BA vs. SA, and BSA?

It seems that the title "Business Systems Analyst" is getting more popular these days.  And many people could be curious about differences between Business Analyst, Systems Analyst and Business Analyst.

And of course, what we consider as Business Analysts these days are technically IT Business Analysts, and the old traditional Business Analysts are business and finance acumen.

What are differences between BA, SA and BSA? Bottom line - it really depends on the employer.

To briefly explain, one of my past employers has three teams that were competing on the same turf: Change Management team that acted as a PMO with a few IT Business Business Analysts, Enterprise Applications team that managed business applications and systems with a few "Information Systems Analysts" which are equivalent to BSA, and Development & Integration team that had a few developers.

If you simply say Systems Analyst, the duties and responsibilities are probably more suitable for traditional systems and infrastructure (such as networking, servers, etc.).

An IT Business Analyst is supposed to be the analysis expert - gathering translating business requirements into technical details and features, or extract the data from systems and transform it in a consumable format for the business. The truth is, I never liked worked with BAs. They usually don't carry any technical or technology knowledge, although some of them are really good at researching and understanding.

So, what is a Business Systems Analyst? In short, a BSA is a systems muscle with business brain. A BSA carries the mindset of a business analyst with the skillset of a systems analyst, but specifically for business applications.

A BSA is a get-your-hand-dirty job. S/he will perform the analysis of learning a business process or operations, gathering requirements for changes in the business applications or a new features (whether custom or add-on), make such changes on her/his own or with external help, develop test plans and guide the business to test them, and then finally implement - of course, on top of day-to-day operations support & troubleshooting.

Because a typical BSA job includes micro-project management, I personally find it very difficult for a team of BA and a team of BSA to work along well.

It is not rare that a BSA will work inside VMs that SEs and SAs may set up, and manage applications that reside on servers. But in today's environment, there are a lot of "cloud" business applications. In my personal work environment, managing a VM instance is very minimal.

If you are seeking advice whether to become a BSA or not, I can tell you that I enjoy working as a BSA.