Changing (BA)asics

Business Analyst is supposed to bridge the gap between business users and technical solution provider by using the business domain knowledge and technology understanding.
As per international institute of busyness analysis, “The Business Analysis Professional is responsible for requirements development and requirements management. Specifically, the Business Analysis Professional elicits, analyzes, validates and documents business,
organizational and/or operational requirements. Solutions are not predetermined by the Business Analysis Professional, but are driven solely by the requirements of the business. Solutions often include a systems development component, but may also consist of process improvement or organizational change. “
This traditional definition for role of a BA is accurate for customized application developments where some needed to help customer understand his requirement , document it and explain to technical team for developing application. In current IT project landscape there are many ways to address a business problem and hence role of BA is changing with broader set of responsibilities

Package Implementation : Packages are off the shelf component which provide standard set of solution for a particular business function ( with minimum development effort) so in such projects the role of BA changes to Business process Analyst and even business process re-engineering. BA will perform "AS-IS" and "TO-BE" process analysis and then help technical consultants to customize wherever needed.
Support Projects : For support projects BA will handle level 2 and level 3 support for an application where his job would be to resolve functional queries posted by end users. He may also be involved with application developers for bug fixing and other maintenance related issues.
Reporting projects : One of core responsibility of BA is process large data and derive conclusion from it, reporting or data warehouse projects focus on this strength where a BA needs to provide reports as needed by business.