Good sales staff for consulting and services firms are hard to find. These great sales people are always working to strike the balance between knowing enough about the services, and in our case, the Microsoft products to talk intelligibly, but at the same time, not be overwhelmed in studying details and product nuances so that they are distracted from selling.
Bruno and Joey's "Drive Business Performance, Enabling a Culture of Intelligent Execution" is a great aide for business intelligence consultants looking to help their sales leads to understand the BI thought process and lift the talk away from fancy Excel charting and into true performance management.
While this book may be a bit of a slow read for someone mainly focused on technology implementation, I still recommend it. As consultants, we still need to bring our clients along with our solutions, and this primer can help with those talking points around people and organization, not just the tools.
Tags: business intelligence,
consulting,
books,
training,
performance management,
sales
Categories: Business Intelligence |
Training and Education
As I write this I am in the airport in Austin waiting for my flight out to Ft. Lauderdale. I will be supporting tomorrow's presentations around PerformancePoint, so if you are one of the lucky few who knew about this event and will be there, I look forward to seeing you.
Unfortunately, these events are not widely broadcast (try a search on any of the large search engines, you won't find this particular event). For the most part, any of these events marketed in a particular area and invitations go out in a random manner. One of the things I would like to see is a more unified way in which these events are planned and notice put out – I get a lot of questions from clients about when, where and how to attend, and unfortunately, I do not have a definitive process I can point to for their benefit.
A little venting – nonetheless, these events are great for client education, which is why I would like to see more of them. If you are in the area, feel free to give me a shout!
Tags: performance point,
bi bootcamp,
training,
education
Categories: Performance Point |
Training and Education
I wish the search on the downloads site at Microsoft worked better. You can even input the name or title of this one and still no luck.....
You can download "Troubleshooting Performance Problems in SQL Server 2008" from the Microsoft Download Center.
It is a 63 (a few less once you subtract table of contents, etc) page document packed with a lot of good information. For those who are looking for a troubleshooting methodology, this document covers the basics and how to get started.
It also covers using three of the new DMVs added in SQL 2008 and how to use them:
- sys.dm_os_memory_brokers
- sys.dm_os_memory_nodes
- sys.dm_exec_procedure_stats
Tags: sql 2008,
performance,
troubleshooting
Categories: SQL Server |
Training and Education
One nice resource for training, and recently discovered in my case, is JumpstartTV, a division of Fourdeuce, Inc, which in turn is owned by End To End Training, a provider of technical training. Fourdeuce has some recognizable owners in the SQL Server world: Andy Warren, Brian Knight and Steve Jones (if you don't know them, their blogs are behind the links on their names, get to know them, they are pretty darn good).
Currently, they have three "channels": SQL, Misc and .Net. I think if you made the guess that JumpstartTV is pretty loaded on the SQL channel end, you would be right, give that it was started by three SQL aficionados, it only makes sense!
They have posted some pretty good topics out there, and similar to most blog posts, videos are sorted by tags and ranked by popularity. JumpstartTV is open for anyone to become a paid author, with many individuals having contributed already.
If you do not have this as a training resource already, I highly recommend it – videos are at most five minutes, so it is a great way to take a look at a new topic!
Tags: training,
sql 2008,
ssis,
.net,
security,
sql server,
education
Categories: Training and Education