Information analyst

1981 to 1984

Overcoming obstacles (continued): When I looked at the database; I was scared shit-less. Now I wondered what I could’ve been thinking. It didn’t look like anything I’d ever seen before. There were records for building aircraft sections that were so large, they took weeks to write and revise. There was no way we were going to keep information like that ‘moving’ the way I’d envisioned. Now my boss was pacing the floor and chain-smoking and the word ‘sell-out’ kept echoing through my head. That reminded me of something else I’d heard in graduate school: a chain of small data packages is faster to process than a large chunk of information. With the help of Industrial Engineers, we broke-up records for completing sections into smaller records for completing ‘operations’ that were easier to revise, store and retrieve from the database. Now Engineers could create custom work packages using a library of ‘component operations’. Information began moving through the system more rapidly and arriving where it was needed on time. Work packages could be revised and published in a day. When I think about it now, what we actually did was create a system that helped make people more ‘flexible and responsive to change’.