What is the difference between Business Analysis and System Analysis?

Answer 1

Let's start by differentiating the role from the job title. Many organizations have Systems Analysts as a job title, but often the role of performing systems analysis is often assigned to employees with other job titles, like Architect, Business Analyst, Developer or, I even know a few companies where the person with the Project Manager title performs systems analysis activities.

Systems Analysis Role

For sake of making this easy to understand, let's focus only on the role, taking for granted that different organizations may create a formal Systems Analyst job title to perform all of the system analysis activities; or they may split these activities and shove them here and there with other job titles.

System Analysis activities focus around the translation of the business requirements into systems requirements. Business requirements have to be analyzed and decomposed into a series of smaller requirements for different components, providing directions for the engineering team.

Example

Let's say that the business requirement is to add a new optional "Where did you hear about us?" drop down on the Register page for a trade organization. Possible values are {"TV", "Radio", "Marc's List", "The New York Times", "The PMI Newsletter", and "Other"}

This would typically be written by the Business Analyst.

Systems analysis activities would decompose this requirement into:

- New fields or a new table required to capture the user's selections.

- A new table required to capture the drop down values.

- A change in the user interface to add the drop down control.

- etcetera

2 Aspects of System Analysis

The first step is to look at everything that is needed to make the new requirement work. Look at what is required in the database area, the local session information, the middleware layers, connectivity requirements, the user interface, or perhaps a new system interface, a new web service or something of the sort.

After analyzing what is required, the systems analyst must look into what can break if the requirement is implemented. This implies analyzing each and every system component to ensure compatibility, and that there are no conflicts.

The activities of the system analyst border those of the Business Analyst at the start of the analysis and those of the Architect towards the end of the analysis.

For modern SDLC methodologies (RUP, Agile, XP, EssUP, etc.) system analysis also defines the scope of the system under consideration and models requirements by taking the black box view and whitening it. (if this is obscure, stay tuned for an upcoming blog entry on black box versus white box.)

Should Analysis be performed by Analysts?

I have encountered several IT Managers who believe that analysis is not necessary. My answer to them: "Whether known or not, system analysis is performed somewhere in the organization. The question is... Is it done by the Analyst, the Architect, the Developer, or if not done before deployment, then, done after deployment when the defects are analyzed? It is, by far, less costly to have the Analyst perform system analysis."