Recently enough time has opened on my calendar to come up for air and start blogging.  A little about me.  I’ve been a program manager for a number of years, and most recently took a solutions architect role with the Microsoft solutions practice of EMC Consulting.  This latest career move has been an effort to connect with customers and work to solve complex problems in the enterprise.  My experience has ranged from building a startup technology department from the ground up to work at large scale enterprises.  In addition to the U.S., I’ve been fortunate to also get to work with a lot of great IT professionals across Europe, India, and China.  

If you were to ask me my specialty, I would probably tell you a number of things depending on who you are and how long you’d listen.  My main goal is to work with technology organizations to plan and design enterprise solutions that connect the information worker and improve IT efficiency.  Enterprise content management, business intelligence, along with agile project management processes and tools are my main specialties.  The technical implementation of the solutions I design are centered in Microsoft SharePoint Server, PerformancePoint Server, SQL Server BI and Reporting Services, and Microsoft Enterprise Project Management.

The Focus of this Blog

There are many successful Microsoft, MVP, and Partner blogs today that cover code walkthroughs and feature implementations of custom Microsoft solutions.  Additionally, many process centered blogs exist around methodologies such as PMI, Scrum, and XP.  These topics are an invaluable part of the IT community that I utilize every day, but will not be my focus in writing this blog.  Instead this blog will focus on the planning and design topics that precede a sprint or build phase of a project.  While this may at first glance seem like a very broad concept that is handled differently across organizations, there are trends in the questions I hear from customers, both directly and indirectly, and common solutions that can be found in Microsoft technologies.

- What can enterprise content management do for my business and how do I get there from where I am at today?

- How can I design a BI strategy that lets me keep a pulse on my key priorities and is flexible enough for a changing and growing business?

- What projects should I focus on and how do I ensure they are delivered and the value understood and realized?

- How do I keep my information workers, development teams, and IT professionals trained and able to absorb the change that will be needed to attain the value of implemented projects?

- What is this going to cost me year over year, and how do I continue to do more with less?

I see the benefit in answering these types of questions resulting in more successful Microsoft ECM, BI, and EPM solutions along with increasing the value and efficiency of a technology driven organization.  

Thanks for reading,

Brook Buchanan (.com)