Business Analyst vs. Data Architect: Who should do the source-to-target mapping?
An Oracle user asks who should do the source-to-target mapping in a company--the Business Analyst or Data Architect.
Who should do the source-to-target mapping? The Business Analyst or Data Architect?
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.
