A day in the life of a Business Intelligence (BI) Consultant
What’s it like being a consultant in the information technology (IT) industry? That’s something anyone considering a career in this environment should ask themselves. In this article, Morné le Roux, Senior Consultant, Synergy Business Intelligence provides an interesting perspective – one which highlights the skills you’ll need as well as the experiences you are likely to have working in the front line of advanced technology.

Since joining the IT industry as a junior computer technician over fifteen years ago, I’ve never really felt like the permanent employee type. I soon realized  – almost like The Littlest Hobo – that I was going to be like the stray German Shepherd who wandered from town to town, helping people in need. The Littlest Hobo did not have an owner, and despite the attempts of many people to adopt him, he preferred to be on his own, and would head-off all by himself at the end of each episode.

Being a consultant is not meant for everyone. In addition to the fact that you will move around a lot, and therefore are unlikely to have a consistent set of colleagues, there is the language issue. Not everybody knows Consultant Speak. Being able to speak the right words requires that you have the natural ability to decode all the possible three letter acronyms in the business. And there are an awful lot of them. For instance, at an automotive manufacturer you need to be able to understand when someone says: "An RFT car should not be in a DPA bay when it's got outstanding rework captured against it as NOK on IPSQ". And at a telecommunication company: "You can't possibly have a call passed via the MSC to the HLR without using SS7".

In a way, we consultants are a bit like C-3PO of the Star Wars movies; a protocol droid like C-3PO is designed to serve humans and boasts that he is fluent "in over six million forms of communication".

Moving around a lot means that after you’ve parked on the wrong spot, have been allocated the chair with the broken armrest and you’ve figured out how to go to the toilet by yourself, you need to work out how to gain access to the offices for the next few months. Along comes the building security administrator. This person controls your right of passage and has power second only to the founders of the Google empire. He will determine where and when you roam the offices. Once you’ve gathered authority signatures in triplicate and have managed to get a temporary access card because the machine is out of order, you need to get access to the network and five to seven database systems. When you’ve mastered the art of winning a database administrator’s trust, you’re pretty much ready to go and work as a negotiator at the United Nations.

Global explorers will advise you to avoid smiling or moving when a new ethnic tribe is encountered because it might be regarded as a threat. Treat your new team mates on the new project in a similar manner and you’ll be safe. At first you’ll feel strange when the whole office gathers around for birthday snacks and you get left behind at your desk because no one wants to take the initiative to invite the new guy. But in the course of time you will become part of the inside office jokes and be considered as part of the team.

And then the real work starts. Chances are that the expectation of you joining the project was created in such a way that you’re not just a consultant, but in fact a member of the X-Men. The new consultant on the site is always reckoned to be the expert that's going to save the project's third go-live date. Typically, you’ll be told by everyone that you should have already started on the project two weeks earlier only to be informed by the Project Manager on site that “everything’s on track” except that there isn’t any data available yet.

So far, being a BI Consultant seems to be similar to an excursion into one of the more bureaucratic pits of hell. One has to ask: is it all worth it?

Absolutely! The real job satisfaction comes when you see improvement because of your efforts. I’ve had the benefit to be trusted with sensitive intellectual property and I’ve been able to gain the insight into the inner workings of interesting businesses. I’ve met extraordinary people such as automotive plant directors, CEOs of top IT, accounting, medical scheme and telecommunication companies. And you get to move between companies and enjoy new and challenging experiences without having to go through laborious interview processes.

The work itself is demanding, requiring extensive understanding of how to transform complex business rules into comprehensible visualisations by using BI tools to design dashboards, cubes, static reports and more Even when you’ve received an excellent technical specification document, you still need to take a step back and ensure that you are delivering the most efficient solution. Communication skills are important here. Constant open conversations between you and the customers need to exist. Customers prefer consultants who give them (as the seasoned consultant Steve Friedl describes it) that Warm Fuzzy Feeling, rather than consultants with long lists of technical skills. That means building trustworthy customer relationships. Be honest about mistakes you make, be available to help and try to take the worry away from your customers. Being a good BI consultant is about adding value – and that only comes with experience.

And with Gartner's view that the market for BI platforms will remain one of the fastest growing software markets, despite the economic downturn, a good BI consultant is likely to be in demand well into the future. That means that as a career choice, being a BI consultant puts you in line for the best which is yet to come.