In the mid-2000's I worked for a mid-sized utility company, and I know there's many folks out there who have systems that are held together with scotch-tape and bits of twine, but this was the worst data warehouse and BI reporting system I'd ever experienced. So the CEO decides, after reading an ad in an in-flight magazine, that we need to upgrade to some enterprise-grade system. Cue a tender process, and a well-known enterprise software vendor comes out on top and gets six months to design and plug in the system.
What I didn't know at the time, and came only to realize much later, is that these enterprise software vendors and integrators tend to put their A-team onto winning new business, holding back some hapless goons for the actual implementation if and when that comes around.
I was managing a team of BI analysts, data scientists and assorted "KPI reporting" heads. First thing the implementation team does is look for a list of all current reports and their data sources. OK, nothing odd there, but roll forward about four months and there's a weekly status update meeting where the vendor casually mentions that the data warehouse will be locked down to producing exact facsimiles of the current reporting, with no other access allowed for running other queries. Future reports or changes would have to be routed through the vendor for development.
This of course kicked off a major sh!tshow, where I had to go to the CEO and tell him that unless he wanted to be signing cheques to the vendor forever more, we'd better get some appropriate permissions on the data warehouse and BI reporting system.
After lots of difficult shouty meetings with the vendor, despite their threats to hold back support from their own work, we got access and could continue to do some work. However, the vendor argued that they'd need to place a couple of "senior support engineers" on staff to ensure smooth operations from our meddling. These guys turned out to be some fresh college graduates who didn't have English as a first language, but ended up costing the company about 150k/year each for them to sit at a desk and play minesweeper all day.
Lots of hard lessons learned, I was way too naive thinking that vendors just want to sell stuff, plus occasional support - rather than take over an entire function for cash.
What I didn't know at the time, and came only to realize much later, is that these enterprise software vendors and integrators tend to put their A-team onto winning new business, holding back some hapless goons for the actual implementation if and when that comes around.
I was managing a team of BI analysts, data scientists and assorted "KPI reporting" heads. First thing the implementation team does is look for a list of all current reports and their data sources. OK, nothing odd there, but roll forward about four months and there's a weekly status update meeting where the vendor casually mentions that the data warehouse will be locked down to producing exact facsimiles of the current reporting, with no other access allowed for running other queries. Future reports or changes would have to be routed through the vendor for development.
This of course kicked off a major sh!tshow, where I had to go to the CEO and tell him that unless he wanted to be signing cheques to the vendor forever more, we'd better get some appropriate permissions on the data warehouse and BI reporting system.
After lots of difficult shouty meetings with the vendor, despite their threats to hold back support from their own work, we got access and could continue to do some work. However, the vendor argued that they'd need to place a couple of "senior support engineers" on staff to ensure smooth operations from our meddling. These guys turned out to be some fresh college graduates who didn't have English as a first language, but ended up costing the company about 150k/year each for them to sit at a desk and play minesweeper all day.
Lots of hard lessons learned, I was way too naive thinking that vendors just want to sell stuff, plus occasional support - rather than take over an entire function for cash.