Business Analyst vs. Data Architect: Who should do the source-to-target mapping?

Business Analyst vs. Data Architect: Who should do the source-to-target mapping?

Who should do the source-to-target mapping? The Business Analyst or Data Architect?

    Requires Free Membership to View

    By submitting your registration information to SearchOracle.com you agree to receive email communications from TechTarget and TechTarget partners. We encourage you to read our Privacy Policy which contains important disclosures about how we collect and use your registration and other information. If you reside outside of the United States, by submitting this registration information you consent to having your personal data transferred to and processed in the United States. Your use of SearchOracle.com is governed by our Terms of Use. You may contact us at webmaster@TechTarget.com.

This one may be tough to give a "100% right" answer to as it would really depend on the actual role descriptions for each position. In other words, different companies will have different role descriptions and some tend to overlap roles so there truly is no right or wrong answer to this. Let's take a look at the roles by their typical definition:
  • A Business Analyst (BA) is responsible for analyzing the business needs of their clients to help identify business problems and propose solutions. Typical BA activities include requirements gathering (functional and non-functional), solutions development, project planning, etc.
  • A Data Architect, on the other hand, is responsible for developing and maintaining a formal description of the data and data structures - this can include data definitions, data models, data flow diagrams, etc. Typical activities include data modelling, ETL (Extraction / Transformation / Load) processing, data mining, data analysis, etc.

The better answer, then, in my opinion, would be a Data Architect. In most scenarios, the Business Analyst would document the requirements while the data architect would perform the actual mapping of the data.

This was first published in July 2008

Join the conversationComment

Share
Comments

    Results

    Contribute to the conversation

    All fields are required. Comments will appear at the bottom of the article.