Business Analyst and Data Analysts have same roles, while both BA and Data analysts use data to enhance business decisions in different ways.
The role of a Business Analyst is to scrutinize and document the market environment. They assist in businesses to enhance their processes, services, products and software by data analysis. Moreover, a business analyst does not require any technical or programming skills. Whenever a business comes across with any problem in present situation or in future, it’s a business analyst’s job to assist in facilitating a solution.
The tasks or roles of a Business Analyst are
- Define business case
- Analyze and understanding business requirements
- Gathering Requirements
- Project Management and development skills
- Need to find the validate solutions to the problem
- Handling change request
- Interacting with colleagues and clients to keep on updating the technical teams regarding changes in the project according to the need of stake holders
- UAT (User Acceptance Testing)
A Data Analyst is a professional who works on data; in common we can say translating numbers into alphabets or English. Data analysts spend most of their time on researching unorganized data and come up with creating reports that show intuitions which is provided to the respective teams. Nowadays, Data Analysts are popularly known as Data Scientists.
The tasks or roles of a Data Analyst are
- Need to understand Data Structure
- Need to Produce and maintain records for different departments
- Need to acquire knowledge on analyzing tools
- Creating both internal and client-facing reports
The Data Analysts work more independently than Business Analysts. Moreover, Data Analysts should have knowledge on the data analyzing tools; whereas Business Analysts should have Domain Knowledge of clients’ business and their services.
The requirements of business analysts are:
- Expertise in data research
- Elicitation of information from stake holders
- The ability to draw use-case and activity diagrams.
- SAP skills
- Knowledge on MS Office like Microsoft Excel, MS Word, and MS PowerPoint skills
- Proficiency in SQL
- Experience in Project Management
- Strong communication skills
Data analysts are mostly number oriented. The skills required for data analyst includes:
- Expertise in Analytical skills
- Data mining techniques
- Should have knowledge on upcoming technologies, data frameworks, and machine learning
- Experience in SQL/CQL, R, and Python
- Expertise in agile development methodologies
Responsibilities of Data Analyst and Business Analyst are
Data analysts assist organization by analyzing data insights to present to business stakeholders.
They work with:
- IT departments
- Data management teams
- Data scientists
Data analysts’ responsibilities:
- By using techniques need to acquire insights from data
- Database management
- Optimizing statistical efficiency and quality
- Acquiring data from primary or secondary sources
- Locating and Correcting code issues by organizing with technical team members
- Working with management to prioritize business needs
- Enhancing the opportunities in the process
The responsibilities of Business Analyst depend on the industry or a company, but the primary objective of a BA is to analyze and derive intuitions from data to make appropriate business decisions.
Responsibilities of Business Analysts are:
- Need to analyze the complex data
- Identifying areas that needs to improve in business sector of an organization
- Addressing business needs, problems and their solutions
- Working with IT teams and stake holders to escalate and resolve issues
- Recommending possible solutions
Nowadays many companies are data oriented, where both business analyst and data analyst can employ. Business Analysts can assist to improve the business of an organization whereas Data Analyst can assist in increasing the overall production and business performance.