Name: Cheryl Currid Place of Birth: New Jersey, but considers Washington, D.C., her hometown Car She Drives: 1994 Mercedes SL-class convertible Current Position: President, Currid & Co. Years in Current Position: 4 Years in the Industry: 17 Pet Open Systems Peeve: We have allowed it to get too confusing-we meaning the whole industry, and I'll take as much blame for that as appropriate. We haven't clearly communicated what open systems are and what the benefits of open systems are to business. Open systems has become a buzzword, and so has client/server. On UniForum: UniForum should be the meeting place of the open minds that will promote open systems. I think that in the past the show and UniForum have been technology-focused but not enough business-focused. Don't move away from technology, but technology is for a purpose and that purpose is business.
Technology managers who are interested in a business perspective on client/server computing may have a guru in Cheryl Currid. "The technology manager who can't speak business these days is somewhat out of a job," says Currid, who is presenting the Technology Managers Client/Server Seminar March 12-13 during UniForum '95 week in Dallas. "The technology manager has got to understand what business the business is in. We will talk business issues, but we will also focus on that person's charter in life, which is making decisions and recommendations for deploying client/server technology."
In fact, Currid's own career forte has been directing technology toward business needs-a mission that's taken her from candy marketing to one of the top information systems jobs with Coca-Cola. Since 1991, she has been president of Currid & Co., her own information technology assessment firm, as well as an industry analyst, commentator, and speaker.
"You say the term client/server and people's eyes glaze over," Currid comments. "They all start thinking in different directions. What I wanted to do was bring some clarity to the definition of client/server computing, how much of an impact it has right now in the real world and where it's going. In my opinion, it's going to overtake everything," Currid says. Her philosophy is that client/server technology is no longer optional-it is a part of information systems that everyone will have to know about and deal with.
The basis of each seminar session will be what works and what doesn't, what's hard and what's easy, and how technology can be implemented to actually help business. "We have pulled together some very interesting, hands-on people" as seminar presenters, Currid says. "These are not pie-in-the-sky luminaries. These are people who have walked the walk and talked the talk, and can shed some very good light on which way the future is going." There's a difference between this year's speakers and the ones who would have appeared last year. "A year ago not that many people had done it," she says. "Now we've got the real live practitioners who can speak from real life experience. I think that makes it different."
Client/server architecture enforces the philosophy of open systems, Currid believes. It is difficult, but not impossible, to do a client/server setup without open systems since client/server forces choices from various categories of products and the best choices probably will lead to multivendor selections.
Currid found her first PC to be a fascinating puzzle. "You turned on the machine and there was a blinking light for a few seconds, and then it said 'Ready.' Ready for what?" In 1978 she began taking graduate courses at George Washington University, in an attempt to understand how PCs could be made to do real work. She found the market data supplied by marketing services not very useful. "Invariably, they would slice the products and categories in a way that made absolutely no sense," she recalls. "When you wanted to put in a request to combine products and basically reshape a category, that request would take months or years to come out of the mainframe." So she learned to program and then wrote programs to construct a database and analyze data connected with her job, including some of M&M Mars's first marketing analysis systems. "It just snowballed from there, and I was able to produce a lot of information that nobody knew existed."
The power of information technology was immediately apparent, and Currid recognized it. On one hand, the lack of options in handling and gaining access to data was putting a crimp in business decision making. "You just couldn't get information any way you wanted it. People had to make decisions based on data that didn't necessarily mean anything. Therefore, sometimes the resulting decisions didn't mean anything either." On the other hand, people tended to believe anything that a computer spit out. "Because it came off the computer, the information was assumed to be right, whether the programming behind it was any good or not .... From that, I certainly learned the power of computing as applied to business."
Once she started down the road of employing computing power, there was no turning back. "When business people got hold of the data and could reshape it, reorganize it, and put it into different categories, it made everybody's minds explode. They realized what it meant. It really did improve our decision making. So having done that firsthand, I became quite a vigilante for decision support systems and flexible computing architectures."
One of Currid's clients, Coca-Cola Foods, was impressed enough to offer her a full-time job as manager of sales systems. "Before I knew it, I was doing it all for the entire sales force at Coke," she says. "Basically, I had to do on a larger scale what I had done at M&M Mars." She brought in networking of PCs and servers to the sales department, then was promoted into the IS department. Before long she was director of information technology for the division. By that time, the work had involved a significant shift toward client/server architecture. "By 1989 we had pretty much moved everything that was worth having off the mainframe computer," she says.
The purpose to bringing in networks and switching to client/server was to expand the reach of the company. But often Currid felt a kinship to pioneers in covered wagons. "It was bloody on two fronts," she says. "It was bloody in that the technology really didn't work that well. If you got it to work it was amazing, and we were just very lucky, or very good, or something. One out of every 10 PCs that you stuck a network adapter card into, at the time, would go up in a puff of blue smoke. Through a process of elimination, we got the ones that worked. You could make it all work if you cajoled it enough."
The other difficult challenge was in getting people to change within the organization, she notes. People didn't want to give up control or change policies. The human resources structure was lacking correct pay grades and titles. "I certainly made a lot of enemies along the way," she says. "There were people who just didn't like having their jobs changed based on this technology. A lot of companies still struggle with some of these issues."
With 10 full-time and another 12 to 15 occasional employees with specific expertise, Currid & Co. consults with between 80 and 100 customers a year-from Fortune 500 companies like Exxon to government and health care agencies. Often, Currid is asked to do what she calls B-52 runs. "In the consulting business, a B-52 means you fly in, you drop the bomb and you fly out. You just tell people how it is, like it or lump it, then you fly out. It may be a second opinion-when some other consultant might be in there trying to pitch some megabuck project that they are not 100 percent certain will work. I have been noted by some people in the Houston area as being the high-tech second opinion doctor."
In a major analysis of the reengineering process, Currid & Co. identified 18 major technologies that the company says change the rules of business operations. The technologies are detailed in a book titled Reengineering ToolKit, published last June by Prima Publishing, Rocklin, CA. The work was prompted by an invitation from Boston University to present a seminar on reengineering. "These technologies are what we call the paradigm busters-the things that, if you use them, will rewrite your rules and the way you think about using technology on the job," Currid says. In some cases, the technologies are ones that have already transformed business. In others, the potential is there. "Some of it is so new that people haven't done it before, but they will," Currid says. "A good example of that is integrating wireless technology. Wireless technology is now available, but you have to be smart enough to figure out how to use it, and how you use it can change the rules of your business."
For information on registering for Currid's Technology Managers Client/Server Seminar and the rest of UniForum '95, you may: