Business Information Specialist
8:30 am... I come into the office, turn on my computer, check my voice-mail and check my email. There's a voice-mail from Keith who is the project manager for a compensation design & administration plan we are administering for a client's sales force of 500 representatives. He needs to confirm the validity of a market share change on one sales rep's report. Since this report drives the sales rep's quarterly bonus, he is understandably concerned. I better familiarize myself with the specifics before the call. I confirm our calculations and programs were right. I leave Keith a message that the report is accurate based on the data we received, and he may want to look into the underlying data.
9:30 am... I meet with Ted, my Professional Development Manager. We discuss my current projects and how they are going. We continue our prior conversation about a new Microsoft AccessTM tool I would like to build to allow our Business Associates to perform ad-hoc analysis on SAS® datasets directly. This will improve their productivity and make them less reliant on us (the BIS group). We also discuss project management opportunities for me on new projects. He reminds me to sign up for the Visual Basic training sessions being offered in the Princeton office next month.
10:00 am... I check on Reuben, one of the new BIS Associates who joined us 2 weeks ago (I'm his "mentor"). Together, we design the data flow diagrams for a sales force alignment project he is staffed on. I point out the potential pitfalls with various data sources and stress the importance of checking the validity of data at the end of every processing step. We want to avoid any GIGO (Garbage In, Garbage Out) situations. Reuben comes up with a neat little step to eliminate redundancy in storing multiple copies of the data. Our quick calculations reveal a potential saving of 2 gigabytes of storage space on disk. Good work, Reuben!
11:00 am... We meet with the rest of Reuben's project team and explain our process flow to them to ensure accuracy and identify potential gaps. Everybody seems to be completely comfortable with it, and are happy that it fits in with the overall timelines of the deliverables. Christine, who is the Consultant on the team mentions that she talked to the client this morning and they have changed their doctor specialty mappings. We will receive the new mapping file this afternoon. We will have to incorporate the change into our process. Reuben says he is comfortable doing it himself and will pass the change by me later in the afternoon.
12:00 noon... I head out for lunch with Keith and Reuben at a Thai restaurant in Evanston (there are lots of great restaurants on our block). We meet up with Debi at the restaurant. Debi is an ex-ZS'er who went back to school full time to get her MBA from Kellogg. We are all excited to meet after quite a few weeks. We all reminisce about the good old times we had when we are all staffed together on a pretty intense long-term project. Debi seems to be enjoying business school. She says her stint as a BIS at ZS is really helping her in her courses because of her exposure to complicated sales and marketing issues and how data management can make or break these critical functions.
1:00 pm... I attend a conference call in Chris' (a Principal at ZS) office with a client to finalize specifications for a new physician segmentation data feed they require for their micro-marketing department. They want this feed to be produced on a monthly basis from the data warehouse we are maintaining for them. It is important that our output exactly meets their requirements. Besides the actual layout, we discuss some potential referential integrity hazards this new data may cause in view of proposed changes to the warehouse data. Though these changes may not happen for another three months, I am glad that I went back to review them. We all agree that the specifications need to be modified right away to avoid future re-work.
1:30 pm... I'm back at my desk to begin SAS® coding for the new data feed we just discussed. I can't forget to modify my flow-charts and documentation since someone else will be taking over this processing next month.
3:00 pm...Something's fishy! I am looking at the sample outputs from my SAS® programs and I am finding unexpected records in the final output. What's up with all these missing values? There must be something wrong with one of the dataset merges. The business rules in that area have always seemed a little complicated to me.
4:00 pm... I am still having problems with debugging my code. I pick up the phone and call Mary (a technical consultant) to see if she can help me fix this. Though she herself is in the middle of finishing an urgent task, she comes over. She takes one look at it and knows what the problem is right away. She helps me fix this issue. That saves me a ton of time, and puts me back on track on finishing up this task. She's my hero today!
5:00 pm... John, our Recruiting Manager, calls to remind me of the campus recruiting sessions next week. I start work on putting together a presentation for our meetings with the student organizations.
6:00 pm... I email John my proposed presentation, check my voice mail and email one last time for the day. I find out there is an Associates' Discussion Session scheduled for later this week to talk about trends in the pharmaceutical industry. I really want to attend this so I'll have to juggle some stuff around. I shut off my computer and head home.