Don’t Be A Tool

Those of you who follow my blog know that I’m big on DBAs having something to offer your company other than just being an insurance policy should the DB ever go down. You should actually try to make things better for your users.

One thing I like to do is pretend everyone in the company is an external customer, and I’m a contractor. As a contractor, my income depends on how much business I can bring in. So, while I’m talking to users, I see what I can do to drum up their business. If I hear someone talking about an Excel sheet they do every month, I ask them questions about it to see if it’s soemthing that could be brought into the DB to make their job easier. I’m amazed at every company I see how much stuff is still done by hand every month/week/day.

You don’t have to wait to overhear something either. You can just ask random users, or send an email to the dept heads. Ask them if their people have any processes that they do by hand that they would like to look into automating. I did that a few times in my last company and it worked out really well. We had a girl who was spending 3hrs every week going through user ids that hadn’t logged into an application in a while and sending them emails asking them to change their passwords to maintain compliance. She had over 200 names to go through, and that many emails to send. I know what you’re thinking already… there’s a better way to do it even by hand… and you’re right, but what I did was brought it into the DB and just had it go through every fri and start sending out emails. Once we got that working (2days), the word spread like wildfire and I had more business than I knew what to do with.

The point of this is that a lot of DBAs are tools. They don’t go out and drum up business, nor do they care to. You never see a hammer running in to offer its services do you? No, you have to go get it when you need to use it. That’s because a hammer is just a tool. And you want to be more than that.