4 ms·

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

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.

tom_b 16y ago
Don't forget - most companies that are interested in reporting this way probably already have an internal team tasked with this job. You need to market your services to high level decision makers and be adroit at negotiating the murky waters you'll be in (essentially competing with or doing the work of an existing team).
ErrantX 16y ago
I can't disagree with your thoughts; to be honest it could be you occupy a specific but useful niche (just based on language; reporting, data liberation, etc.) but it is hard to say for sure on generalities. I actually have an anecdote about reporting in a piece of software we use. It's a highly customized database which then lets you design reports using Microsoft Report Server. Honestly, it's, really, a complete nightmare to use. But is it cost effective to get a consultant in to make it like, say, Gmail? That would be a dream (and if I had the decision you'd be at work on it tomorrow morning :)) but the truth is that your additions would mean re-auditing the whole thing, hiring other consultants to ensure it met data standards, retrain staff, etc. Essentially what I am saying is that while the trade off of your cost vs. the man-hours saved is probably a net gain. When you get into a largish company lots of additional costs come into effect. In addition (and this is probably a more important factor) habit breeds contempt; or, rather, if I was using this DB for the first time today I would hate it. But after 2 years it doesn't bother me any more. If you came to us with a knowledge of the software, our requirements and a proposal of how to beat it then that would probably be considered - making a pitch like that can be hard though (because how do you know what we use and how). Something with before/after figures dressed up in the kind of language managers like. Turning up with a "vague" (If you follow me) proposal to liberate databases is nice, but unlikely to hook anyone in the few minutes pitch window. Again; not to put you off. But you may well need to use a different approach to "normal" consultants to get companies involved (I really wanted to give you a suggestion here but I am struggling, sorry).
- justajoe 16y ago
  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).

tom_b 16y ago

Don't forget - most companies that are interested in reporting this way probably already have an internal team tasked with this job. You need to market your services to high level decision makers and be adroit at negotiating the murky waters you'll be in (essentially competing with or doing the work of an existing team).

ErrantX 16y ago

I can't disagree with your thoughts; to be honest it could be you occupy a specific but useful niche (just based on language; reporting, data liberation, etc.) but it is hard to say for sure on generalities. I actually have an anecdote about reporting in a piece of software we use. It's a highly customized database which then lets you design reports using Microsoft Report Server. Honestly, it's, really, a complete nightmare to use. But is it cost effective to get a consultant in to make it like, say, Gmail? That would be a dream (and if I had the decision you'd be at work on it tomorrow morning :)) but the truth is that your additions would mean re-auditing the whole thing, hiring other consultants to ensure it met data standards, retrain staff, etc. Essentially what I am saying is that while the trade off of your cost vs. the man-hours saved is probably a net gain. When you get into a largish company lots of additional costs come into effect. In addition (and this is probably a more important factor) habit breeds contempt; or, rather, if I was using this DB for the first time today I would hate it. But after 2 years it doesn't bother me any more. If you came to us with a knowledge of the software, our requirements and a proposal of how to beat it then that would probably be considered - making a pitch like that can be hard though (because how do you know what we use and how). Something with before/after figures dressed up in the kind of language managers like. Turning up with a "vague" (If you follow me) proposal to liberate databases is nice, but unlikely to hook anyone in the few minutes pitch window. Again; not to put you off. But you may well need to use a different approach to "normal" consultants to get companies involved (I really wanted to give you a suggestion here but I am struggling, sorry).

justajoe 16y ago
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).