A business analyst is someone who looks at, understands, and writes about how a business works, including its products, services, and software, by looking at data and information. A business analyst helps make a company work better by using their understanding of both technology and how the business operates.

Some of the tasks a business analyst does are making detailed business analysis, creating budgets and predicting future financials, developing business strategies, making plans and keeping track of progress, comparing actual results with expected ones, setting prices, preparing reports, and explaining business needs to stakeholders. The job of a business analyst works in four main areas or levels of business activities – operational, project, enterprise, and competitive. Each of these areas in business analysis plays a big role in how well a business performs.They help improve profit and make operations more efficient at every step of the business process and in every part of the business.

Business focuses
Because a business analyst can work in many different areas, they can perform their role in specific fields. Kathleen B. Haas explains that business analysts are needed in four areas of business: operations, projects, the whole company, and competition.

1. Operations focus– Business analysts can use big data to look at how the way a business operates affects its ability to create value. Business analysts help make a company run better by finding ways to save money, buy better tools, make workers more productive, and produce more of the products that customers want.
2. Project focus – When a business analyst starts working on a project, they tend to pay more attention to areas that were usually ignored before. The business analyst plays an important role in projects.Their job involves connecting strategic planning with planning for Information Systems and technology.They also consider how business decisions might affect future performance.Additionally, they use modelling tools to show the current state and the desired future state of the business to all employees at different levels.
3. Enterprise focus- A business analyst who works in the enterprise area helps to improve the creation of new and innovative solutions by using technology. A business analyst working in an enterprise setting does several important tasks.They create models of how the business is now and how it might be in the future.They look into possible opportunities, problems, and whether ideas are practical.They suggest new projects to develop solutions.They check if predictions and assumptions are correct.They evaluate proposed solutions to make sure they work.They also compare what was planned for the business with what actually happened.
4. Competitive focus- Business analysts look at the competitive environment to create a useful strategy that applies to every part of the business. One of the key roles of a business that this is connected to is marketing. By looking at how customers behave when they use a business’s products and those of its competitors, as well as how different brands stand out in the market, we can find out how easily one product can be replaced by another and how well each product performs.