through a lot of BI architecture, a lot of BI administration,
server set administration, standing up multi-server architectures for
our clients with enterprise grade BI tools.
That's really the front end of data warehouses that we had put together.
Our core competency kind of out of the gate was within ETL and data integration.
We've noticed just such a need throughout the marketplace for companies really to
bring data together to conform that data to put business rules around that data.
And really one of the main challenges we continue to see
is around departmentalized solutions,
a lot of siloed solutions within different departments and
different departments having different definitions for different data.
So for the same terms,
people are coming up with different answers to the same questions.
So the whole goal behind what we do within enterprise data management is that
conformity and really putting that metadata management,
that master data management, in the hands of the business.
So they can really start to master their data and conform that and
come up with the same answers to the same questions.
And there's really endless needs through out the market with mergers and
acquisitions, and just as companies get bigger and
bigger, it just continues to be a challenge.
So we've continued to grow and really blossomed from coming in and
doing tactical solutions to coming in and
helping at a higher level within trying to really promote the I
programs to get them really into that enterprise data management space and
really start to master the data that they collect as there are just so
many different sources available.
>> Let's focus on sort of a typical consulting engagement involving business
intelligence and maybe perhaps data integration.
What types of skills does your team bring to a client, and
what types of skills did you think are in more short supply?
>> One of the main skills, and
it's a fairly basic skill if you studied business intelligence and
data modelling and data architecture, but from a relational perspective, one of
those main skill sets is just having the ability to write SQL, to understand SQL.
Structured Query Language is really at the core of what
most of our developers have to be able to do.
And whether that developer is an ETL developer, or a BI front end developer, or
a data modeller, or a data architect,
it's really the language we speak when it comes to relational data warehousing.
So that is very fundamental.
Another real key skill in the consulting business is that likeability,
it's that skill of walking into a new engagement and
presenting yourself and bringing yourself down.
Not down to the business' level, but
being able to speak their language and not throw a bunch of acronyms around.
You just really have to be able to talk that same language.
And so you gotta be able to learn very quickly and learn about new businesses and
new environments very quickly, so that you can understand where those
challenges reside, and then you can help pinpoint problems.
So there's a softer side of consulting that is often overlooked that we find,
and we push our consultants to really focus on that human aspect to get
to know their users and to understand what their needs are.
And we found that the closer you get to your business community,
to the end users of that system, the more that you work in conjunction with those
folks, the more success that you're going to have.
And the solution is always going to be a lot
more well received when it's something that you've built as a team together.
And it kind of goes back to
the whole agile methodology that's really taken shape in the last five to ten years
in that you want to deliver solutions a little bit faster, so
that people aren't waiting at the end for a big bang solution.
You want to produce results very quickly and
do that litmus test and see how well received it is,
if there's any issues, so it allows you to get in front of problems a lot quicker.