The Silicon Jungle by David H. Rothman
4. Working with your company’s data-processing people. Know which
1265 words | Chapter 60
questions to ask to find out the computer crew’s true attitudes about
micros. And come up with the right answers of your own if the
mainframers feel threatened by your interest in do-it-yourself
computing. Good data-processing people, however, won’t be
frightened—quite the reverse.
The scary aspect of Frank Stewart’s consultant fiascoes is that he and
his people were hardly lost amid high tech.
“Some of us were inventors,” Stewart said, and his vice-president, Bob
Hillard, even had a smattering of the FORTRAN programming language.
Stewart’s firm didn’t rush blindly into computerization. Originally, it
had been hand culling articles from 140 periodicals and 16 major daily
newspapers. “We sat down,” Hillard recalled, “and worked out a
mathematical formula to give weight to a particular article by mention
of certain words, certain individuals, certain companies.” Existing data
bases like The Source and Dialog just wouldn’t do. You couldn’t easily
use them to search out the political patterns affecting the fortunes of
Stewart’s clients.
Stewart spent $31,000 on a computer and soon was suffering defective
circuits and junky software. He paid a secretary to cram almost a
million words of newspaper articles into the machine’s hard-disk memory,
but it still couldn’t fetch facts as easily as he’d hoped. Then the
data-base program, the one he was using to store facts and juggle them
around, crashed—apparently overwhelmed by the volume of data. Micro data
bases at the time, the early 1980s, couldn’t easily handle big hunks of
text. Stewart couldn’t retrieve whole articles.
It was time for a consultant. A good consultant (the “Who”)
theoretically could write or install a new program (the “What”) in an
effective way (the “How”), justify his actions (the “Why”), and ideally
do everything at a reasonable price (the “How much”) before the data
base grew too unwieldy (the “When”). Stewart wanted him working on his
own premises (the “Where”) as much as possible so he could supervise
him.
“Our first consultant lasted all of four days,” Stewart said. “He was
abrasive, nasty, and didn’t know what he was doing. One of our staffers
was so frustrated trying to work with him that she wept. We’d hired him
because he was a friend of a friend and said, ‘I’m a computer
programmer. I can fix it for you.’ We never quite could pin him down
about his background. We were so burned that for five or six months we
put off hiring another consultant.
“And when we did get one,” said Stewart, “we wanted a solid, established
firm.”
So he went to a government contractor headquartered in an imposing
building, the size of a small public library. The consultants even owned
the same-model computer that Stewart’s company did.
Unfortunately, however, they were using different software for much
different purposes. Stewart’s needs were new to them.
“Look at MDBS,” Hillard recalls telling the contractor. “It really looks
like a good package.”
But he says the consultants told him they hadn’t even heard of it.
That in itself might have been a tipoff that Stewart had hired the wrong
people for the job. MDBS stood for Micro Data Base Systems. Ads and
reviews about it had appeared in _Byte_ and other prominent publications
of the micro world.
With the clock ticking away at up to $35 an hour, the consultants
searched for data-base software meeting Stewart’s detailed
specifications. “Three weeks later,” Hillard said, “they handed me a
bill for $2,500 and said, ‘The package you need to use is MDBS.’ I said,
‘Where is the work, where are the hours in relationship to the $2,500
bill?’ It went around in circles.” Stewart and Hillard must have
remembered the old saying that a consultant borrows your watch to tell
you the time of day and then charges you for it.
According to Stewart, in fact, the consultants based most of the report
on material his company had given them.
By think-tank standards in his area, Stewart may have gotten a bargain.
Dealing with consultants new to micro data bases, however, he was in
effect paying their tuition.
“The federal government must like them immensely,” Stewart said,
“because they do good, documented work in the fields they have expertise
in. But a small businessman had no business using them. After two and
one-half months we had nothing but recommendations on the data base—and
a stack of bills”—$2,500 high.
But there was hope. Stewart’s corporate benefactors were sticking with
him. If he could get his data base running, he could easily recoup his
losses, offering clients a treasure trove of information about
government policy-making affecting them. Although Stewart thought of
himself as a truth seeker, his vice-president was bluntly a money man.
“We would have sold our service for a million a year,” Hillard said,
“and we would have netted $600,000. We were using four people to feed
the articles into the computer, but that would have changed, because
optical readers eventually could scan magazine articles and newsprint.”
So now Hillard shopped around for a new savior to unravel the
complexities of the MDBS software that he had settled on.
He found three possibilities. One consultant, a micro expert, was snowed
under with work, and another man had only mainframe experience. So
Hillard and Stewart chose Fred Brown, a retired military officer who had
worked not only on big computers but also little Radio Shacks and
TeleVideos. In fact, Brown came recommended by the manager of a local
computer store. The manager leveled with Stewart. He said he and Brown
were together in a partnership developing software for lawyers’ offices.
Hillard asked only two people about Brown. And both references came from
the computer-store manager with the business relationship with the
consultant. Inquiring about Brown, however, Hillard asked some good
questions. Did Brown document the software properly? Did he, in other
words, tell how to use or change it? Did his software work? Did he meet
deadlines? Did he live up to all the specifications in his contracts? “I
got affirmative answers to most of these questions,” Hillard said. One
reference said a software project of Brown’s hadn’t come in on time but
brushed off the problem as a hardware one.
Unfortunately, Hillard didn’t ask _all_ the right questions. Brown had
never before worked with the brand of computer that Stewart Research was
using; nor was he fully comfortable at the time with the exact kind of
software used at the company.
Brown, however, struck Hillard as “a very nice professional.” He wore
three-piece suits, lived in a $140,000 home with several computers in
the basement, and held a masters degree from an Ivy League school.
“No problem,” Brown told Hillard. “Listen, I charge——” He gave an hourly
figure to the nearest cent; $30.02, we’ll say.
“What?” asked Hillard. “Why 0._02_ an hour?”
“I like to be fair about my salary, and that gives me $30,000 a year.”
“Okay,” said Hillard, “that’s cute.”
Brown wasn’t about to apply for welfare. On top of the $30,000 for
consulting part of the time, he was enjoying income from sales of
computer hardware. In short, he came across as successful and honest.
And he may have been. Just the same, client and consultant were clearly
mismatched.
Their downfall was a familiar kind—software problems.
You could customize the MDBS program in FORTRAN or BASIC. The earlier
consultants, the ones with the large government contractor, had
suggested FORTRAN. Brown himself was more familiar with that than with
BASIC. And Stewart was convinced that FORTRAN would make the best use of
software already purchased. So Brown went ahead with it despite three
strikes against him:
Reading Tips
Use arrow keys to navigate
Press 'N' for next chapter
Press 'P' for previous chapter