Just about a year ago I joined Revelwood as an associate consultant working on client implementations using IBM Cognos TM1 and IBM Cognos ICM. It was a great move for so many reasons, but also a surprising one in the context of a career path.
Ten years ago I started my professional life as a reservations agent with Starwood Hotels & Resorts. In those intervening ten years, my jobs transitioned from guest relations roles to operations roles, where I analyzed sales revenue. Most recently, I was the manager of sales analysis for Starwood, working on the standardization and development of analytical tools for system reporting and sales trend analysis. During that time I worked on a web application and relational database for complex performance compensation plans and developed a property-level scorecard for key reporting metrics. Oh, and I was a TM1 administrator.
While I loved working in the hospitality industry, the opportunity with Revelwood meant I’d be able to expand my technology expertise and work in a number of different industries. To date I’ve worked on TM1 and Cognos ICM implementations for businesses in the media & entertainment and financial services industries.
One of the things I love about working with TM1 is that it’s both “like and unlike” working on one of my hobbies. During my free time, I love doing artistic things – creating art, painting, refurbishing furniture. It both fuels my creativity, but also forces me to focus on small details. And there’s nothing like the feeling of seeing the finished product – especially if the “before” required a lot of work to get to the “after.” It’s a huge payoff.
Some might argue that working with TM1 is not really a creative exercise. That might be true, but I do see a creative angle to it. TM1 offers so many ways to get something done, there’s room for creativity. And the software has so many pieces to it that working in it requires great attention to detail. I love that TM1 provides an almost limitless opportunity to learn and do different things. I get the opportunity to build a model or create a piece of code, go back and improve it, and then see the results.
Just as I enjoy the diversity of working with different businesses, I also like the opportunity to work on not just TM1, but also Cognos ICM. And those technologies are very different from TM1. The approach is quite different from that of TM1. There’s more building and putting together of “pieces” in Cognos ICM. Once you’ve built, say, a report, if there’s an error, you have to go back through those pieces to find where the break is.
Even though I never imagined my career would take me from a reservation agent at a hotel chain to working with the latest in analytics technologies, it’s been a great journey. And as I mark my first year at Revelwood, I’m looking forward to the new clients and new projects I get to jump in to in 2015!
