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Why I'm leaving Digital.
Eric Pierce
District Technology Consultant
Ontario West
A number of you who know me already know that I am
voluntarily leaving Digital for a position as Consultant
Specialist at London Life Insurance Company, A large Digital
(as well as IBM and MicroSoft, etc.) customer in London,
Ontario.
I discussed the reasons that I am leaving with Frank Birch,
my manager, and he expressed an interest that I capture some
of my parting thoughts for circulation to coworkers and
management. I will also send it out to a few mailing lists
and place it in a few notes files that I have frequented
with the hope that it will serve as a farewell to those of
you that I have met during my 7 years with Digital but did
not have an opportunity to speak to personally before I
left.
The first question that I keep getting is: Why are you
leaving. It is the result of a well thought out action plan
that I put into place last October. I have a habit of re-
evaluating my career on a yearly basis, and up until now I
have been comfortable staying with Digital. At that time,
however, I realized that due to changes that we are all well
aware of in the industry (multivendor server client,
standards, commoditization of hardware, networking and
operating systems) that the days of dominant single vendors
in the computing market were gone forever. The days of a
"Digital shop" (Or IBM, or HP) with a single vendor
supplying all hardware, software and services were long
gone. The stresses within Digital have been obvious to all.
Therefore I set a goal of:
- Changing my career to the "other side" of the supply
chain, with a company who's business was not primarily
computers, but which uses computers as a business tool
within their enterprise. My primary skills that I took
to the bargaining table were designing and implementing
distributed, multivendor server client systems and
communications / presentation skills.
A couple of other criteria followed:
- The enterprise that I joined had a sustainable line of
business that would exist for at least the medium term
without total changes in their business model.
- The enterprise be a user of open, server client
computing, with a large IT budget.
- The enterprise was located in the London, Ontario area
as I did NOT desire to relocate back to the Toronto
area where a richer job market exists. This is a purely
personal reason based on the quality of life in a
smaller city, and also that I did not want to disrupt
my family again.
Those of you that know the London area will understand that
these criteria produce a pretty short list of potential
employers. I put in place a plan to discuss possibilities
with contacts at various companies, and after preliminary
discussions with a few of them I received an offer from
London Life, which I have accepted.
London Life is a fairly aggressive user of server client
computing with a large IBM mainframe, head office ethernet,
hundreds of pathworks MS-Windows clients served from
MicroVaxes and distributed offices with MicroVAX serves and
MS-Windows clients (read about them in the NAS references).
They are planning to move their SNA WAN to multiprotocol
over time.
My initial assignment with London Life will be spearheading
a project to improve the reliability and responsiveness of
the LAN; they have had some issues in managing server client
computing with their history of mainframe experience. It
will be a challenge, as most of the issues are cultural,
organizational and political rather than technical. In the
medium to long term they plan for me to be involved in
evolving their technical architecture.
London Life is a large, well capitalized company and I feel
that there is a possibility that I could even finish my
working career with them (of course, I said that when I
joined DEC), perhaps in an area not directly computer
related such as staff training or development. They have a
very strong corporate culture ("Customers for Life" is their
motto) and an excellent record for stable employment since
the mid 1800's. That is very attractive when you get to the
point where you have a lot less working life in your future
than in your past.
Interestingly enough they were one of the first users of
computers in Canada, with a UNIVAC in the late 1950's.
It will be a company that will be easy to
believe in. Maybe I'm just getting old and sentimental,
but I like a strong corporate culture.
So that in a nutshell is where I am going, and why I left. I
will continue with a few parting thoughts; some of them
rather random, but hopefully food for thought. I can't
say a lot that has not already been said before by many.
I sincerely believe that had I stayed with Digital and
applied myself to getting as good as possible in delivering
a number of services in the consulting services area that I
could have continued to be successful. However, I believe
that the cross IBU "capabilities" consulting model would
have resulted in either a lot of travel or a high
probability of relocating back to Toronto.
There are many opportunities for good people in the new
company that emerges from the old DEC as we knew it. I feel
that Bob Palmer is executing exactly the right plan to build
the type of organizations that is needed to restore what
remains of the company to health. Unfortunately he is much
like a military commander who is carrying out a campaign
where he knows he will be receiving heavy casualties. He
cannot stop and think of the individuals that fall by the
wayside.
The unfortunate negative effect on the moral of those
remaining after the waves of cuts is something that has
personally affected me, and has only made me that much more
certain that my decision for a career change was the right
one. Hopefully a return to profitability will occur in the
next few quarters, and some semblance of order will return.
I just hope that too many critical people have not been lost
for the company to have the depth it needs to operate in the
near term.
Digital will need to struggle with the new vertical IBU's
competing for resources from the horizontal capabilities
consulting units; I am really unclear how that will work,
especially in less populated geography's. I see a potential
for "turf wars" as we have seen in the past when resources
are shared, or poor utilization of resources when they are
dedicated.
There are many very bright ideas for ramping the consulting
capabilities of Digital specialists up; changing them to
always think in terms of selling consulting will be
challenging and take time.
The new commodities units will have to develop totally new
skills and models for selling; I just hope that they don't
re-create the overlap of effort that existed back in the
"product days". I recall as a customer in the early 80's
getting separate sales calls from PDP, VAX, PC, EDU and
SERVICES sales reps; Digital does not need a repeat of that
experience.
Digital needs to create a type of direct customer pre-sales
/ sales hotline and good commodity product catalogs, much
along the lines of what Microsoft has done to lower the cost
of sales for the very low end or experienced high end
customer.
Digital needs to continue to kill "lame duck" software and
hardware that is not clearly best in class, BUT have a clear
migration plan to the industry leading packaging.
I personally was caught by the cancellation of Bookreader
and was frustrated that the migration plan is not clear
and fast.
I feel that the the operating system future for growth is
clearly Windows NT and / or possible UNIX; Digital needs to
concentrate on bring production robust features over from
VMS because someone else will anyway. Trying to win new
accounts (remember them) by leading VMS is seldom
successful. No consultants and programmers are better
equipped to leverage off of Windows NT than those who grew
up on VMS. (or RSX for that matter).
Digital needs to continue to concentrate on the basic core
skills of networking connectivity and interoperability
design and delivery as it moves up the consulting "stack".
To lose the ability to deliver will render Digital just
another "report and run" consulting company.
It's been painful to experience the changes that have gone
through DEC in the last couple of years. In many ways I
understand what the DEC employee (sorry I can't remember who)
meant when he said
I joined DEC, but I'm leaving Digital
If you don't understand that, then you probably won't
understand why I had a huge knot in my stomach for a couple
of hours when I learned of the plans to phase out the mill.
Kind of like hearing that your parent's house where you
grew up had burned to the ground. It was very ironic that
this announcement was within a day of my offer to leave Digital.
The symbolic death of the old DEC.
The old DEC is gone; If you don't have a copy of "Digital at
Work" (Edited by Jamie Pearson, ISBN 1-55558-092-0, Digital
Press EY-J826E-DP), get one so that you can leaf through it
years from now and remember the way DEC once was. But you
can't live in the past. Find a place in the new Digital, and
go for it. It's up to you to manage your career.
I'm looking forward to being a customer again. Only problem
is that there are lots of other vendors out there selling
plug and play components for what once was the "Digital
Style of Computing"; In fact, you can build it without ANY
Digital components. Just like IBM created the PC and then
lost control of it, DEC created networked computing and lost
control of it.
Hopefully some Digital products and services will continue
to be best in class and priced competitively so that I can
continue to buy them.
Farewell to all I have met and worked with in my 7 years with
DEC / Digital, I'm sure that I'll be running into many of you
again.
Best Wishes!
Eric Pierce
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