Jeff Gorman – [President]
As an IT professional, knowing your strengths and learning to recognize how to best interact with others is not viewed as a technical aptitude, but it does allow each of us to perform better in terms of providing desired services to business areas who need technical resources to achieve their goals.
Learning how to communicate effectively among people is equally important with knowing how to make technical systems communicate with each other. There are plenty of stories from business units about projects failing because IT did not understand requirements. There are also countless stories from IT about projects failing because the business units do not understand the technical implications behind their requests and actions.
At its most effective level, good Information Technology is about providing service to others to help improve business performance. Efficiently performing Information Technology takes both technical and interpersonal skills in equal parts. Beyond interactions with the rest of the business, even within IT there are frequently opposing objectives, which are not based on technical requirements but are critical to navigate successfully.
For example:
- Security administrators want to keep systems patched at all times.
- System administrators want to keep systems up at all times.
In most cases, it’s not possible to achieve both of those divergent objectives. Common technical architecture principles say you get three choices among “good, fast, and cheap,” which inherently means as IT architects it is imperative you understand how to balance different needs and collaborate with others to determine the best courses of action.
The best administrators have to be effective communicators; listening with empathy, asking questions to seek context, establishing clarity on objectives and intentions, understanding a ‘big-picture’ outside of the tasks or systems they are responsible for to ensure their actions match the true ‘best case’ for the organization.
Trust is an interesting thing. We often think of it as something we must earn, when in fact it is something one must choose to give in advance. That’s why we don’t take trust for granted. It is the hardest thing for you to let go of. It is said that people do business with those they know, like, and trust. We can help you know us by making you more aware of who we are and what we do. We can help you like us by being likable. And, of course, we can influence your trust proving ourselves trustworthy. But it isn’t enough just to share how others trusted us and how we delivered for them, or even to tell you of the times we messed up and how we made it right. In fact, our trustworthiness is not something we can prove to you personally at all until first you give us your trust. Once you give it, the onus is on us to prove you right.
Matt Mulherin 
Our answer is Microsoft Power BI, an affordable business analytics solution that visualizes data and allows you to share insights across the organization. It can connect to many data sources and bring data to life with interactive, live dashboards and reports. Power BI can integrate with Azure Machine Learning Services, which are a subset of AI, to analyze data and make future predictions about the business. Power BI is available as a SaaS option running in the Azure cloud or as an on-premises option as Power BI Report Server.
Thankfully, Keller Schroeder can help! Using the recently launched Microsoft 
As simple as that concept is for people to understand, somehow it frequently gets lost in the world of technology. People become infatuated with the newest “square peg” technology and become fixated on pounding it into a “round hole” issue just to have the privilege of using the latest and greatest. As a technology company in the performance improvement business, Keller Schroeder firmly believes the role of Information Technology is to make businesses perform better. Information Technology companies and departments should serve the business functions, not vice versa. IT professionals should have a box full of different shaped pegs, and when they collaborate with business units, should be able to identify solutions that specifically address business needs and improve overall performance.
