Data in modern organisations behaves like a restless traveller. It never stays in one place. It is constantly moving from system to system, handed off between applications, application programming interfaces (APIs), integration layers, processors, validators, workflow engines, and regulatory reporting platforms. And just like travellers crossing borders, every movement introduces risk. One missing document, one careless officer, one weak checkpoint, and chaos spreads through the entire journey.
This is why integrity in transit has become the quiet backbone of trust in regulated industries. It is not simply a technical aspiration — it is a discipline, a culture, and in many ways, a national obligation for institutions whose operations depend on clean, verifiable, and accountable data exchanges.
Yet in this long chain of movement, the business analyst (BA) sits at a particularly uncomfortable intersection: the bridge between operational logic and compliance expectation. The BA should not merely gather requirements — they should determine what the organisation should consider as truth, ensuring every system that touches that truth handles it with respect.
Many organisations get integrity wrong because they treat it like a generator’s fuel: something to think about only when the lights have gone out. But by the time darkness arrives, the damage is already in motion. Once dirty data slips into a process, it multiplies.
It does not stay in the system where the error began. It spreads to billing engines, reconciliation reports, settlement files, regulatory submissions, analytics dashboards, and even customer relationship management (CRM) interactions. One wrong value becomes ten inconsistent outputs, and soon, the entire workflows are grounded like Lagos traffic during Monday rain.
When an organisation falls into this error, the business analyst’s role in safeguarding data during its transmission becomes critically important. They cannot wait for a post-mortem — they must design so that integrity failures become nearly impossible.
Every movement of data is a moment of vulnerability. When information leaves System A, as a BA, you have to understand what shape it takes, how it is transformed into System B, who validates its consistency, and what guarantees that it is not altered, duplicated, misinterpreted, or lost before reaching System C. The BA is the only role positioned to question the full chain without bias. Architects understand systems, developers understand code, compliance understands rules, but the BA is the one who sees across the entire landscape, the person who must make sense of how all parties interact when data is handed across borders.
The core responsibility of a BA is ensuring that integrity in transit starts long before the first API call is built. It begins with the uncomfortable but necessary task of deciding what the organisation calls “the source of truth.”
This is not always straightforward. In many institutions, legacy systems claim authority because they have been around the longest, while newer platforms claim authority because they are more modern. But truth cannot be determined by age or prestige; it must be defined deliberately, with clarity about ownership, responsibility, and the exact behaviours expected whenever data is retrieved, transformed, or transmitted. When this responsibility is neglected, organisations end up with systems that behave like quarrelling siblings, each insisting they are correct while confusion spreads in every direction.
As the custodian of these conversations, your role as a business analyst should be to build a model where every transformation is intentional. You design the checkpoints that prevent unauthorised changes, the validations that confirm completeness, and the lineage documentation that records what exactly happened to a piece of data at each step of its journey. A checksum is not just a technical detail; it is the equivalent of checking a traveller’s luggage at every border to ensure nothing went missing or mysteriously appeared.
The Transport Layer Security (TLS) encryption is not jargon — it is the digital equivalent of securing the corridor so that no one can intercept or alter a traveller’s belongings while in motion. Audit trails are more than logs; they are eyewitness accounts ready to stand before any regulator. Your responsibility as a BA ensures these mechanisms are not isolated IT practices but core business behaviours.
However, safeguarding data is not only about building checkpoints — it is about knowing when the journey must stop entirely. Nigerian organisations, especially in fast-paced sectors, often pride themselves on “finding a workaround.” But workarounds are simply shortcuts with long-term consequences.
When a workflow continues despite missing or unverifiable information, the organisation is planting seeds for future crises. The BA must create a culture where the system behaves like a disciplined immigration officer: if the documents are incomplete, the traveller cannot proceed. Early stoppage is cheaper than late repair. It prevents errors from becoming scandals and misalignments from becoming audit penalties.
Yet the most underrated part of your role as a BA in protecting integrity in transit is the emotional labour: the ability to question everything before it becomes an issue. Every integration, no matter how small, must be interrogated. What exactly is moving? Why is it moving? Who verifies it? What happens when it fails? How do we know that the version arriving matches the version sent? These are not philosophical questions; they are the blueprint for engineering trust.
And trust is the currency of regulated sectors. Banks cannot afford silent mismatches. Energy distribution companies cannot allow data to drift. Healthcare institutions cannot entertain undocumented transformations. When systems fail to protect data in motion, the cost is not only operational — it becomes legal, reputational, and sometimes existential.
This is why integrity in transit is not an isolated technical requirement but a full organisational mindset. The business analyst, by designing flows that prioritise validation, traceability, accountability, and transparency, ensures that systems behave like responsible custodians rather than careless couriers. It is your work that turns audit exercises from investigations into confirmations.
It is your discipline that saves institutions from the embarrassment of discovering that their systems have been exchanging corrupted information for months. And it is your strategy that allows organisations to innovate confidently, knowing the data fuelling their decisions is protected at every crossing.
In a world where data is always in motion, the only constant should be integrity and the professionals who insist on safeguarding it. The business analyst stands at this frontier, keeping the lights on not through crisis management but through proactive governance. Just as every Nigerian knows to top up generator fuel before night falls, every responsible organisation must secure its data before the journey begins. That is the only way to ensure that what leaves one system is the same truth that arrives in the next.
Ibosiola, a business analyst, wrote from the United Kingdom.
