As a follow up to the EIM Awareness with SQL Server blog post I previously created, I’d like to dig into the potential impact of the “…increasing EIM maturity level…” I referenced.
Whether you manage a consulting practice or a BICC, you’re always struggling with providing the right balance of value to your clients. In our business technical expertise is a must, but it’s never enough. To make the largest impact possible, you have to help your clients understand the entire (i.e. Enterprise) landscape of Business Intelligence. So what does that landscape look like?
The diagram below maps the value of technical/strategic expertise across project types as the projects become more/less technical. But keep in mind, our next example will add a technical component that will increase the strategic complexity of the platform (which is the whole point of this post).
Removing specific technologies and simply looking across project types, our landscape looks like the above sliding scale of expertise. Most project expertise will be technical in nature, but some certainly needs to be strategic. Why? You may ask. Because when the business complains about data quality and you recommend DQS from SQL Server 2012 you need to know that you are not only adding a technical component, you are expanding the EIM footprint of your solution, as well as suggesting that the business take on a new set of responsibilities.
Our landscape expands even more when the business asks about Master Data and the MDS component. Now we’re introducing another point of transformation for our data; increasing testing time for some projects that use our new service (Do you know which ones?), and quite possibly jeapordizing SLA’s that we’re not aware of.
The following diagram expands our value map and shows us that we now have excess technical expertise in our environment.
However, the same problem happens when you load up on EIM theory, as shown below. You turn into a management consulting organization that can no longer implement!
All of this points out that the sweet spot where your client will get the most value from is the area under BOTH curves as shown below.
It now becomes obvious what we need to do to continue delivering blended value to our clients on our EIM friendly platform. Increase our expertise across the entire spectrum.
The national Microsoft BI practice has been built from the ground up to deliver this type of blended value. Ask us about our Strategic Assessment offerings and how they can help you deliver blended value to your clients.
Blended value with SQL Server and your BI team
by Duane Schafer on March 7th, 2012 | ~ minute read
