Data Analyst Vs Business Analyst
In this article, we will discover what business analysts and data analysts do and how these two professions differ from one another.
Business analysts and data analysts are both very popular career options in the industry, but they differ greatly from one another. As opposed to data analysts, who analyze business data to produce reports and dashboards for business users, business analysts are primarily involved in the software development process.
What does a business analyst do?
In a software development project, a business analyst serves as an intermediary between the business team and the technology team. Consider a scenario where a sizable IT services provider is creating loan servicing software for a bank. As a business analyst, your role would be to work with the key stakeholders and business users in the bank to understand their requirements for the software.
The business analyst's job will be to understand the needs of these users, understand the processes in the bank, prepare the requirements document and communicate and work with the technology team to provide and explain these requirements to them so that they can develop the software as per the requirements. As a part of their job, the business analyst will also create mockups, use cases, test cases, etc., that will help the tech team build a robust software.
What does a data analyst do?
A data analyst, as the name suggests, analyses data. A data analyst works with data to create dashboards and reports for business users. Let’s take a bank’s loan department as an example. The bank’s senior management will want regular reports on how the business is doing. For example, they may want loan disbursal details by region. They may also want reports on how different marketing channels are performing. Along with this, they may also want a snapshot view of the business in current month viz-a-viz previous month, % of bad loans, and so on.
Since a bank completely works on IT systems, all this data is available in various systems and databases. The data analyst sits in the middle of this data and the business users and prepares the dashboards and reports as requested by the business users. Unlike a business analyst, a data analyst doesn’t just gather the requirements and send it to someone else to prepare these insights. He is actually responsible for creating these dashboards and reports.
Data analysts use various software to create these dashboards. The most common software is Microsoft Excel. The data analyst can pull all the required data in excel sheets and then prepare dashboards, reports, graphs, etc. as per the requirements and share them with business users for their perusal. Nowadays, there are many sophisticated software available, such as Power BI, QlikView, Tableau, etc., that make it easy to connect data from different sources and prepare powerful, real-time reports.
