Data-Driven Healthcare: How Analytics and BI are Transforming the Industry

Afterword

Much of what I have written about in both of my books were my lessons learned as a consultant. I'd spent one-third of my professional life guiding sometimes three or four organizations at a time through the journey of business intelligence (BI). It was an exhilarating time to be a consultant, although it didn't start that way. In 2008 as the beginning of the great recession sank its teeth in, I left a large stable company to go to a small consulting firm. At the time it felt terrifying. I lost a lot of sleep those first 18 months, and it wasn't just because I had a baby at home. But then the Affordable Care Act was passed and healthcare executives realized that they had been ignoring a great asset. I'm sure that as the years pass and I look back on that time, I will consider it to be an incredible gift to be doing what I was doing at that time in history.

But all great partnerships must come to an end. The truth was, even though I was doing what I wanted to be doing professionally. it was taking an incredible toll on my family. I had a friend share with me once the anecdote about juggling balls; some of them are rubber and some are glass. The balls for your career and other commitments are made of rubber and bounce when you drop them (although not always the way you want), but the balls that are made of glass are the ones marked family and friends. If you drop those you can never put them back together again. I was dangerously close to dropping one of those glass balls. ...