Does Technical Knowledge is required for Business Analyst?

Business analyst should have good functional and technical knowledge for understanding the requirements, do the Gap analysis and to identify which technology suits the best to develop the complete solution. 

The Business analyst who has technical will have more advantages when compared with business analyst with only functional knowledge. The Business analyst with technical knowledge also called as IT Business Analyst in few organizations. 

Having technical knowledge for a Business Analyst is very useful when taking to clients while defining a solution for their requirements, some client might have requirement of integration of different systems. For example Integration of POS system with ERP application.  In this case client will ask what is the best way to integrate the two systems, security issues, how synchronize of data works between POS and ERP etc. BA should be able to respond to the client immediately on the call with the solution that we will web services like SOAP protocols to synchronize the data and using Data integration, ETL tools etc. 

If you didn’t say at that point of time, client might think you don’t know what is taking about and that makes negative impression. 

And also Business Analyst doesn’t need to know How to do the coding for the entire application, he should be knowing on the high level like few difference between the database, which database is more good in terms of Scalability, performance etc. so that he can suggest the client on the call immediately and not only the database but also the technologies like Java, ASP.net, PHP, Perl and their frameworks etc which will be better in terms of Scalability, performance etc.

The BA who has technical knowledge has more value in the market for the hiring companies, the work will be challenging and good pay as well.

The BA should have excellent communication skills with basic technology knowledge.

Yes the Business Analyst should have the Technical Knowledge/skills.