What technique allows an analyst to break down business functions into lower-level functions?

Functional decomposition diagrams (FDD) are specifically designed to break down business functions into their component parts, allowing analysts to analyze and understand intricate processes more thoroughly. This technique involves taking a high-level functional requirement and breaking it down into lower-level components or functions, providing clarity on how these functions interact and contribute to the overall business objectives.

By visualizing the hierarchy of functions, FDD facilitates communication among stakeholders, ensures that all parts of a system are considered, and helps identify areas for improvement or further analysis. This structured approach is crucial for system analysts when designing systems that align with business needs and ensuring that complex functions can be managed effectively.

While flowcharting can illustrate processes and steps within functions, and use case diagrams focus on the interactions between users and the system without necessarily breaking down those functions, they do not provide the same clarity in decomposing functions to lower-level details. Entity-relationship modeling focuses on how data is related in a database rather than the functional breakdown of the business processes. Thus, functional decomposition diagrams stand out as the most appropriate technique for the given task.