The Next Chapter

It hasn't happened often with me - I've just changed employers.  Farewell to Metrie - I spent a long time there, worked with fantastic colleagues, and as I hope this blog has shown... I learned a lot.  The company started with absolutely nothing analytic - except for a ten user license of Cognos that went completely unused.  It took some time and lobbying to arrive at a solid base for a data warehouse that could deliver them real value.  My small team actually accomplished what I think most BI groups endeavour to do - integrated data from multiple systems, transformed and cleansed the data, fed quality and reliability information back to stewards, presented a business-oriented data model to quality presentation tools, and provided best practices for evolving the business and technology to meet the future.  Unfortunately, the roadmap felt lackluster at that point - so I made the difficult decision to leave a solid and comfortable place with great relationships. 

Now it's on to the next adventure, working with a completely different industry on their business intelligence challenges.  CHC Helicopters is a world leader in aviation - of the rotary wing kind.  They had an existing BI group that certainly seemed intent on the same goals I mentioned above, but was unable to solve some serious issues.  They ran head-first into some of the design, implementation, and organizational problems I had the benefit of seeing second-hand through this great community.  Unfortunately, the technical debt grew too large, so CHC decided to completely rebuild their BI group, and I'm excited to be part of that.  Four months ago, I joined a group of four with a grand total of two years as part of this team.  That's not to say they're greenhorns - far from it.  They each bring a very different, and very valuable background to the process of retooling the platform, architecture, and practices of CHC's BI.

Over the last year I've been fairly quiet as I wrestled with career decisions and couldn't scrape together much to share in the way of technical posts.  It's hard to feel useful posting tips and tricks for 2008R2 - around five years old by now, and without much change since 2008.  CHC isn't any different - yet - they still run 2008R2 as well, with a clear intent on moving to a current release.  But before that - and all the technical goodness that I'm sure will fall out of it for me - I have some very good lessons I've learned from reworking CHC's systems.  So for longtime readers, the good news is that I'm posting again.  The bad news is that it won't be centered on the most frequent topic I've blogged about so far.  Overall, I think this will be a good change - I'll get to share how I've solved some design problems that I haven't run into before, or that I thought were common knowledge but obviously weren't.  I hope you enjoy the ride reading about it as much as I have had working it over the last few months.