Subject Experts
As Scott Ambler states in his book "Process Patterns" the description of a subject matter expert (SME) is "The person(s) responsible for providing pertinent information about the problem and/or technical domain either from personal knowledge or from research."
No person in IT knows everything about IT. That is an undisputed fact. Nevertheless, search firms continue to publish requirements for professionals with an unrealistic list of demands. For example I recently came across an ad that insisted a candidate have 5 years of experience as webmaster, complete with front end and back end skills, ability to do design start to finish and the ability to present a very professional view of the world to the client. Okay, but $25/hr?? Now c'mon people! Be fair! I don't think such a person exists. I have yet to meet a Unix/programming wizard who is also a real graphic artist.
Our company prides itself on its ability to connect with SMEs rapidly. Our experience in the corporate world, for example, helps us to connect easily with just the right Microsoft SME. Our software engineering experience allows us to find underlying problems with confidence but even our company occassionally needs a little help to bring a problem to resolution quickly. For example, we frequently call the ISP to have them check the connection from their end.
It is a fact that of the last ten calls to Microsoft, only one or two were actually billable by Microsoft. This is due to the fact that Orange Crystal Consulting on more than one occasion have uncovered 'bugs' of Microsoft software. The last 'bug' our company discovered was the fact that IIS 6.0 has to be restarted on an attempt to recreate an FTP site. Various strange errors were coming up related to 'duplicate network name' and 'invalid parameter'. Research on the web suggested digging into DNS or even renaming the server!
Our in-depth knowledge of how IIS 6.0 and Windows Server 2003 cohabitate led us to conclude that this is really some bug we are hitting and not the way we are doing things! Therefore a call was put in and the Microsoft technician had us 'restart' the IIS server. The technician claimed that the 'metabase' had not been updated quickly enough and that is why there was a duplicate names condition.
Having developed many multithreaded programs, our team pointed out to Microsoft that the GUI should not reflect that an object has been deleted when in fact it hadn't.
The call to Microsoft was decremented (not charged for) and Orange Crystal Consulting had the problem resolved within an hour.
In this situation, Microsoft was turned to as the SME for IIS 6.0. Orange Crystal Consulting had confidence that neither it nor the client would be charged for the support incident and everyone came out a winner.
This problem-solving strategy is just one example of how Orange Crystal Consulting collaborates with SMEs to get you over production problems as quickly as possible. While we are proud of the expansive industry-wide knowledge we possess, we are never to self-assured that we don't seek out SMEs when needed!