While I was still stepping in as needed to write code for
difficult situations, by the mid-90’s I was no longer spending my time in
coding. Rather, I was helping to lead
others who were doing the actual coding.
I was not their supervisor, but was floating between projects as the
need arose. In many cases I was giving
technical advice to people who were coding in languages and on platforms that I
myself had never actually used. Two
things happened that made this transition complete.
The first was Y2K. All the way back in 1980 I had designed a
generalized date routine for the company that did all the needed date
calculations – getting the current date, changes date formats, calculating the
difference between two dates, etc. As a
result, many of our applications were insulated from Y2K as this date routine
took it into account and would work until 2040.
But there were still many applications that would fail when the change
of century occurred. I had been the lone
voice asking for this problem to be worked on for many years, but no one was
listening. Finally, I received
permission from my manager to work on the corporate accounts receivable system,
correct any faulty date logic, and document what the impact of the new century
would have been if the changes had not been made. The results stunned everyone. Beginning in January of 2000, all accounts
would be flagged as past due and interest charged to each customer with an
outstanding balance, and any payments received would be dropped as having
invalid dates and simply rejected – with no way to correct them except to rekey
them from scratch. Because of those
results, I finally convinced management that we needed to address this issue. The issue was too big for one person to
handle, so one of the most senior project managers in IT was given overall
responsibility and I worked on the team to address all the gas group
systems. This included all our gas group
subsidiaries and joint ventures around the world – so I had a series of trips
to all our major international locations to document their systems and work
with their local IT staff to address any issues.
On the night of the century rollover, I was on duty the
entire night. The VP of operations was
also on duty and as Y2K rolled through each time zone the plants were being
shut down before midnight, restarted after midnight, and the results called in
to him. Despite all that we had done, I
logged over 60 failures, mostly minor ones, around the world. The only ones with any financial impact were
(1) the executive payroll system took out the deductions from each executive’s
paycheck twice instead of once [that was a system I was not allowed to inspect
because it was too sensitive], and (2) a computer in one of our facilities that
logged the amount of product being imported via pipeline from a government
plant calculated a negative amount of product for the hour that spanned
midnight and gave us a credit instead of a charge [because the PC it ran on was
a government PC instead of ours we had not been allowed to touch or examine
it.]
The second incident was our (failed) attempt to buy out one
of our competitors. While the
headquarters of both companies were in the US, we each had a network of
subsidiaries and joint ventures around the world. We had a large IT staff putting together a
plan for how to integrate the two companies in the US, but just myself and one
other person worrying about all the international locations. I had been put on the team because of my Y2K
experience. So even without travelling
to any of our competitor locations, I had put together a detailed plan on how
to do the integration. Management was
impressed with the plan I had developed.
While the acquisition did not come to pass because of FTC objections
(that’s another story that I will not include here), I became known as the
international expert within IT – so much so that I knew more about our
international structure than even the corporate secretary and I helped update
the corporate records on our percentage of JV ownership (see below for more
detail).
The result of these two situations meant that I had now
totally divorced myself from the technical area (although I still had all that
knowledge as an asset) and was the expert in our international operations. Thus “rebranded”, I entered the final phase
of my career at Air Products.
I had spent the four years prior to 2000 making the
transition. For the rest of my working
years in the new decade I was still in IT, but with a very different focus –
that of being an advocate and business analyst for all our international
subsidiaries and joint ventures. There
were several facets to this new focus.
Defining the company – In the process of wanting to know
where the company did business and where there might be Y2K problems, I had
explored our ownership position of the various subsidiaries and joint
ventures. Some of what I found
conflicted with information that was kept by other departments, specifically
the corporate secretary’s office and the corporate tax office. The former is supposed to be the “owner” of
our ownership position, the latter cares about taxability, but stops caring
whenever the total ownership position drops below 50%. I ended up forming a small working group with
representatives of those two offices and myself. The definitions of things like “ownership”,
“liability”, and “control” can be very convoluted but we needed to have a
consistent view of them at the corporate level.
It’s complicated when you directly own X% of company Q, but then you
also own Y% of company P which then owns Z% of the same company Q. I also suggested some new wording for the
standard wording that went on all corporate press releases: “… does business in
__ countries …” as well as the language regarding how many employees the
company had (it’s established at the beginning of a fiscal year and is
published unchanged for the next 12 months even as company changes are
made). For IT to take the lead in such
matters was quite unprecedented.
Standardizing computer hardware/software – One of our goals
was to replace the hodge-podge of computer systems around the world that had
resulted from either acquisitions over time or of each country going their own
way in the absence of corporate standards.
The object was to make them consistent so you could take your
company-issued laptop to any installation in the world, find a green Ethernet
cable and log on to the network just as if you’d been at your own desk. It took a couple of years to get this all
done, but I led the effort to do so and this had huge benefits later.
Standardizing systems – At one time we counted 38 different
order entry systems being used within the company. There were several in various divisions in
the US and when you added the international segment the numbers
skyrocketed. This usually also meant
that there were several different accounting systems, complicating the function
of reporting total sales figures for example.
The decision was made to replace all our homegrown systems with
standardized purchased software, namely SAP.
The prior project to standardize our network paved the way to make this
possible. While I was not officially a
part of the SAP team, I was often the lead person presenting this concept to
both local IT and local business management, so I had to be pretty familiar
with what they were going to be encountering and alleviate their fears.
Building relationships – One very important function was for
me to establish relationships with the people in each country/subsidiary. I needed to develop a level of trust as I was
the voice/face of the company to them. I
also needed to be able to accurately represent them whenever decisions were
being made in Allentown that affected them.
I found that a face-to-face meeting every two years would suffice as
long as there was regular email/phone contact in between. I also get very good at both understanding
and speaking ESL (English as a Second Language). Being able to communicate in a way that I
could be understood directly was an extremely valuable skill. Most of my IT colleagues either talked too
fast or used too many figures of speech or complicated words to be easily
understood. I made many good friends
around the world, even though I generally limited my travel to only one major
trip per year (but usually with multiple stops in different countries in that
part of the world).
Standing in the gap – There were a few occasions where I had
to provide direct technical support. For
example, a couple of people in our Brazilian subsidiary were fired due to some
improper actions. Brazil has one of the
most complicated tax structures in the world and some spreadsheets used by one
of the fired individuals were critical to complying with these tax laws. I stepped in and designed a new system that
would automate the complicated calculations so we could close the books in a
timely manner each month. The night of
the first closing I was on duty in my office in the US while the new finance
manager in Brazil was running the closing from her office in Sao Paulo. I had access to the server in Brazil so I
could help make the necessary final tweaks.
I had been saying for many years that I did not have a
retirement date in mind – that I would keep working for as long as it was still
“fun.” While when I began saying this I
meant that I might continue working after age 65, the “fun” ended quite a bit
before then.
The company had gone through many reorganizations since I
had been hired over 30 years before.
There were always changes and that was a way of life that I was used
to. But in the latest one I found myself
with a new manager who happened to be British and he brought with him a new way
of doing things. This included that
every task had to be done the same way by everyone. It didn’t matter whether it was a relatively
new hire in their mid-20’s in the UK or myself in my mid-50’s with 30 years of
company background and knowledge. And he
did not believe in compromising this view.
The company as a whole was also undergoing change
(again). They were on a “quality” kick
that was all about elimination of “waste” and “unproductive” time. We had had similar campaigns in the past, but
now “waste” extended down to the fact that if you took a bathroom break you
were being unproductive. Or if you were conversing
with a fellow employee in the hall, even if it was about a mutual problem you
hoped to solve, that wasn’t a formal meeting and so was unproductive. The “fun” had left – and in a big way.
Even though I was only 58, in the fall of 2006 I announced
my retirement. Rather than the typical
two week notice, I announced it six months in advance, allowing a lot of time
for the transition. As it turned out, I
was on the leading edge of a great exodus of experienced IT folks. Over the next two years, there were dozens of
“retirements” of my compatriots. Some
even left before I did by not giving as much notice. And my fears were not unfounded. As I visited a few times in the following
years, or as others of my fellow IT retirees did the same, the mood had
changed. There were no people in the
halls, there was dead silence – people were either “heads down” in their
offices, or in meetings. The “fun” of
working for the company had died. Not
only had things like defined benefit pension plans been eliminated (that
happened a few years earlier but I had been “grandfathered” in), but the
feeling of contributing to the company and the willingness to give long hours
because you felt valued had gone away.
Now it was just a job and not a career.
(As I write this, the company has just gone through another such
reorganization – to operating totally regionally or by country. As such, they are in the process of
eliminating much of their home office staff – approximately 30%. Not fun at all any more!)
I didn’t regret leaving but I didn’t regret my time working
there either. But it was the end of an
era and I’m glad I left when I did.
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