Being a Technical Expert – Isn’t Enough!

Let’s deviate from tuning for a couple of weeks.   I’d like to turn our attention to a topic that I have lightly covered in the past.   It is the premise that it takes more than just being a great technician to keep DBA customers happy.  There are dozens of database “experts” out there that are willing to provide you with their own style of administrative techniques and technical education.   In this series of blogs, I intend to round out your knowledge to make you more than just a good administrator.   And I have a news blast for you, being a technical expert isn’t enough.

Whether your customers are internal or external (like mine here at Remote DBA Experts), if you focus on just providing great technical support, you are only winning half the battle when it comes to keeping your customers happy.

One of the benefits that I am able to provide is that my organization supports dozens (and dozens……) of remote database administration services customers.   Our customer base spans the market spectrum from high technology to heavy industry.  In addition to having every market sector represented, the size of our customer base also varies widely.   We support organizations that have virtually no IT staff members to multi-national organizations consisting of huge IT staffs and hundreds of database servers.

This gives me the unique perspective of having a broad knowledge of what database support services customers want.   Name a market sector and I would be highly surprised if we didn’t have at least a handful of customers representing it.  Our customers’ technological strategies also vary widely.  Many of our customers don’t want to push the technological envelope while others want to stay at the forefront of every new database feature.

As I stated earlier in this blog, you need to be more than just a technician to be a success.   If you focus just on being a good technician, that is how you will be viewed and treated.   Being a mere technician or “table jockey”, as we call low strategic value DBAs at RDBAE, will not lead to a successful career path as a database administrator.   I’m responsible for service delivery at Remote DBA Experts.  When a customer views my organization as nothing but a pack of “table jockeys”, I have made a big mistake and have jeopardized that relationship.  If a customer sees us as a “utility provider” (no added value, just keeping the lights on), I’m in trouble.   In order to ensure our customer’s happiness, being a “table jockey” or a “utility provider” isn’t enough.  Providing excellent technical support is the foundation of a good relationship and building credibility, but it is only one facet.

Is this just a “remote DBA thing”?  Absolutely not!   You know that your customers expect you to be the technical expert.   If you aren’t at the top of your game technically, you will never obtain credibility with them.   But after you obtain that technical credibility – what next?   That will be the focus of my next set of blogs.  Will this require you to change your entire strategy? Once again, absolutely not.  Here’s a great quote that I often refer back to:

“Small changes can produce big results – but the areas of highest leverage are often the least obvious.”

- Peter Senge, The Fifth Discipline

But where do you start?   How do you determine how you are viewed?  Well, the first thing is you need to know where you are starting from!

It is obvious that effective measurements are required to judge the success of any activity.  In my next blog, we’ll discuss a DBA report card.  Questions that I have been using for years.  We’ll review some of the information you will need to gather in order to determine where you are when it comes to being a strategic-value DBA.

Thanks for Reading,

Chris Foot
Oracle Ace
Director Of Service Delivery