Personal Objectives for 2007

It's that time of year again when I start to think about the appraisals for the team I look after. If any of you have completed appraisal forms in the past, you'll know that one of the sections is usually along the lines of "What do you see as your objectives for the next twelve months", and so I got to thinking what I'd like to concentrate on over the next year (rather than writing up their appraisal forms, which is of course what I should be doing now.)

Putting aside all the business stuff (more on that at a later date), for me, the areas of consulting and technology I'd like to most get involved in during 2007 are:

To get more exposure to BI tools and technologies outside of the world of Oracle; I'm thinking about the rich set of OLAP client tools that work off of MS AS, get a feel for what SAP are doing with their BI Accelerator, perhaps dip a toe in the world of Master Data Management and also, see what vendors such as Cognos and Business Objects are up to. This isn't part of some shift away from Oracle, it's more that getting exposure to tools and techniques that Oracle doesn't offer makes you I think a more effective business intelligence consultant. If you keep track of sites such as Intelligent Enterprise, DMReview and B-Eye Network you'll hear mention of lots of trends and new product directions that don't really get touched on by Oracle; in the past I've tended to ignore them and focus on what's possible with the toolset as currently provided, in the future I'll try and pay more attention to this, to try and get a more holistic view of the market and see what others are doing as well as what the Oracle BI community are doing. Historically, I've described myself as an Oracle consultant who works with BI tools; in the future, I think there's value in focusing a bit more on the BI side as well, as I think that's where I can add a lot value for clients, and from a marketing perspective, create some differentiation from the great mass of other Oracle consultants out there.
Back within the world of Oracle, I see there being two areas that an Oracle BI consultant can prepare themselves for the forthcoming BI Suite Enterprise Edition-based world of business intelligence; firstly, really get under the covers of Oracle Dashboards and Oracle Answers, treating the tools as a kind of RAD development kit for BI applications and working out how it interfaces with OLAP, how workflow and interactivity can be built into dashboard applications, how it links in with security, the new BI Publisher and so on. Being honest, I'm not really going to devote any of my own R&D time going forward to Discoverer, Portal and so on - it's all going to be BI Suite EE, that's obviously where the action is going to be going into the future (whilst as mentioned above, keeping an eye on where the market is going as well)
On the same BI Suite EE subject, the other area that I feel has got a lot of potential, is the integration with Fusion Middleware. Now I'm more of an integrator and architect than Java developer, but going into the future, any decent Oracle BI consultant has got to be up to speed with technologies such as SOA, BPM, BPEL and Web Services, and one of the key skills I want to get under my belt is the ability to tie in the analytics provided by BI Suite EE to applications built using JDeveloper and Oracle SOA Suite; I can't see many people grasping how this works and this is potentially an area in which you can create some real differentiation.
Finally, and going back to my roots a bit, I want to spend a bit more time going back to the basics a bit and doing some database development work and performance tuning. Around a year ago, I was getting regular consulting engagements where I ended up tuning ETL processes, optimising applications that used up too much CPU and memory when scaled up to lots of users, that sort of thing, and I still get more of an "intellectual buzz" out of this sort of work, sort of "Oracle stripped back to the basics", compared to some of the more flashy stuff around GUIs and application servers. I'm going to make a point of going to the next Miracle Database Seminar (although not, unfortunately, Hotsos, which comes at a bad time) and I'll try and make a point of securing a bit of honest-to-goodness database performance tuning work.

Anyway, that's my objectives for next year. I guess other ones should include taking regular backups of the site, and of course finishing off the remaining ten chapters of the book by 31st October. All being well, I should be going to the EOUC event next May, Collaborate'07 in April, ODTUG in June and the UKOUG at the end of the year, and I've got one more surprise up my sleeve that I'll reveal later on in 2007, but for now, that's what I've got planned for the next twelve months.