What is Business Analysis? Business analysis is the practice of enabling change in an enterprise by defining needs and recommending solutions that deliver value to stakeholders. Business analysis enables an enterprise to articulate needs and the rationale for change, and to design and describe solutions that can deliver value. Business analysis is performed on a variety of initiatives within an enterprise. Initiatives may be strategic, tactical, or operational. Business analysis may be performed within the boundaries of a project or throughout enterprise evolution and continuous improvement. It can be used to understand the current state, to define the future state, and to determine the activities required to move from the current to the future state. Business analysis can be performed from a diverse array of perspectives. The BABOK® Guide describes several of these perspectives: agile, business intelligence, information technology, business architecture, and business process management. A perspective can be thought of as a lens through which the business analysis practitioner views their work activities based on the current context. One or many perspectives may apply to an initiative, and the perspectives outlined in the BABOK® Guide do not represent all the contexts for business analysis or the complete set of business analysis disciplines.

1. A business analyst is any person who performs business analysis tasks described in the BABOK® Guide, no matter their job title or organizational role. Business analysts are responsible for discovering, synthesizing, and analyzing information
   
   

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Introduction


Structure of the BABOK® Guide

from a variety of sources within an enterprise, including tools, processes, documentation, and stakeholders. The business analyst is responsible for eliciting the actual needs of stakeholders—which frequently involves investigating and clarifying their expressed desires—in order to determine underlying issues and causes.

Business analysts play a role in aligning the designed and delivered solutions with the needs of stakeholders. The activities that business analysts perform include:

• understanding enterprise problems and goals, • analyzing needs and solutions,
• devising strategies,
• driving change, and

• facilitating stakeholder collaboration.
Other common job titles for people who perform business analysis include:

• business architect,
• business systems analyst,
• data analyst,
• enterprise analyst,
• management consultant,
• process analyst,
• product manager,
• product owner,
• requirements engineer, and • systems analyst.

Structure of the BABOK® Guide

The core content of the BABOK® Guide is composed of business analysis tasks organized into knowledge areas. Knowledge areas are a collection of logically (but not sequentially) related tasks. These tasks describe specific activities that accomplish the purpose of their associated knowledge area.

The Business Analysis Key Concepts, Underlying Competencies, Techniques, and Perspectives sections form the extended content in the BABOK® Guide that helps guide business analysts to better perform business analysis tasks.

• Business Analysis Key Concepts: define the key terms needed to understand all other content, concepts, and ideas within the BABOK® Guide.

• Underlying Competencies: provide a description of the behaviours, characteristics, knowledge, and personal qualities that support the effective practice of business analysis.


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Structure of the BABOK® Guide Introduction


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• Techniques: provide a means to perform business analysis tasks. The techniques described in the BABOK® Guide are intended to cover the most common and widespread techniques practiced within the business analysis community.
  
  
• Perspectives: describe various views of business analysis. Perspectives help business analysts working from various points of view to better perform business analysis tasks, given the context of the initiative.