Business Systems Analyst — Data Governance & Operational Systems

The Business Systems Analyst — Data Governance & Operational Systems

Nelnet Business Services (NBS), a division of Nelnet, Inc., provides payment technology, education services, and learning management solutions to education and faith-based organizations, serving more than 1,300 higher education institutions, 11,500 K-12 schools, 3,500 churches, and millions of individual students, families, and supporters across the globe. Our culture of service enables us to form long-lasting and trusted partnerships, while our focus on creativity and innovative solutions empowers our customer communities to thrive.

The role connects business requirements to technical delivery and data integrity across the organization’s operational systems portfolio, including its CRM platform. This role leads discovery workshops, authors testable user stories, and owns requirements through delivery — while simultaneously defining and enforcing the data standards, governance rules, and stewardship processes that keep production data reliable.

• Lead discovery workshops with business stakeholders to map current‑state processes, surface pain points, and define future‑state requirements with enough specificity to build from.
• Author user stories and acceptance criteria sufficient for a developer to implement and a QA analyst to test, explicitly accounting for real data conditions including quality issues, missing fields, and regulatory obligations.
• Document end‑to‑end workflow designs tracing each process step to the data it creates, reads, or modifies; identify and communicate downstream system impacts when operational workflows change.
• Define and enforce data standards, field naming conventions, and domain ownership policies for all systems in scope — actively maintained and auditable, not parked in a document.
• Identify and document regulatory and compliance data obligations — do‑not‑contact flags, consent records, opt‑out status, and similar fields — and ensure each is represented in the data model, assigned an owner, and validated before go‑live.
• Own the data dictionary for assigned domains: field definitions, acceptable values, lineage, stewards, and compliance classification.
• Validate data readiness before system go‑live using pre‑migration profiling, field‑level quality checks, and defined pass/fail acceptance criteria; partner with the Data Migration Specialist to enforce cutover standards.
• Participate in the Data Governance Council and cross‑functional working groups, contributing operational domain expertise to enterprise‑wide data standards discussions.
• Serve as the business systems analyst for the CRM platform (Salesforce, Dynamics 365, or equivalent) — gathering and prioritizing requirements, validating configuration and data‑model changes, and coordinating UAT with CRM administrators and business owners.

• Required:
  
  Bachelor’s degree in Business, Information Systems, or a related field, or equivalent work experience.
• Preferred:
  Professional certification in business analysis or data management (CBAP, PMI-PBA, CDMP, or equivalent).

• Required:
  
  4+ years in a business analyst, business systems analyst, or data analyst role in an operational or technology delivery environment.
• Proven, hands‑on data governance experience — you can name the program, the tooling, the metrics, and what you personally owned.
• Demonstrated ability to write requirements clear enough for a developer to build from and an end user to test against without assistance.
• Experience validating data readiness before system go‑live, including pre‑migration data profiling, field‑level quality checks, and defined pass/fail acceptance criteria.
• Demonstrated ability to identify regulatory and compliance data obligations and translate them into governance rules, field‑level standards, and schema requirements before a system goes live.
• Hands‑on CRM platform experience (Salesforce, Dynamics 365, or equivalent) — required for current project work.
• Preferred:
  Experience with data governance frameworks (DAMA‑DMBOK, DCAM) or tooling (Atlan, Collibra, Alation, Data Hub, Microsoft Purview).
• SQL proficiency for data profiling, validation queries, and…