Business Analyst Developer Salary in 2024

Business Analyst

Business analysts (BAs) are the glue between IT and the business, turning to data analytics to evaluate processes, determine requirements and provide data-oriented findings and reports for leadership and stakeholders.

BAs play the role of an intermediary between business leaders and users to understand how data-driven changes to process, products, services, software and hardware can be made to increase efficiencies and add value. BAs have to be able to articulate that vision but also have to temper that vision against what is technically possible, and economically and functionally reasonable. A BA’s role is often transforming data to create better products, better hardware tools, better software, better services or better process.

The International Institute of Business Analysis (IIBA), a nonprofit professional association, describes the business analyst as ‘an agent of change’: Business analysis is a discipline for bringing order to chaos – a way of organising complex projects in organisations, facilitating communication among stakeholders, and changing systems or structures to better meet business needs. (Business analysis ‘is a disciplined approach for introducing and managing change to organisations, whether they are for-profit businesses, governments or non-profits’, the IIBA writes.)

Business analyst job description

BAs create new models to support business decisions, creating initiatives and strategies with finance and IT teams in order to either increase the bottom line or lower costs. ‘Good business analysis candidates must have “a good knowledge of regulatory and reporting requirements and experience in forecasting, budgeting and financial analysis and an understanding of key performance indicators,” says Robert Half Technology.

According to Robert Half, a business analyst’s job description typically includes the following responsibilities:

• Demonstrating the ability to conduct a complex business analysis that details problems, opportunities and solutions for a business enterprise.
• Budgeting and forecasting
• Planning and monitoring
• Variance analysis
• Pricing
• Reporting
• Defining business requirements and reporting them back to stakeholders

For business analysts it’s all about prioritising technical and functional requirements, understanding what the client needs and what is feasible to develop. You have to understand how systems work, how they divide up responsibilities, who has to do what, and what steps are needed to bring everyone on board.

As a result, the business analyst is evolving into a transformational role within the IT landscape – particularly as companies look to data to inform the way business is conducted. There are numerous issues that a business analyst can solve; companies are continually faced with legacy systems, ageing technology, broken processes, poor customer or client satisfaction, or simply growing so large they’ve become siloed.

Business analyst skills

The business analyst role requires a combination of hard skills and soft skills: the ability to pull, analyse and report data trends, communicate those trends to others, and apply those trends to business goals and needs. You can be a business analyst without a background in IT, if you have a general understanding of how systems, products and tools work. Conversely, you can have a strong IT background with much less business under your belt, but want to move away from IT into this hybrid role. The business analyst role is often the bridge between the business and IT, so having a deep understanding of both business and IT can be helpful.

The IIBA suggests that some of the most desired competencies and experience of 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
• Cost-benefit analysis
• Processes modeling
• Understanding of networks, databases, and other technology