What Makes a Siebel Consultant?

On his Siebel Tech blog, Oli Ollerenshaw recently discussed the state of the Siebel job market. Oli spent more time in the Siebel realms than I have and I strongly agree with his views, especially the following, which are reproduced here with Oli's kind permission.

Recent search results for "siebel job" at topsy.com

Oli writes:

Siebel consultants must be more than just technical resources

What I've found is that a Siebel Consultant has to have the some or all of the following skills, in addition to a sound technical knowledge of the product set, in order to keep up with the market, find jobs and keep busy:

• Business Analysis � an ability to talk to clients, key stakeholders and business users is an essential skill. You need excellent verbal and written communication skills and an ability to see the world from a user's eyes. Understanding and experience of UML is really useful here as process diagrams, sequence diagrams and user stories are things that business users understand and can form the basis for valuable discussion.
• Functional Knowledge � it�s not good enough any more to know how to write a business service or build a Product Model. You need to know what out of the box features of Siebel can be used to implement a business requirement. And that means a lot of work when you look across the vertical product stack: Siebel Marketing, Siebel Life Sciences, Public Sector, Sales and Service, Automotive � there are literally dozens if not hundreds of functional modules that serve a specific purpose. Being able to map these to a business process is a key skill as is the ability to influence a change to a business process to make use of the functionality of the product.
• Application / Enterprise Architect � you need to know how Siebel will solve the business problem at hand, end to end. That means understanding how all of the key features of the product, along with any customisation you deem essential, will make up the whole solution. How does this map to the business processes and user stories? How does Siebel fit into the Enterprise landscape? What integration points exist, what middleware technologies make sense and fit? Understanding the �big picture� is more important than ever before.
• Infrastructure Architect � back in the good old days, a client may have employed a dedicated resource, or even a team, to manage Siebel Infrastructure. Nowadays, clients are looking to their Siebel Consultants to provide knowledge and guidance on this alongside functional and technical design. Knowing how to plan a Siebel Enterprise, how to size a database and offer high availability and scalability across the Enterprise is very valuable. Knowledge of the Siebel Security Model and how that fits in with other technologies such as Active Director or Oracle Identity Manager is something that many clients will look for.

So, my experience has shown that the days of an abundance of Siebel roles are over. In order to stay in the game, we must learn to be more than Siebel Techies: we need to be specialist generalists, excelling in all aspects of the CRM lifecycle but with our feet still firmly on Siebel ground.

What are you thoughts and experiences of the Siebel job market where you are? Please feel free to share and discuss in the comment box below.

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You can find the full article here.

have a nice day

@lex