Still working for DEC, I joined CSSE – only one letter different, but a totally new type of work. This was a part of customer services (the support arm of DEC) attached to product engineering; our role was to work with the engineers to ensure that the products being developed could be supported properly after sale – sometimes this meant changing the design, sometimes simply providing simple and straightforward training for support staff. I worked on a few small projects (including GAMMA-11, a system for viewing a patient’s internal organs by means of a mild radioactive medicine and a gamma camera), before working on PSI, a data communications software package to do with X.25 networks. This software was regarded by DEC in the USA as “something that only the Europeans would ever want”; so it had been developed by the Reading branch of Network and Communications (NAC) Engineering .. but they were wrong! After a couple of years in CSSE, I moved to join NAC as Product Manager, responsible for all X25 products worldwide, and in the next three years X25 revenue shot up from 5,000 to 5 million dollars a year. Far from being a European sideshow, PSI was regarded as a highly profitable business (and the USA folk wanted to pinch it back – oh no!). These years in DEC involved much travel; I went to the states at least quarterly, and once 3 times in one month, making many friends over there among colleagues and US customers. Several times I visited major US customers, usually to meet a Vice-president for a “shirtsleeves” technical session – this incidentally was the biggest of the many contrasts between US and UK businesses that I observed, i.e. that senior bosses in the US knew all about the technical details – in the UK that was rarely true.
Twice a year was the US User-group exhibition, where I would do a 45-minute product presentation to audiences of 3-500 customers, and help man the stand for a week. Customers would wander up, tell you their problems, and lap up all hints and ideas – often, they wanted a hands-on demo of the product, and most would go back ready to order it the following day. One incident is strong in my memory – a US customer came and described his business, what he wanted to do, and asked what I suggested he did; after a few extra questions on my part, I said that my first guess would be that he needed two X and five Y boxes, and connect them up so, and that should just about do the job. “How much would that cost?” he asked, so I got out the catalogue and added it up, and it came to about $40-50,000 total. “That’s funny”, he then said, “because my local DEC office just quoted me $20 million!”. You can imagine how nervous I suddenly felt. I wrote down my suggested configuration, and suggested he ask them to review it and contact me if needed. Next Monday in the UK, I sent an email message to the DEC office, explained how our conversation arose, and asked them to phone me; clearly, I feared that I might have missed some of his requirements and had now set expectations wrongly – so I was relieved when the office called and said how relieved they were; “we knew there ought to be a cheaper way, but we couldn’t think how to do it”, they said, “we were about to lose that customer completely, and now he’s so impressed with us, you wouldn’t believe it”. Another of Ken Olson’s “doing right for the customer is doing right for DEC” sayings had come true.
There was some chance for relaxation amid the travels, though the working week was very busy; two of the user group meetings were held in the Anaheim conference centre, next door to Disneyland, and the user-group privately booked it one evening each week for their “social event”; of course, we DEC folk felt obliged to go along too – just in case any customers thought of any technical questions during the evening! And sometimes I’d have a fortnight in the States, and have a weekend free, to drive round, visit a tourist attraction or two, try out a USA church, and generally relax; on one occasion my friend Nancy drove me out to her weekend log cabin in Eastern Massachusetts, and we went to a concert at Tanglewood (the summer home of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, and a sort of American version of Glyndebourne). The only significant problem was during my visit to the user-group conference held at Nashville, when returning to my motel late at night I was mugged at gunpoint, and robbed of my wallet, watch and briefcase (containing work papers, travellers cheques, plane tickets, passport etc). Fortunately, the time difference worked in my favour ... before any American shops opened, I had phoned the UK and stopped the credit cards etc; by 10am I was in the American Express office, being supplied with new travellers cheques and money and air ticket (first class to Boston, courtesy of DEC) – I flew immediately to Boston, and at the British consulate there got an emergency passport to return to the UK. Some six months later, the Nashville police wrote, asking me to drop in at their police station and look at photos, to try and identify my assailants; I declined.
I also did European trips to trade and user-group meetings, visiting Utrecht, Copenhagen, Hamburg, Geneva several times and Valbonne/Nice many times. These were usually one-day trips, involving an early start and late return, but on one occasion we had meetings in Geneva one day and Zurich the next; as our Geneva meetings finished early, we cashed in our plane tickets and took the train to Zurich – an amazing journey, departing to the second, and going through wonderful scenery.
Business management seemed an interesting sideways step after Product management – it was aimed at providing greater analysis, and hopefully good forecasts, of networking Business in Europe. Derek Allan (also ex-CSS) and I spent a lot of time understanding the products on sale and about to emerge; the easiest forecasts were top-of-the head ones (product X replaces Y, so just assume a transition between them over x months), but where there was a totally new product things were a lot more difficult. We decided to try and capture sales – but the problem there was that sales-force were often putting “hopes” down as “sales”, and even without that, customers sometimes ordered and then cancelled. The method we ended up with was to get “nett orders”, by taking a copy of the orders database each week, and subtracting the previous week’s numbers – which meant negotiations with database folk at Ayr, Scotland. I then concentrated on automating information derived from these numbers plus actual invoiced shipments, and soon got to the point when on a per-product or per-family basis I could instantly plot nett orders, and cumulative sales, and our forecasts month-by-month, all on one graph.
These graphs proved invaluable for forecasting business. They showed us quickly if our forecasts were about right, too high or too low. We learned, very quickly, how ordering and shipment patterns varied through the financial year, the impact of Christmas etc., and that our forecasts round about the 8th month were very likely to be close to the final end-of-year result. With ever-improving forecasts, the “totals” were of course much more realistic, and the climax came when the USA were getting very concerned about a dip in US business; at that time I was forecasting $150 million for business in Europe, and they phoned me specially to ask how confident I was (if we made that money, growth in Europe would compensate for the dip in the USA) – I was able to say “very confident indeed”, and when the year ended and the European business was added up, and came to $150.6 million, I was regarded with a certain amount of awe. I was at that time tapping in to USA databases, to forecast European-invented products worldwide, and was therefore able to do a worldwide forecast for all products … which I kept to myself, but it was useful as a double-check on what the US forecasters were saying.
Unfortunately, the USA experienced further recession and business was hit badly; an edict was issued that all Administrative jobs were to be cut by 50%. I was technically employed by DEC UK, but on the headcount of the USA corporate businesses – there were 4 of us, 3 in the USA and myself in Europe, and it was inconceivable that they would lose 2 of the 3 USA jobs. My job was therefore declared void – and this meant that no one would be able to keep the forecasting processes running on; the whole system was to be archived and mothballed; everyone knew it was silly, but orders were orders.
As my job had gone, I had to be offered either redundancy, or help to find another job in DEC UK. I had been with DEC for over 13 years, and at that time the redundancy package was very attractive. Also, DEC was not quite the company it was – many of the original DECcies had gone, and managers had been brought in with no DEC background (even worse, from IBM!); the influence of Ken Olson was waning, and the ethos of the company changing, not for the better. So I felt it right to take the package and leave. As it happened, this was a wise move; DEC’s fortunes deteriorated in the next few years, and they were eventually taken over by Compaq (who in turn were later taken over by HP).
The “package” involved a lump sum payment (proportional to the time employed), plus financial assistance from Hogg Robinson financial services (advice re investments and what to do with my DEC pension), and an outplacement service (help with writing a CV, interview training etc), all paid for by DEC. It worked well, and I was able to leave relatively happily in Autumn 1990.
After a few months being idle (apart from filling in job applications and going to numerous interviews) our ministers’ wife Betty told me that her surgery (she was a practice nurse at our doctor’s practice) was looking for a business manager, and she wondered if that was in my line. The Brookside practice were starting “Fundholding” and needed someone to forecast costs and track payments … Fundholding made GP’s responsible for the secondary care budget; this was the first time that total NHS spending could be “balanced” outside the Treasury – so if a patient needed an operation and it was costing £x a month for medication while they waited, would it be worth paying the extra cost for a private operation “now” to save the drugs budget? It seemed ridiculous to me, that in all the years since the NHS had started, this balancing had never been attempted. Anyway, the work started, and was really fairly straightforward. I began to “absorb” the NHS conventions (like, for example, the reasons why consultant letters to GP’s started “Thank you for referring this delightful elderly gentleman” etc; the reason was that the consultant could drop the delightful, and without saying so the GP would know that the patient had made a real nuisance of himself). I had two admin folk to help in this work – Liz and Ruth – who were invaluable.
My role in the practice rapidly expanded to involve the practice computing system .. after working in DEC it was basic in the extreme. Software came from a company called VAMP (value added medical practice) and used hard wired direct comms lines at up to 9,600 bits/second for communication. There was just one line linking each of the branches (Chalfont Close and Winnersh) to Brookside, and the slowness at Chalfont was the major cause of problems. So I applied my knowledge of networks and calculated that the 9.6kb/s line from Chalfont meant that a Chalfont screen could not refresh in less than 4 seconds, far too slow for the doctors (who stated the “law” of computer speeds, i.e. it’s OK for the computer to wait for me, but not the other way round!). So I started talking to the software company about the benefits of using Ethernet (of which they’d never heard) in the practice, and a 56kb/s bridge between the sites. This eventually happened; inevitably, however, Chalfont screens were slower than Brookside causing some level of friction; I relieved some of this by installing a “login server” at Chalfont, so the only traffic using the bridge was patient data, but the problem was never really solved, even with a double ISDN line.
The big change was when VAMP abandoned its character-based system and moved to Windows-based system; they designed it from new, from the bottom up; I was one of a panel representing users nationwide involved in the specifications. Brookside became an early user, so I had to train everyone on Windows (mouse-training involved the Microsoft solitaire game, which incorporated all 3 basic mouse actions – click, double-click, click and drag). Then came a weekend when the old system was converted and the new one installed, and I spent all hours there … the Monday the place was closed to patients (except emergencies) for final staff training, and on Tuesday the place opened with relatively little trouble. The practice kindly gave me tickets for a weekend in Paris for Katie and I … a nice idea; we travelled by Eurostar under the Channel Tunnel (something Katie had determined she never ever wanted to do) and had a good time sight-seeing.
After a few years, I left Brookside and took a job as “GP Computing adviser” at Southampton Health Authority; this was advice and support to some 78 practices in South-West Hampshire. It meant a daily commute from Reading to Southampton (back-roads to the M3 at Hook, then down the motorway past Romsey), and then occasional visits to the various practices – some of which were in the New Forest, so driving through that was a real hardship!! They used a variety of different computer systems, and many practices were as “behind the times” as Brookside had been. I ran training courses, started a monthly newsletter, helped practices deal with their software vendors, and represented them in HA meetings. This lasted 2 years, and then a government “new plan” (the curse of the NHS!) abolished Health Authorities (which, they correctly suspected, had become somewhat bloated bureaucracies) and replaced them with smaller PCG’s (six in the case of Southampton) … needless to say, each PCG promptly started to become a “mini health authority”, with as many highly paid staff (often much more highly paid) on each PCG as the old HA had had. So my job ended with the demise of the HA – I gathered that 4 if not 5 of the new PCG’s wanted to pool together to keep me on, but one refused.
Consultancy projects:
To be added
C & W
Diabetic project
Back to GP
Practice work
Yet another NHS reorganisation led me back into working with GP Practices. This one was the introduction of a “Quality Outcomes Framework” (QOF) into primary care. Practices had been paid on the basis of the number of registered patients, plus extra for providing additional services; now a different measure was being introduced, reflecting the quality of care provided. As practice income depended on getting as many QOF points as possible, practices needed someone to monitor “where they were and where they would end up at the end of the NHS year”, and to introduce aids to help them maximise their points. I was taken on by one practice at Twyford, as a self-employed contractor, but in no short order 7 other practices asked for help; so what was to start as a part-time job soon became almost full-time.
What was good about this was that a good idea tried out at one practice could easily be shared by all 8 – they ended up using identical “tools”, and all did well. All 8 practices were within 5-6 miles of home, so travel was not an issue. The downside was that I had to grapple with complex tax returns, and of course do invoices to each practice for my time.
Katie was a full-time wife and mother for the early years of our time at Woodley, helping at a playgroup run by St James’ Church (just a short way round the lake from our house). After Chris had started at secondary school (by which time both the boys were able to get themselves to and from school, and were growing up fast) she thought she could take on a job again.
She joined Bulmershe College (of further education) as a library assistant … getting to the Library was easy (a short walk through the woods, then through a gap in the boundary and into the college grounds). Apart from the basic job of issues, returns and renewals, she also took on the job of book repairing – a skill she has used subsequently – but at Bulmershe it often meant getting a copy of a rare book from somewhere else, photocopying the missing pages, and inserting them into the Bulmershe copy of the book. It was strange, she said frequently, that books returned in disrepair were NEVER the fault of the borrower. Bulmershe College was a part of the County Education Dept when she started, but after a few years it was absorbed into Reading University. Katie worked there until she retired.
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