One of the things that I've firmly believed for years is that you need to bring value to your employer. You should prove your value on a regular basis, and if you do, you should have a long and prosperous career. But how do you prove your value? What should you work on?
There is some great advice thatChris Shaw passes on in this blog post about DBAs helping the bottom line. He says he was told early in his career to "find out what people disliked doing the most" and then doing it. He relates this to the DBA profession by noting we often are problem fixers. And as problem fixers, we should look for problems in the company and try to fix them.
A good DBA should understand the data being stored, and how it is used in the company. A good DBA should have contact with business analysts and be able to discuss how they use information. A good DBA seeks out the consumers and providers of information and tries to find ways that they can work more efficiently.
SQL Server DBAs have a great advantage. We have so many tools built into the platform, we can easily implement an application, using SSIS and SSRS, that could help someone do their job better. We can assemble information from multiple sources, and show business users how they can better analyze this data with tools like PowerPivot. We can do all of this with the tools that come with SQL Server.
We can impact the bottom line. We just need to make sure that everyone else in the business knows this by showing them.
Steve Jones
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