Dave's Adventures in Business Intelligence

Last month I wrote a post introducing the Dagira Group. I talked to a few folks about some ideas I had. I filled out the paperwork and registered a basic business in the state of Texas.

After all of that, it seems that I am going in a different direction instead. What does that mean for me? for this blog? for B B? Don’t worry, everything is going to be fine.

To be honest, the idea of starting up a new business right now was a bit scary. We have two kids (age 8 and 6) and I really want to be able to be involved in their lives as they grow up. Right now we’re active in soccer (football to you non-US folks 😛 ) and cub scouts and church activities. I want to be able to see soccer games and go camping with the scouts. Starting a new venture, potentially having to travel quite a bit, the uncertain economy… all of these things were factors to consider. I feel like I was ready to take on the challenge, but there were clearly lots of concerns to consider.

I had mentioned that I was going on vacation for a few weeks. While I was on vacation (on a tour bus in Alaska, if you can believe that) I got a phone call with a job offer. The best news is that my new employer is well aware of my activity on BOB, of my participation in various conferences, and even this blog. They are expecting me to continue all of those activites, which is why I suggested earlier that nothing will change. Which brings me to the next question… who was the job offer from?

For nearly a decade I have been consulting either part or full-time for PepsiCo. I started working for them during their 5.0 to 5.1 upgrade by helping them size and configure their cluster. At one point they had nine Windows NT servers running Web Intelligence (version 2.5 at that time) and Broadcast Agent. Ah, good times. For the past several years I have been involved in a long-term project building a data warehouse for one of their major divisions. (PepsiCo includes Pepsi, Frito-Lay, Tropicana, Quaker, and Gatorade, in case you didn’t know that.) It was a great project to be involved with, and I was disappointed when my contract expired this past June.

It turns out that PepsiCo knew they needed someone to replace my role (or something similar). They had created a new position and posted it on their recruiting web site. (I didn’t even know they had one.) Just before I left town for my vacation I went to the D/FW user group meeting and was able to have conversations with a number of different folks. I was also able to pass out some “Dagira Group” business cards. I printed them myself. 🙂 One of them made its way to the appropriate person at PepsiCo, and they tracked me down while on vacation to offer me the position they had just created.

After a brief conversation I accepted the job. I already knew the people, the environment, and essentially knew the job. There will be additional opportunities and challenges as an employee that were not available to me as a consultant and I am looking forward to those. My new title is BI Solutions Architect, and I start today.

If you are reading this soon after it has been published, then it’s quite likely that I am still sitting in my new hire orientation meeting. 😎