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Business analysis and systems analysis, what's the difference? There's a lot of confusion right now about the differences between the two.
‘Business analysis’ is a study of what the business is supposed to do, while ‘systems analysis’ is a study of the business’ systematic behavior (hopefully, based on what it’s supposed to do) with a particular emphasis on its methods and tools; in other words, how it does things. This has led me to the conclusion that pure conventional business analysis is insufficient for just about any information technology project. On the other hand, systems analysis generally misses the foundation of the work required, which then becomes an almost insurmountable challenge for analysts.
So, it all boils down to this: Business Analysis determines "what" is required, while Systems Analysis determines "how" we're going to execute or implement what is required.
How to separate these two views when doing the analysis is, of course, the challenge.
There are some legitimate different points of view on how to do analysis. However, tools will not help us get the analysis done, they will only enable us to record the result in some technical format that's needed to build the solution. While that's very interesting, the tools we use are pretty alien to our clients and subject-matter experts (SMEs). They have no interest in seeing some technical representation of their business requirements. The challenge for analysts, then, is to stop using these tools as a panacea for business requirements analysis.
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