The next big skills every business analyst needs today

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What’s changing for business analysts in today’s fast-paced, data-backed high-tech industry? Everything.

Domain specialists are still important, but today’s business analyst plays a crucial role in the entire life cycle of a project—from defining a problem statement and mining hidden insights to designing the right data strategy for a compelling, business-relevant solution.

To drive industry transformation, you have to understand data—from defining a data strategy to performing analysis, modeling, solutioning and more.

Rewriting the rules              

To ride the wave of epic disruption, high-tech companies are unleashing the power of data to become more intelligent businesses and find new growth through innovation.

This is where the business analyst role becomes critical—and interesting. You’re fueling an organization’s transformation into an insight-powered business.

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The next big skills for business analysts

It’s important to grow your understanding of data modeling, statistics and data architecting, combined with critical thinking and data visualization.

But just as important is knowing when to apply these skills across a data-science project—that is the next big skill.

Here is a step-by-step look at specific skills and techniques business analysts use to add value:

Stage 1: Define the problem. You start the journey with a design-thinking session, collaborating with experts from cross-functional teams to understand possible problem areas. A precise description of the problem, backed by rigorous document analysis, holds the key.

Stage 2: Identify and access accurate, clean data. After establishing a clear understanding of the objectives, identify and gain access to the right data, then clean it. Exploratory data analysis is one of the most frequently used techniques at this stage.

Stage 3: Analyze and interpret. Now that you have the relevant data, you can use different statistical techniques to build models that are more accurate and help in faster decision-making. A predictive maintenance model is one example that can offer better insights.

Stage 4: Report results. This is the most crucial step, as it requires you to share results with business and technology stakeholders who will make decisions based on the recommendations. As a business analyst in the new age, you must have experience using data-reporting tools to present it with right visualizations so that it is easy for stakeholders to grasp the outputs.

Stage 5: Reproduce and maintain. As a final step, ensure every small detail responsible for the solution are well documented in a format easily understood by technical as well as functional tools.

In today’s evolving high-tech landscape, your role as a business analyst will take many new shapes and dimensions. Become a master of data skills and the application of these skills across the project and you’ll always be in demand.

Are you an industry specialist or data-science technology expert? We’re growing our team. Find your fit with us today.

For a deeper look at how business analysts can learn, adapt and deliver value in a fast-changing, data-intensive, high-tech industry, read the IIBA Data Science Age – Driving differentiation in High Tech whitepaper, developed in collaboration with Accenture.

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