SQL Lion

Let me start with a simple question. Suppose you want to have a bicycle. How do you want it? Getting the bicycle in one piece from one shop or to have each part from different shop and get it assemble by some mechanic. Yah you got the point. Obviously, you want the bicycle in one piece and readymade. 

IT industry also works in the same fashion. Although most of the IT companies recruit specialized candidates in each field, but if you have all the skills to carry out the business problem then you have more value than anyone else in the IT industry. By telling “All the skills” does not mean to learn all the languages or to have depth knowledge of all the databases. Here “All the skills” means to have the ability and caliber to give the total and acceptable solution to the business.

Let me briefly illustrate it by taking a simple example. Suppose in a retail business “XYZ” who has its transactional data for about last 5 years. Now the CEO of the XYZ wants to know how effectively his business is going on and what needs to be done in order to get better margin in profits and what are his key factors that needs to be punched. He wants to get some knowledgeable information from this past 5 years data for the growth of his business. Now to accomplish this mission, he assigned this task to his development team or to any third party agency / organization.

A BI development team, who usually do this type of stuffs, may have a team size of about 11 with the below specialists within one team:

• 2 business analyst,
• 1 data modeler,
• 1 DWH architect,
• 2 ETL developer,
• 1 or 2 Cube Developer,
• 2 for reporting and
• 1 manager who keep track of all this and who is responsible for the delivery.

Having specialization in any one of the field is enough but recruiters usually looks for the candidate who is specialized or have workable knowledge in more than one field. So to have business understanding or to have reporting skills even if you are a core ETL developer is not bad, instead it’s an advantage to you that you have a wider scope for your career and you can work in more than one specialism.

Having knowledge in more than one field does not mean having knowledge horizontally like learning more than one ETL tool for an ETL developer, because in a particular project only one ETL tool will be used; or to learn more than one reporting tool like SSRS and BO; or to have business knowledge of health care or finance when you are dealing with retail business. You need to have knowledge in more than one field in a particular business problem like to have skills as a business analyst as well as BI developer i.e. to have both frontend as well as backend knowledge.

Let me tell you the other benefits of having knowledge in more than one field. Usually business analysts are key contacts between the clients (i.e. XYZ Company) and the project. They deal with the business requirement and system specifications like what type of problem the client has and what type of solution he wants, what needs to be done, etc. Then the information will be transformed to the development team usually through the data modeler and the DWH architect. They used to build data flow model, mapping document and DWH model. Then it is passed to ETL developers where the ETL package is developed as per the mapping document and DWH model. Again the information is passed to Cube designer along with the Facts and dimensions list. And finally the cube is passed to the report developers to design the end user reports and dash boards.  A whole lot of transformations and translations of information are going on in this process which may lead to discrepancy or inconsistency in the final result.

Let me show you pictorially:

With individual specialization in one field. 

With individual specialization in more than one field.

Here in the second approach, gap of information is not there resulting in better BI solution. My main objective here is to show you how having a business clarification from end to end will yield not only better solution but also guide you to a better career path.

Benefits of having more than one specialism:

• Better Solution approach
• Time save
• Consistent information flow from end to end
• More exposure
• Better career path
• None the less more money at the end of the day 

Wish you all best of luck in your career decision. Let me know your valuable suggestions in the comment section.