I frequently start by telling people I've been to Mars - twice. Now, thanks to Google, I can give directions:
http://maps.google.com/maps?q=mars+pa&oi=geocode_result&resnum=0&ct=directions-to&daddr=Mars%2C+PA&saddr=Slippery+Rock+PAI grew up in Toronto and I spent work terms at the University of Waterloo doing FORTRAN programming modeling air pollution and radio signal propagation among other things. In 1986 was a government contractor, working on software for monitoring small municipal water pollution control (aka sewage treatment) facilities, when I got a call from "the private sector" - a friend who needed help on a Prime Information AR re-write.
This led to more consulting in the usual variety of MultiValue industries - Medical, Transportation, and Mining. I was fortunate enough to work at a couple of MultiValue software resellers when Usenet took off, then the Internet. I rewrote the reporting module - including hooks for making it available on an intranet - in 1997 - for the UV-based academic library automation system then used at MIT, Oxford, and the Vatican Library.
In 1998 I moved to Seattle and got married - and I'm very happy with both moves. I came to Seattle to work at my only end-user employer - Seattle FilmWorks - with some terrific colleagues and 30 million customer records and eventually hundreds of millions of jpegs archived and managed using UniVerse. We did amazing things with UniVerse - and robots - and Apache. In 1999, I launched their data warehousing effort using a new product called DataStage. In 2004 I was wooed away by a small MultiValue software company with 7 employees and a product called MITS - a short walk from my home.
At MITS I worked with end users and developed reference implementations for our business development, marketing, sales and training efforts. You may have heard me speak or read articles I wrote about MITS and business intelligence for International Spectrum. I developed curriculum and ran advanced training classes in Seattle, Florida, the UK, and points in between.
In 2007 I left MITS to return to consulting and work on some interesting projects. I'm active in the wider business intelligence community, speaking at vertical and data warehousing conferences. I’m a TDWI Certified Business Intelligence Professional and my article in the Business Intelligence Journal last fall was selected as the article of the year and is available free in TDWI's 2007 Best of BI publication.
So many of our shops are small and somewhat isolated – it really is a kick to interact with other MultiValue people at shows, at user group meetings, in webinars, and now through Precisely Speaking.
