When I wanted out of my job at Mercer, my headhunter quickly found me a position at Information Resources in downtown Chicago. I already had a reputation as being a very good problem solver, and IRI was having some problems. But what convinced me even more was that this position carried a vice president title, and paid a lot more that I was making.
My first interview was with a consultant who worked long-term at IRI. He was older, and quite technical. In the interview I got the idea that he wasn’t telling me the whole story, so I pressed him about the problems. He then pulled out a paper from his desk and explained what was going on. Even during the interview, I had some suggestions, which he got excited by. A few days later I was called in for a second interview with one of the “Group Presidents”. The one pressing question that was concerning him was “What if we have a major failure on a Friday night or Saturday, and you can’t be reached?” — To which I looked him in the eye and said “If I am the only person in my organization that can fix the problem, then I’m not doing my job.” He loved that answer, and I got the job offer.
By the way, although I was impressed by the “vice president” title, this was a very large company, and they had about a dozen VPs!
When I came on board, I found out that the Unix servers were repeatedly crashing for all sorts of reasons, disrupting work for clients, and severely affecting data delivery times. (IRI processed scan data from retailer sales, both providing analysis and raw data back to the product manufacturers and distributors. Getting the data in a very timely manner was critical to keeping up to or ahead of competition in the retail space.)
In my third week, while I was still getting to know people and evaluating the situation technically, I was asked to participate in a video conference with Proctor and Gamble. In those days a video conference was a big deal — required a special room with thousands of dollars of equipment and a dedicated high speed line. What I discovered was that P&G was IRI’s biggest customer (millions per year), and they had almost 1000 people whose job it was to analyze the data we supplied. If we were late by even a day, that was 1000 people being paid to sit on their hands!
Although they understood that I was new, they pressed for a fix to their problems. Without really knowing yet what was going on, I promised them a short-term fix within two weeks, and a longer-term fix within 3 months. I basically went out on a limb, just trusting my technical instincts, knowing that these systems should be stable.
Long story short, I found out that the people managing the servers had not applied system software patches for over two years — because, in their words, they were “too busy fighting fires”. Well, those fires were mostly due to the missing software patches! I brought in HP themselves to quickly bring the systems up to the latest patch levels (dozens of software patches were missing), and in a week we suddenly had almost no outages!
I made quite an impression in the first year, solving many similar issues. Some problems were much more complex, but I was not only technically proficient, I was very good at bridging the gap between the technical staff and the business staff, so I was able to get both sides to understand each other better and work out difficulties.
I’ve posted a few interesting emails from the first year. One of the major products at the time was called “Timeshare”, and was basically a portal into our servers that our clients could use to access our analysis programs. The actual packages of analyzed data were called “InfoViews”. Some of these terms may appear in the posted emails.
I will create a couple of separate posts covering specific episodes of my tenure at IRI.
The above letter was written immediately after I returned to my office after a company meeting. It was to my staff but of course I copied senior management.
The snippets below are some of the replies I got to that letter, which management forwarded to many departments, and to the events of the meeting in general.
