Business Analyst (Business Skills)

In addition to project management, I identified business analyst as another set of skills related to information systems.  There are several paragraphs that define business analysis from BABOK Guide 2.0 (Business Analysis Body of Knowledge) by IIBA (International Institute of Business Analysis).  My favorite line is: business analysts often play a central role in aligning the needs of a business units with the capabilities delivered by information technology, and may serve as a "translator" between those groups.  They listed project management, software development, quality assurance, and interaction design as related disciplines.

The BABOK Guide 2.0 lists these as knowledge areas:

• Business Analysis Planning and Monitoring,
• Elicitation,
• Requirements Management and Communication, 
• Enterprise Analysis,
• Requirements Analysis,
• Solution Assessment and Validation,
• Underlying Competencies,

There are application areas for business analysis and related professional bodies of an area listed in BABOK that I found interesting: Agile Development, Business Intelligence, Business Process Management, IT Service Management (ITIL), Lean and Six Sigma, Project Management, Software Quality Assurance, Software Process Improvement (CMMI), Strategic Planning, and Usability and User Experience Design.