A comment on my last post reminded me about another aspect of the BA job/title, that being the job ads for BAs with experience in Oracle Financials or some number of SAP modules or some such thing. They are looking for people to configure these applications.
Now, I have done a lot of projects where I did the requirements work that led to evaluation of software packages and eventually the selection of a winner, that being followed by implementation of that winner. That did not make me or anyone else in the company an expert in that package, so you could either get training on how to configure the package (as opposed to eventually training new users of the package), or you could hire consultants to do the configuration based on your requirements. These people are often employees of the package vendor, although 3rd parties can be found for the popular products as well, either will do.
I call these people “Application Analysts”, and it looks like a good job if you have gained the appropriate knowledge and like that that kind of thing… but job ads for this kind of work almost always use the BA title. These are not BAs, these are people who use what BAs do as input to their work, just like developers.
