Wednesday, February 15, 2006

New Year's, 2000

We were asked in class if we rememebered Y2K. Boy do I! I dredged this up from an old website post, something I wrote about December 31, 1999 turned January 1, 2000. Total fluff, not really IT related (other than brief mentionings), but it captured my mood of that night in Athens, GA, just over 6 years ago.

Turning Time

New year's eve: so this is the last day of 1999, and chances are tomorrow will be just like today was. I find myself wondering if I should feel mystified. This is how we mark time; outside of us, this day has no significance any more than any other day. Hm.

I decide to dress up a little, since I so rarely do. Find that slinky slightly shimmery turtleneck in thin horizontal stripes of black and olive green (whoda thunk that polyester could seem fashionable?), wear with black jeans, motorcycle boots and leather biker jacket, thinking I may as well enter the new year ready to kick some ass if I had to, not that I really would but sometimes the image is fun. Run out of patience before I get to makeup, so I go clean-faced. Good enough for friends who wear jeans and flannel to work, and good enough for myself.

Go to Piotr's with Ben, who will have to leave early to cover the y2k readiness centers. Suprise, the TV is on. Someday I'll have to break them from this habit. Drink some beer, engage in conversation depite the television. So you heard I'm working at Cisco? Yeah, it's good -- I like it muchly. Pride must show through me. It makes me giddy sometimes.

11:30, and Ben is getting back as we're making plans to head downtown to watch the fireworks. It bothers me a little that Morris Newspapers spent more on fireworks for one night than they pay Ben in a year. Someday Ben will be appreciated for his value. But then, shouldn't we all be? We drive downtown, even though Piotr's apartment is about 12 blocks away. Ben and I park at the paper, lose the others. Guess they'll work it out on their own. Ben checks in at the paper, comes right back out and we head to the center of downtown. Ben's phone rings -- there's a fire down at College Square, the direction we're heading. We go by to find it's only someone's cigarette butt that got thrown down a manhole.

There are people all around, with noisemakers, friends, looks of excitement and drunkenness on their faces. This beats the hell out of watching television any day, even if it is only little old Athens. Sometimes being there makes all the difference in the world. We continue on to where we think the fireworks will be, where most others are gathering. We hear our names shouted, look up to the top of the parking deck to see figures waving at us. We wave back. There's a police car parked in the middle of the intersection; that's a cop who wants to be where the view is good. Other cops on bicycles, roaming the town, looking un-anxious. There are a couple of false starts, false countdowns. Then the fireworks begin. People are screaming, whooping and hollering, whistling, laughing, shouting. Sparks fly over our heads, kids with sparklers run around us, creating volumous amounts of smoke to add to the surreal nature of this time. Lights are still working, no airplanes falling out of the sky, no rioting in the streets. No great pyramid from outer space coming to take the believers away. Ben needs to test an ATM, discovers the only problems being drunkenness of the users. He heads back to the paper, I look for the friends.

I go back to the parking deck, but streams of people are flooding the glass-walled stairway and I don't see them. I decide to walk down to House of Joe to see if they are there, since that spot was mentioned. I start walking, feeling like a salmon, floods of people walking past me. I think I have the long-strided but not too hurried pace down well. Every other person yells happy new year at me. Two girls throw multi-colored shiny confetti at me. People I've never seen reach out to me, we high five or give a quick shake of the hand. Everyone seems to be in a good mood, such that I've never seen. People are looking me in the face as I go by, wishing happy new years. I wonder if it's relief that life will still be as we know it, that the worst-case scenarios have not come to be. One guy calls me girl in leather. Even the pandhandler tells me I look beautiful after he asks me for change which I do not have. I find myself walking in step to tunes blaring from parked cars. I get to Joes, and it's closed. Turn around, walk back to the paper. More people with happy wishes greet me as I sail past. I find this general elation contageous.

I make it back to the paper, and Ben tells me friends are back at Piotr's, tells me to take the car. I head back feeling a little mystified. These people in the streets after midnight are the same folks who will be guarded as they walk down the streets on Monday morning. I feel lucky to have seen this side of humanity.

Back with friends, I share some champagne, share some more conversation. Ben joins shortly thereafter. We eventually leave, and life continues on as it always has.

Tuesday, February 14, 2006

Taking the underdog's view

Marc works for the UPS helpdesk. Or rather, he did before they got closed down. While this was not a complete surprise (they had been shrinking the desk's workforce through attrition for the last 9 months or so, going from an ensemble of about 20 employees down to their current count of 3), what was a surprise was when he showed up for work yesterday to find no body there.

That's right -- they'd decided over the weekend to cease calls to the desk and didn't bother to let some of the employees know, sending Marc upon arrival to a different office to do whatever work they could find for him there. This is reflective of their overall attitude toward keeping their workstaff informed throughout this process. Marc (and some of his coworkers) have for months felt the desk was going to be shut down, but not until about 4 weeks ago did management actually announce any such plans to the dwindling helpdesk staff. They said then that generally UPS gave 90 days notice but would give no date. About a week later, they told them the close date would be Feb. 28th (well short of the 90 day window they'd mentioned). Then last week, management told them that the desk might close sooner (though again they would not give a date). They have made a habit of being extremely stingy with information, have given wrong or misleading information in order to coerce employees into particular positions, have flip-flopped on closing dates and promises of benefits. Today, they were supposed to have a meeting with the HR manager, but no such meeting seems now to be going to happen. All this has left the remaining employees with an incredibly distasteful distrust of management, leaving them and me by association with the sense that UPS is horribly mismanaging its IT force layoffs.

You can read the opinions of others in the company on the website Brown Cafe (not sponsored by UPS). Under 'UPS People' click 'UPS Discussion Boards', then click 'Brown Cafe', then 'UPS Discussions' and look for 'UPS laying off Technical hourly employees'. This public, and mostly anonymous, forum (due to fine print in the employee handbook telling employees they are not to talk about any of this) is bringing to light the sentiment that the UPS marketing engine would not have us see.

This makes me think about another mental munchy tidbit -- how the free availability of information to anyone who wishes to seek it out is changing the way corporations (and the military, for that matter, but that's a different post) do business. No longer can the 4000 pound gorillas hide behind their PR screens, filtering out predigested information to a coddled public. We want the raw, the real, the hard information, and now we can get it.

Dr. VanSlyke once mentioned in class that any business that gets unionized deserves the union it gets. While the UPS driver force is unionized, its IT force is not. Until now, it hasn't made much sense in general to unionize IT because the working conditions tend to be pretty good. I'm curious to see if UPS will have the ignominious credit of pushing their IT divisions to unionization. Note the thread on the Brown Cafe labeled "Information on making TSG unionized", and the link there to find more information at http://uatups.com/.

I'm also curious to watch how the way they've managed this IT reorganization will affect UPS in the long run, curious to see what of it makes it out into mainstream news, and curious to see if this decision to save money now in the short term will adversely affect long-term productivity and health of the company. My personal interest aside, I believe this is a case study in the making.

Saturday, February 11, 2006

Open Source or ERP ... why not both?

How we rolled our own ERP over time using open source code, ingenuity, one IT guy and a paper clip.

I used to imagine the existence of an entire underground civilization of computers locked away in dusty, damp, inhumane back room conditions, streaked with grease-monkey fingerprints, caked with flour and jammed with crumbs, or hiding amidst the junk just on the other side of the drip falling from the ceiling of the add-on shack. I imagined that one day, all these computers would realize that they weren't the only ones, that there were others out there, just like them, and they would form underground coalitions, pass surreptitious communications back and forth, and form a plan to unite and demand better work environments, unionized PCs for cleaner conditions.

Granted, this is a fantastical scenario, but I mention it now because in a sense, it's not so far from what is actually happening. What is ERP but a way to tie together previously separate processes into a unified whole?

It's funny how sometimes you learn the name for the system you've been using all along at work, and you suddenly develop a higher respect for what it does and how it came to be. When my supervisor started at our place of work, he was the IT department. The school was using Access to store student data, and was quickly realizing that it would not scale to meet the growing requirements of the business. Being as slim on budget as IT was on staffing, he pulled together a system using Open Source products: Linux on the mail server running Postfix, PostgreSQL database with user definitions and permissions set through the use of pgAdmin, and various PHP classes (including the PEAR framework) to build the Web Interface to allow employees access to student files from their offices in Grand Cayman, Orlando and Niceville, FL, and Standish, Maine, on whatever operating system platforms they were using (usually Windows). Add to that an online web portal running eGroupWare available to students wherever they may be, and what you get is the built-to-order beginnings of an ERP.

So, where do I see ERP in our system? To start, the nature of our company required that we be able to keep track of student information from wherever we were, because our students are so dispersed. Since we don't have our own teaching hospital, we have agreements with others throughout the US and UK to allow our students to do their clinical clerkships there. While some students stay at a particular hospital through their clinical science education, most of them travel to different locations. And since the administrative offices are in Florida while the college itself (where students attend their basic science classes) is in Grand Cayman, we could not be tied to a particular location. I see it this way: the student is what drives the process (giving that student their medical education and degree is the process). The IS is built to enable faculty and staff to do what they need to do to help keep that student's education on track, and all the systems functioning in order to create an environment to facilitate that. While our system is still not as all-inclusive as I would like, we are working toward building modules to reach that goal. I imagine our system works so well because it was built from the ground up and tailored to meet the needs at any given time. While that has caused some problems with keeping the larger picture in mind, all in all I'm proud to say that our system is highly successful.

As the school has grown, the IT staff has grown. Now, we have three of us full-time in the Oviedo office: the Director of IT (my supervisor), myself as software engineer and helpdesk overflow, and the helpdesk guy to assist employees and students with computer and online account questions and problems. We finally hired someone full-time in Cayman to handle IT issues there on campus, and he has a guy helping part-time. The Maine staff still relies on bringing in occasional IT help from a guy we have contracted to work hourly on an as-needed basis. I've been with the company now for about 2 1/2 years, and one thing I know for certain: there's gonna be changes ahead.