Business Analysis

Business analysis involves soliciting, analyzing and documenting a set of business requirements that a solution to a business problem must satisfy. For information systems, requirements generally fall into the following Architectural Categories:

Business Concepts and Data
Business Processes and Functions
Business Locations and Communications
Business Roles and Interactions
Business Events and Schedules
Business Policies, Procedures and Rules

In addition to requirements, analysts will solicit information and act as facilitator among various organizational groups in order to discover potential risks and gaps within the proposed solution. This may extend into a full cost-benefit analysis of potential projects in order to advise management on the project's expected value to the business.

Once Requirements are stable (enough), and a project is in progress, they will act as a facilitator between the business team and the development team. Because of the wide variety of projects that may be encountered, the analyst must be familiar with, and have a working knowledge of various modeling and development theories and methodologies.

The Business Analysts normally liaise with the stakeholders of business enterprises to identify current and future business requirements as well as with Enterprise Architects to enable their development of business blueprints. They also conduct business gap analysis to plan appropriate technology implementation in alignment with business goals.