the Software System and may not have direct interaction with the business users.
Throughout the late 1980s and 1990s, organisations evolved their IT systems to take further advantage of computer technology – but many projects failed to deliver the desired benefits often because of a focus on delivering ‘technology’ at the expense of business needs.