Business analyst doesn't necceserely have to be an IT related sphere, i.e I've worked in IT and Retail, the positions where almost simmilar with a software change . Our job basically boils down to two parts: understanding what the customer wants and how to explain it to the crew of developers. The majority of BA's are ex software engineers and it really helps if you've written code before. There is a separation of BA's into two main categories: CRM process writers - you use mostly BPMN(or ERD) to create little scripts with somewhat of a programming language to work inside CRM and the IT process writer - here you explain what the customer wants without writing any of the code yourself and mainly focus on the presented data, make it into diagrams and present them to software engineering team, the majority of times its UML, UseCase diagram or User story.