In over 30 years of professional I.T. experience, I've made some wonderful friends all over North America- and in some pretty remote places (Prince Edward Island and Thompson Manitoba spring to mind). And we accomplished some wonderful things. Recently, installed BAAN, the ERP system, for two different manufacturing companies in Minnesota. Remember the year 2000 flurry? One implementation was completed in nine months and we issued AP cheques from the new system within 48 hours after conversion!!!
Telemarketing is a big industry now. For a fun technical challenge, constructed a large-scale predictive dialing system in Winnipeg driven off an AS/400 and an AT&T G3 Definity switch. We could dial 1.5 million calls a month for 300 calling seats (and it has grown since). Also installed a multi-gigabyte data warehouse for market research purposes and redesigned a leading equipment manufacturer's CRM database. Oh yeah, a telco was our major client, so did a lot of neat connectivity for stats, rack changes and billing over some huge bandwidth. WHAT GREAT TOYS! We could calculate the expected profitability of each calling seat added as straight function of calling hours per seat!
Mining companies earn money by pouring money into holes in the ground, so talking them into investing in new computer technology was pretty easy. For INCO, did strategic planning, BPR and ended up Information re-engineering and implementing the whole company world-wide. Indonesia got to install first before we implemented in Canada. In one site, we cut warehouse parts inventory by $6 million and reduced equipment maintenance charges by $11 million in one year. Not bad ROI for a $5 million investment. For another mining company (uranium and gold) we ran a WAN from Saskatoon all the way to a mountain mine site in Kyrgistan, Russia where we had an AS/400 running at 14,000 feet altitude...now THAT is a distributed database!
The Canadian Government moved their Department of Veterans Affairs to Prince Edward Island in the early 80s and implemented all new online CICS systems at the same time. No employees or systems people made the move and a handful of us spent six years making things run. Got to rationalize a huge hierarchical database and wrote some retrieval and data linkage code that streamlined all their procedures and legal compliance. Also got to install a nationwide three-tiered WAN with mainframes, minis and PCs. What great fun. We paid over $240 million every month to veterans, widows and orphans. And never missed a payday.
And in over ten years of consulting, worked for banks, insurance, wholesaling, warehousing and governments. Applications as diverse as motor vehicle registration, Provincial Health systems, Police dispatching and records, cartography, and GIS.