Let’s see if you’ve heard this one before. You lose an FTE in a critical, highly specialized EHR application area. You need someone who can hit the ground running ASAP. Of course, this is a classic scenario that calls for an experienced consultant – at least until you can find a high-quality FTE. And, most often, that might be the best approach. But these days, depending on the role, you might have some more creative approaches to explore.
Let’s take a look at an example within data and analytics and see if you might rethink how you handle that all-too-familiar scenario.
Setting the Context
If you're like most CIOs, you have data and analytics on your list of top priorities. You're also well aware that one of the biggest barriers to success within data and analytics is talent. That talent is critical for supporting an effective data and analytics infrastructure. Let’s look at extract-transform-load (ETL) maintenance as an example. These employees are generally extremely specialized, have a low level of redundancy, and have extremely grueling support cycles (24/7 on call, required overnight work, high variability in workload). For many moderately-sized customers, this position often requires less than one FTE.
The Typical Consultant Scenario
So, how does a typical Nordic partner organization handle a loss in the area of ETL support? Here’s how one recent Nordic client handled it. They lost their FTE ETL support analyst unexpectedly and needed to fill this role with someone who could hit the ground running – a perfect scenario for a Nordic consultant. Over the next 14 months, our consultant checked ETL daily at 3-5 a.m., participated in monthly code drops from the EHR vendor into their production system, and generally expanded and maintained the existing ETL infrastructure.
During this same time, the organization sought qualified personnel to manage their ETL infrastructure. After 14 months, they were able to find an FTE to support their ETL, however, they elected to keep the consultant engaged during onboarding and training of the new FTE.
Note: Organizations also often engage Nordic to provide limited short-term support through extreme ETL maintenance events such as go-lives, rollouts, and upgrades. These types of engagements exemplify healthy uses of consultants: highly specialized skill sets required to fill specific needs for a limited duration. Is that a current need?
A Different Approach to ETL Maintenance
Thinking more creatively about scenarios like the one above, we developed a remote-based ETL management service. Fundamentally, this service includes a primary dedicated Nordic consultant – working mostly remotely from our home office in Madison – responsible for expanding and maintaining the existing ETL infrastructure while working under a service-level agreement to ensure client satisfaction.
What does that look like? Well, these consultants work a lot like an onsite FTE might. They participate in frequent team huddles and discuss barriers and successes, helping identify new optimization opportunities of the existing configurations. Unique to this service, our consultants are part of a pool that rotates call and supports all of our ETL customers outside of normal business hours. Lastly, these consultants work with their managers to quickly expand resource availability for short bursts of support such as for upgrades, rollouts, and go-lives.
Our clients gain:
- Dependability through SLA-based, primary-contact-supported ETL management service, which focuses on proactive management of ETL issues
- Scalability through a pooled resource, ensuring additional coverage of highly trained consultants to support larger initiatives
- Shared best practices and pooled issue resolution across similar customers
- Cost effectiveness through Nordic’s pooled approach
What’s nice is that while this ETL maintenance service meets a unique need for our clients, it also provides a better experience for our Nordic consultants. These consultants gain a long-term role using an innovative team-based approach to solving client issues. This approach centers on proactive ETL management techniques that ultimately reduce false alarms around critical table extraction issues. The decreased call and flexibility are also nice benefits.
ETL Maintenance Revisited
So there you have it. The traditional approach to handling ETL maintenance staffing issues can work just fine. And we’re always happy to help if that's the approach you’d like to take. But at least now you know that there may be a more effective option to help you keep your data and analytics infrastructure running in top condition: Nordic’s ETL Maintenance service.
Interested to learn more? Let’s talk.