Merry Christmas 2021

And happy holidays! This post will be a bit more personal, so I’ll begin by sharing a bit of beauty that I have received. May your holiday season be filled with joy and gladness!

Big Changes

I started at Cerner on the last day of September and our new CEO David Feinberg started on October 1st, dropping by on our orientation meeting. He said that coming to Cerner after leading Google Health, it was good to be back home in healthcare rather than working for a technology company, and this really resonated with me. As much as I enjoy working with tech, I thrive when I face the real everyday problems of business.

As of Monday morning, Dec 20, 2021, Oracle started the process of acquiring Cerner. It’s exciting and promising news for many at Cerner and in Kansas City. For me personally, it means a big change. I was hired as a Power BI Evangelist with the task of helping business units move their reporting from Oracle to Power BI. As one colleague put it, I may need to flip that soon.

The Road Ahead

What’s next for me? For the immediate future, I’m still moving people to Power BI and Snowflake. There’s also a modernization element, which involves decentralizing the data. I’m certain that all of our migration efforts now is good practice for integrations on the horizon. I’ve been learning TONS about using Power BI in DirectQuery and can’t wait to share more posts about that! Beyond these things, I could take the opportunity to learn more about Oracle BI tools. After all, many of the tools are converging and what really matters to me is the meeting the business need. Looking at LinkedIn, almost 1% of Oracle employees have Power BI experience. The elements of ETL, data modeling, and visualization are similar across platforms. Beyond that, who knows? In the past I’ve had specific goals and plans, but I feel that the next thing may be very different and better than I could imagine.