An Introduction

Ahoy there, I'm Andy Tegethoff. 

Lothario, roustabout, no-good-nik, bass player, consultant.  Call me what you will.  :) 

I have a loving family consisting of a wife and two boys, and I've got about a dozen years in the IT game in Metro Atlanta, with the last 4 of them spent as a Business Intelligence consultant.   Prior to that I did software development in a number of environment and across several platforms.  Chiefly, from a technical perspective, I was a solid VB/C# guy who knew programming for both Oracle and SQL Server better than most.  I spent time in the trenches, survived Y2K and the DotCom flameout; I'm one of the "good ones" in IT.   

Not that I am a techie by birthright.  I got my BA in English Lit/Psychology, and have been a would-be rock star for more like 20 years.  I was always more of a Drama or Band geek than a Math geek.  However, as it turns out, the TRS80 CoCo I got for Christmas when I was 9 shaped my destiny beyond allowing me to write a Light Cycle videogame.... 

But as Dr. Evil would assert, "the circumstance of my upbringing are quite inconsequential."  Neither here nor there.  A topic for a later post (I can't give it all away now).  The overall point is, once I entered the working world I found quickly that I could do tech work and yet interact comfortably with actual human businesspeople.  Which is a bit of an edge it seems.

In 2006 I started work for a consulting company called Northridge Systems (a Microsoft Partner with practices specializing in custom Dev, SharePoint, creative design, and BI).   While I began at NR doing web and Windows dev work, the opportunity arose for me to join the firm's nascent BI team.  So after examining my options, I jumped at it.  As I said previously, I was the SQL expert in most programming situations in my career, anyway.  Plus I was burnt out on pure dev, and wasn't seeing a clear career path that I liked from that position.

BI, on the other hand, seemed relatively glamorous, and well-suited to my particualar strengths.  I liked the "mo-money" aspect for sure, and I also liked the prospects career-wise.   But it turns out it was kind of a "through the looking glass" type thing.  Like parenting or owning a luxury yacht.  I didn't really understand my situation until I was in the middle of it.  And it took some getting used to. 

But now I've feel like I've really found a professional niche, one reasonably safe from outsourcing due to cultural necessities, and narrow enough to be either unappealing or unattainable to many in the industry.  I like doing it, and I think I have a great aptitude for consulting.  BI work is much more strategic than the Dev work I used to do, and the communication aspects are so critical, that I feel like it really fits my skill set well.

So I've decided to start a blog where I can potentially share my insights (for what they're worth) from my BI consulting experiences.  The blog title (with tongue securely in cheek) is pretty accurate.  I'm really aiming to keep this largely above the technical fray, and more about the "philosophical conundra" of BI.  I think so much of what BI is about gets lost in those details that I'd like to make it about what role business intelligence can/should play in the enterprise, how to make it work, etc. 

So we'll see how it goes.  Hope to see you around.  Perhaps later we'll enjoy pie.