Business Analyst vs. Systems Analyst

Here's a question that's been troubling the BA world for over a decade. We have "Business" business analysts and "Systems" business analysts. One is employed by the business to solve business problems, the other is employed by IT Systems to solve business problems using the systems in place. I consider myself a Business focused Business Analyst, with a strong knowledge of systems. What that means is that I focus on understanding the business first, and then help the business use whatever the best systems solution is available at the time.

What I've found is that solving business problems is always the best solution. If you focus on systems, you're only going to have temporary solutions, and you'll always be trying to fit the business into some new system scheme.

There are a few schools of thought on how to discover the business. My favorite is using process. I've found that most people in business understand a process that they repeat. It's especially true in manufacturing, but goes across the board into almost every aspect of business. Some of the tools for process discovery are Use Cases, Data Flow Diagrams (Context Diagrams), Document Flow Diagrams, and Sequence Diagrams. There are also many others.

Another way to discover the business is using data. Reports, forms, tables, catalogs, etc... Dissect the data and the process will follow. This is somewhat true, although I've found that BA's that focus on data assume that all of the data is part of all of the processes. The primary tool to analyze data is the Entity Relationship Diagram.