One of the most important responsibilities of the Business Analyst is to
understand the data that is needed by the organization to operate
efficiently. Each time a business interacts with a supplier or
customer, information is captured by the business. This information is
required for operational, tactical and strategic purposes.
Data is a valuable business asset that can be sliced and diced in
different ways to generate business intelligence. This business intelligence is
useful to identify problems (e.g. supply chain issues, distribution
bottlenecks) and opportunities (understanding buying patters, reducing
inventories).
Many organizations have serious problems with data quality, availability,
consistency, currency and accessibility. These problems are often
caused when data is fragmented across multiple systems or just poorly
managed.
The method that is used by the business analyst to understand an
organization's data is to build a conceptual data model. The data
model illustrates the "things" of interest to the business (i.e. data
entities) and important facts (i.e. attributes) about those things. It
also depicts relationships between the things of interest and fundamental
business rules.
Although a fully detailed data model can sometimes look like the wiring
diagram for the space shuttle, abstractions of the data model can be
produced
that are less detailed and more "user friendly".
