On being a consultant at Bearing Point.

[epilonious]

First off, congrats to Boxy, DJButtaflye, and Gordo on their new careers. I also wish luck to Ruzy so that he gets an awesome job really soon.

Otherwise, I have been a consultant with BearingPoint since September 18th, 2006. I am a part of the BAMS team, which is a part of the Public Services SAP team, which is part of the Public Services Enterprise Solutions team. Public Services is the team of consultants within BearingPoint that works most with Governments of various sizes (federal, state, county, city) and Enterprise Services researches and installs some of the really hugenormous computer applications to handle the types of things that governments need (like real-time access to lots of peoples records about taxes or cars or similar).

The BAMS team is pretty much an R&D team that was set up within the enterprise group. They are using the SAP technologies I learned at Morrison Homes, WebDyn Pro and J2EE, but they are also using bleeding edge technologies like Composite Application Framework (CAF) and Guided Procedures (GP). All these elements tied together makes it really easy to incorporate existing systems and data stores into new business processes. Thus, instead of telling a company they have to transfer their perfectly-adequate customer database to something new and expensive and probably a bit buggy for the sake of some grand, expensive new customer-using app... you can pretty much just consume the data and functionality of the existing customer database in a CAF/GP application, and if some extra functionality is needed, or better yet, you need to create some extra data stores or work with other databases and such, you can code it into the caf/gp application really, really easily.

I think this works out well for me. One of the things I was worried about was being shoved into client teams in faraway lands and not knowing quite what I would be doing. Instead, I am working on a really cool application with the same people, being given a chance to learn it (and all the cool technologies it is based upon) and then, when it starts going out to clients I'll be one of the knowledgeable peoples who helped test, build, and enhance it.

The other cool thing is that when I am not client facing, I get to spend more time at home. I am just now finishing off a two-week stretch at home and am actually looking forward to traveling back to Tyson's just because when I am at home TOO much I go a bit stir crazy. I think a month solid and Geoff-n-Eric would start coming home to me in underwear singing show-tunes while coding.

But yea, Travel is going to be a big part of this job. Right now the worst of it was a full-week stretch due to training, but it looks like most trips will be M-W.... and I have it pretty much set in writing several spots that the most I will ever travel when Client facing is 80% (M-Th). They also gave me this shiny corporate Amex card I use to charge expenses... while it is a personal liability (Anything I charge that is not reimbursable under travel policy I have to pay for) most of the travel expenses are covored and I even get these awesome per-diem benefits (where they just give me $60 a day for food rather than try and sort out lots and lots and lots of low-value meal receipts... I think this is the result of all those studies where they found that travel accounting sometimes cost more than actual travel... and just give people a little extra cash and ask them not to defraud based on such niceties)

But yea... I definitely really like my new job. They have me doing lots of cool new stuff and I feel I am being well compensated.

Cheers, everyone.