Who is a Business Analyst?

A Business Analyst is someone who combines analytics knowledge with strong domain expertise.
Business analysts are valuable to businesses because they tend to focus on the role of analytics in
the context of a business problem or an opportunity. Business analytics (BA) refers to the skills,
technologies, practices for continuous iterative exploration and investigation of past business
performance to gain insight and drive business planning. Business analytics focuses on developing
new insights and understanding of business performance based on data and statistical methods.
Business analytics makes extensive use of analytical modeling and numerical analysis, including
explanatory and predictive modeling, and fact-based management to drive decision making

What are the skills required to be a Business Analyst?

1. Business Analysts don’t need to be expert programmers. They don’t need to know very
advanced statistical modeling. However, they need to know a little bit of everything.
2. Business analysts need to have a good understanding of the business and/or domain they
are in.
3. They need to understand basic statistics and have knowledge of simple analytics
techniques including basic predictive modeling.
4. They are expected to, of course, know Excel. Knowledge of more specialized analytics
tools like SAS or R is an added bonus.
5. Business analysts are hired not for how well they know a tool, but rather how well they
can understand a business problem or opportunity and use data to come up with a
decision.

Role Of A Business Analyst

1. Understanding the Requirements of the Business

The key skillset required for this part of the process is the capability of the Analysts
to filter the different messages as well as the requirements of the project
stakeholders or consumers into a consistent, but, – single vision.

Thus, a business analyst devotes a large chunk of time, asking questions. They may
even need to conduct interviews, read, observe and align the developers with their
target goal.

They also need to carry out analysis and look for solutions for both, the organization,
as well as the customer.

2. Analyzing Information

The analysis phase is the stage during which a BA reviews the elements in detail,
asserting clearly and unambiguously as what the business needs to do in order to
achieve its objective.

During this stage, the BA will also require to interact with the development team and
the technical architects, to design the layout and define accurately what the solution
should look like.

3. Communicating With a Broad Range Of People

Good Business Analysts need to dedicate countless hours actively communicating

back and forth. More than just speaking, they need to listen and recognize verbal
and non-verbal information.
Generally, people watching the presentation of Business Analysts are senior
executives of the organization, as well as key management people of IT. Building an
open conversation, validating that you understand what you have heard, and
communicating what you have gathered to the stakeholders is extremely important to
keep the vehicle operating efficiently.

Therefore, Business Analysts are expected to impress the stakeholders and other
authorities with their presentations, which in turn would have a notable effect on the
growth of the business.

4. Documenting the Findings

An effective document is the one that clearly states options for solving particular
difficulties and then helps select the best one. There are often times situations where
a BA might miss out on a few requirements from the document.

Consequently, the developers won‟t be aware of the same which in turn would lead
to a considerable loss of time and efforts, as they would be required to redesign the
product, this time including the missed part.

Hence, it is extremely critical for any BA to effectively document the findings where
each requirement of the client is efficiently mentioned

5. Evaluating and Implementing the Finest Solution

Ensuring that the systems‟ design is up to the mark, as per the needs of the
customer is the next decisive step. The most important job of the Business Analyst is
to spend time identifying options for solving particular difficulties and then help pick
the best one. The preferred solution is then assessed throughout the layout and
planning to assure that it meets the business requirements.

7-steps of Business Analytics Process

Step 1. Defining the business needs

The first stage in the business analytics process involves understanding what the
business would like to improve on or the problem it wants solved. Sometimes, the
goal is broken down into smaller goals. Relevant data needed to solve these
business goals are decided upon by the business stakeholders, business users with
the domain knowledge and the business analyst. At this stage, key questions such
as, “what data is available”, “how can we use it”, “do we have sufficient data” must
be answered.

Step 2. Explore the data

This stage involves cleaning the data, making computations for missing data,
removing outliers, and transforming combinations of variables to form new variables.
Time series graphs are plotted as they are able to indicate any patterns or outliers.

Once the data has been cleaned, the analyst will try to make better sense of the
data. The analyst will plot the data using scatter plots (to identify possible correlation
or non-linearity). He will visually check all possible slices of data and summarise the
data using appropriate visualisation and descriptive statistics (such as mean,
standard deviation, range, mode, median) that will help provide a basic
understanding of the data. At this stage, the analyst is already looking for general
patterns and actionable insights that can be derived to achieve the business goal.
Step 3. Analyse the data

At this stage, using statistical analysis methods such as correlation analysis and
hypothesis testing, the analyst will find all factors that are related to the target
variable. The analyst will also perform simple regression analysis to see whether
simple predictions can be made.

Step 4. Predict what is likely to happen

Business analytics is about being proactive in decision making. At this stage, the
analyst will model the data using predictive techniques that include decision trees,
neural networks and logistic regression. These techniques will uncover insights and
patterns that highlight relationships and „hidden evidences‟ of the most influential
variables. The analyst will then compare the predictive values with the actual values
and compute the predictive errors.

Step 5. Optimise (find the best solution)

At this stage the analyst will apply the predictive model coefficients and outcomes to
run „what-if‟ scenarios, using targets set by managers to determine the best solution,
with the given constraints and limitations. The analyst will select the optimal solution
and model based on the lowest error, management targets and his intuitive
recognition of the model coefficients that are most aligned to the organisation‟s
strategic goal.

Step 6. Make a decision and measure the outcome

The analyst will then make decisions and take action based on the derived insights
from the model and the organisational goals.

Step 7. Update the system with the results of the decision

Finally the results of the decision and action and the new insights derived from the
model are recorded and updated into the database. Information such as, „was the
decision and action effective?‟, „how did the treatment group compare with the
control group?‟ and „what was the return on investment?‟ are uploaded into the
database. The result is an evolving database that is continuously updated as soon
as new insights and knowledge are derived.