French & Company is a C2C consulting firm providing ad-hoc expertise in business intelligence and data analytics including IBM Cognos, Oracle OBIEE/OAS, QLIK, custom SQL solutions, and data migration/automation.
Get the expertise your business needs when you need it with the flexibility of a corp-to-corp partnership meaning you only pay for what you use and avoid the cost of long-term contracts or full-time hires.
Delivering Solutions with Integrity
Q&A with Principal Consultant
I’m Chris French, the principal consultant of French & Company, Inc. My career experience spans 28 years across the spectrum of information technology and industry. You may learn more about me here. Here are my responses to questions tossed at me recently.
Q: Is Artificial Intelligence (AI) going to replace people with your skillset? A: Not as quickly as it’s being hyped. The advances in AI is incredible and I’m excited about the prospects but it’s not a plug and play compatible solution that is going to snap onto complex legacy data environments and start creating reports and charts on command. AI models as we know them are trained on extremely large yet general datasets based on the information available to it. This is not your data. Your data is most likely in a relational database environment such as Oracle or SQL Server and it has been customized to meet your ever evolving needs. AI does not currently connect to a relational database and start working out of the box. AI utilizes vector databases with ontological parameters to translate text to output. It’s more complex than the current marketing suggests.
Q: What’s your value-add? A: My career goes back nearly 30 years which means I was there building these data systems that run most large companies. In order to bridge the gap from the old to the new it’s beneficial to have people with the in-depth knowledge from the very beginning of Business Intelligence and data analytics to where it is now and where it is going. I’m staying right here in the arena and continuing to evolve with the technology.
Q: Why you instead of a large consulting company? A: Why me? Why not me? It really comes down to what you need. I’m a specialist. My clients call me in when they have a data project – whether creating automated data feeds or building executive dashboards or custom SQL solutions – and I show up and deliver. I get to know you, your company, your software environment and I give it to you straight. If I can do it, I do it. If I cannot, I’ll let you know right away and, if possible, put you in contact with one of the many partners I’ve made over my career.
Q: What type of projects do you take on these days? A: I like being the go to guy to solve the tougher challenges, like, “Your mission, should you choose to accept it…” I really only have room for one long-term project at a time and I’ve currently got that locked so I take on short-term or one-off type projects. That’s why I choose to operate on a corp-to-corp basis where once our relationship is setup, you can call me when needed, I deliver the solution, and when you’re satisfied I send the invoice. I prefer to keep it simple.
