the Monday Musings column from that consultant bloke

Last week saw me landing in Swindon, having escaped from IT and become, to a degree, poacher turned gamekeeper. Towards the end of the first week in that new job, back in the Autumn of 1984, two things happened; firstly, I met the lady who I would, at the end of that decade, set up home with (I’ll come back to her later, but, for regular readers, this was the Berkshire Belle), and secondly, I was presented with an IBM PC: I had not seen one before, but my new lords and masters had assumed, me being ex-IT, that I would know all about. Fortunately it had arrived late in the afternoon and so I took advantage of the wonders of flexi-time and buggered off home on the ‘bus with the PC’s manual, and the MS-DOS and MS-BASIC manuals, in my briefcase.

By the time that Thamesdown Transport’s Outer Circle service had dropped me back at the office the next day I had three programmes written in MS-BASIC; one nonsense routine to amuse, or annoy, colleagues, another to calculate expense claims and the third a new version of an American Football game that a pall and I had written in COBOL back in London. I settled at the computer desk, powered up the IBM for the first time and got to work. Sure enough, an audience arrived. Someone asked what I was doing, and I told them I was checking that it was working. How did I do that? I moved aside and asked a colleague to type in “Are you working OK?” They did, and, after a short pause, the word “Yes” appeared on the VDU. Some seemed impressed, others less so; “Is that it?” asked one. I suggested to the colleague who had taken my seat and typed the first question that they should ask if it was sure. They typed that in and, after a shorter pause; “I’ve told you once. Either ask me to do something or piss off and leave me to think in peace.” Scrolled across the screen. Exit audience, and it was about half an hour later than one of them sidled back to ask if that hat been a wind up. I told them no, that the IBM was sulking because I wasn’t wearing blue socks. (Quick lesson: In jokes only work with people who are in).

For a short while I was back as a programmer, writing odd little routines for the trio of IBMs that we had acquired and one of the simplest of these was another routine to blind with science. One of the stock controllers was getting regularly whipped at the weekly management meetings because his figures were manually generated rather than coming off the new computer system that had just been introduced. No-one would believe his numbers and so I wrote him a little routine so that he could type in his figures and print them off on piano lined paper. He did this and handed the report around at the next management meeting: Ho got no comments. Just seeing his figures as apparently off the system was all it took. Smoke and mirrors.

The project that I had been drawn down to Swindon for involved computerising purchasing and stock control at local and regional offices around the UK. This project would be linked to a parallel one in Swindon from where central stocks and purchasing were undertaken. I was back in my business analyst role, but with responsibility for field testing the new systems and rolling them out. This project ran on IBM System 36/38 minicomputers, standard business machines of the time and, again, the size of a large washing machine. The software was in a language called 4GL and I learned enough of this to write routines to run the sort of reports that we needed, it being quicker to do that than to go through the formal process of asking for them to be written by the IT people. They never spotted what had been done behind their backs.

The Berkshire Belle enters the story again here because her job changed and she became the key user contact for the Swindon based project and used to sweep into our office clutching her packet of Marlboros and her lighter to engage in heated debate with my boss squared. I developed something of a crush on her at this time. And she terrified me too.

Computer projects are a hard slog. They involve change and that is something that many people instinctively resist. They also mean that what people are actually doing, as opposed to what they are supposed to be doing, get exposed and that is a threat. They encroach on fiefdoms and, often, sweep them away. They also impose deadlines that few like to have imposed on them, but worst of all, they take control of things. On arriving at most sites and introducing myself, the words; “I’ve come to computerise your stores” often appear to be heard as; “I’ve come to rape your wife and daughters.” One is usually as welcome as a dose of piles.

But the weight of the corporate machine meets the wealth of corporate anarchy head on and usually the result is some form of score draw. I was unusual in that I was a generalist in a specialist role. I was well travelled around the business, knew how the system worked and had mentors in high places. I didn’t have to invoke the latter, but knowing the system meant that I could often break deadlocks and my reputation as a hustler grew through the mid-eighties.

One of the major problems with big computer systems is that they are big. The bigger the project the more people get consulted and involved and by the time that you get a specification signed off as what is needed that requirement is probably out of date. When you finally get around to implementing the thing, a year or more downstream, it is definitely not what is needed, even if it is what everyone wanted. Look at any of the major governmental computerisation projects and they all fall down this hole. Too much time is pend on getting the spec tight, when the better option is to go with something more flexible that can adapt to the world that it enters.

A lot of time is wasted on computerising what is done now rather than producing a system that will work with what is possible. I battled away, but the project that on was working on was shut down almost overnight when the organisation decided to split into four divisions: three operating businesses and an overall HQ. There was wholesale scrapping of computer projects, not just mine, and thus a large surplus of computer project people. I dived for cover into a strategic role: The ivory tower was not my natural habitat, but any port in a storm (I come from two generations of Royal Navy stokers, nautical expressions come naturally).

To be continued: Part three next week.