justajoe

Awesome!

That's a cool idea. I wonder if technology firms actually ever take a contract like that.

Very good read. Thank you.

Warning and cold hard reality I'm afraid. Still would be awesome to at least give it a try and see what I learn.

Depressing but true.

My experience is that a company would rather assemble a team of low level business people to power through raw data or cobbled together observations for weeks rather than pull a developer off of doing CSS tweaks on the company's about page to actually solve the problem once in for all.

Using good tools can be a religious experience and make a company much leaner, meaner, and effective. However building good tools is high risk and rarely something company's want to work on (hence the problem with enterprise software in general).

Yeah, I think you've hit the nail on the head here. I firmly believe a good platform could be custom built in a short amount of time and allow the business to realize the value of their data months or even years earlier than would happen going the route of a big vendor's solutions...however the bureaucracy within a large organization would always red light such an effort. To put it another way, no one ever get fired for using SAS.

That's true. I'll try and nail down that quote if/when I decide to leave.

Good thoughts. To answer your main thoughts, maintaining custom reports on a generic platform is itself a major cost. I agree I'd love the repeat business but I think my approach is dead simple enough that I could easily hand it off to existing tech talent within a company.

My main thought is that rarely can a company pull either their business or tech people off of "working in" the company to "work on" the company for a few weeks to improve their reporting.

Yeah, that is a difficult cat to let out of the bag. I'm high enough in the company that voicing that I think my personal success is going to be found elsewhere is going to be a hard break no matter what. That said, a few weeks later I could probably get some endorsements and maybe recommendations but for now my skills are a competitive advantage (if only because I'm the only one who's actually done this particular work up until now) and they wouldn't be inclined to help anyone else secure them (I think).

True, that is a good place to start. Every company I've had serious contact with has this problem, but the list of companies where I have a good high level contact to pitch this idea is somewhat small. But I agree, people I know is the place to start.