Information analyst

1981 to 1984

Overcoming obstacles: Douglas Aircraft was losing thousands of dollars a day in deferred revenue because they couldn’t respond fast enough to customer changes. Information wasn’t reaching the work centers on time resulting in production delays and missed milestone payments. They couldn’t rely on standard work instructions anymore because every customer wanted something different. Douglas said that they needed a system that was more ‘flexible and responsive to change’. So, they hired a group of executives from the automotive industry ..and put together a team of analysts from IT. I was chosen because I had experience ‘pulling text out of a database’. I had no idea what this meant in the aircraft industry ..but that didn’t seem to matter. The new execs explained the concept of a ‘virtual assembly line’. This meant moving the work instead of the planes ..and required an information system to coordinate things differently than before. This worked in my favor. Since I had no experience with the way things worked before .. I had no pre-conceived ideas. I was an ‘active listener’ ..paraphrasing practically everything I heard. I went: “Sounds like you want the fuselage to stay in one place ..but keep the information moving, in ‘assembly line’ fashion, through the workstations ..(?)” Now everyone was looking at me and I didn’t know whether they were going to yell at me for impertinence ..irrelevance ..or stupidity. I felt the blood drain from my face. Then they shouted: “That's EXACTLY RIGHT..!!!!” When the blood returned; I calmly replied “Oh yeah ..we can do that.” Now my boss was looking at me in disbelief.