The other posts in this forum have really answered this one!

One point I would like to add though is this: Business Analysis seems to be a misnamed role - we don't tend to analyse Businesses as such, and we don't just work in Businesses but also charities, Government bodies and so on. In fact, we tend to analyse requirements for change. "Change Requirements Analyst" seems a much more meaningful title but of course we are stuck with this BA label so there you go.

Where did the label come from though? I suspect that System Analysts (who've been around since Turing I suspect) found themselves in the early 80's trying to answer questions that were far more about Businesses than systems. So they concluded that as they weren't doing Systems Analysis that it was Business Analysis.

And what about Analysis? Defintion of analysis can be summarised as "breaking a problem down in to it's component parts to expose the logical inter-relationships". Given that definition, analysis does not need to be (and arguable should not be) done using any particular method - you do what you need to do to do the analysis. It is interesting to note that there is only one scientific method - why should Business Analysis need hundreds of them?

Hope this helps!

- Guy