The title "business analyst" has been misappropriated by IT and needs to be immediately released and returned to the business side of the house. Who would have thought that a simple misnomer would have such far-reaching consequences? Well, certainly not those in IT; they innocently set out to improve service quality and relationships with their business customers by creating a well-intentioned liaison.

Let's examine the situation more closely. It all started when IT needed better business requirements to build systems in support of the business. The business was reluctant to allocate a business resource to an IT project when it believed that IT should fund its own requirements gathering. While the need for this resource was clear and justifiable, the source of funding caused the business analyst (BA) to reside on the IT side, which is where the problem begins.

Unfortunately, the IT-based BA typically has no firsthand business experience. In fact, most job postings for BAs indicate that industry knowledge is "desired" but not required. More valuable is that the candidate knows SAS, RUD, and SQL. It's no wonder that internally developed systems designed to support the business often fail or receive tepid reception from the business users. The downfall of using a BA who lacks extensive business knowledge is in not knowing what questions to ask, especially when generic processes need to be implemented countrywide.