Thursday, November 26, 2009

Memories of IT - mid-90's - Tossed out of the White Tower

A little background on Technical Development (TD); it had existed in Toronto, and was staffed up again in Regina. We all worked for a middle manager, a couple of different ones who came and went. When one of them did move on, that’s when the VP I have mentioned previously took over. She had managed a large application area, and a re-org took away that area, and she came to manage us white-tower, R&D folks. It seemed like overkill to me, but it turned out that her job was to get the current of R&D projects done, This was mainly getting a server-based environment implemented that could be used to take over from the mainframe, which was supposed to be cheaper and better because it would be GUIs on PCs and such.

This reminds me that when we moved to Regina, our mainframe processing was switched from Datacrown/Crowntec to a local IBM/ISM facility, so we were still paying for every MF cycle and disc storage byte, so servers were seen as the solution.

So, at some point, it was divined that the server environment was ready, so we would never have to do R&D again, so TD was to be disbanded. It was like “the end of history…”. I also think it was because we were a senior bunch of people, higher-paid, and management decided it was time for us to work on actual projects and earn our pay.

So, we all dispersed across the company, and the VP got a new big app area to manage. I was concerned, because a lot of app areas were run by people who had declined to do IEM/IEF, and that’s what I was tagged with. However, I ended up joining the team doing the new Individual Insurance package, to do requirements for possible changes to the package.

So, back to the project trenches I went…

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About Me

Ontario, Canada
I have been an IT Business Analyst for 25 years, so I must have learned something. Also been on a lot of projects, which I have distilled into the book "Cascade": follow the link to the right to see more.