Any person in the organization who performs the tasks that are described within the BABOK® Guide is considered to be a business analyst

The BABOK® v3 Guide describes business analysts as follows: “Business analysts are responsible for discovering, synthesizing, and analyzing information from a variety of sources within an enterprise, including tools, processes, documentation, and stakeholders. The business analyst is responsible for eliciting the actual needs of stakeholders – which frequently involves investigating and clarifying their expressed desires – in order to determine underlying issues and causes.”

So, if we consider this very broad definition of who the business analysts are in the organization, we would most likely recognize that many projects or product-related roles within the organization could be considered as playing a business analysis role to a certain extent. 

Examples of roles that often include a variety of business analysis tasks would be as follows: 

• The business architect
• The business systems analyst
• The data analyst
• The enterprise analyst
• The management consultant
• The product owner
• And the list goes on….

You probably get the picture that business analysis stretches across many different roles, perspectives, and areas within the enterprise.