Hugh Brownstone: Building the Business of Information

IMS America VP Balances Corporate Development and IT

by Richard Cole

"Basically, I take views from different worlds, put them together, and make them work."

Age: 38

Place of Birth: New York, NY

Current Position: VP of strategic business development, IMS America

Years in the Industry: 14

Car He Drives: BMW 525 station wagon or a Land Rover Discovery. "I like the way the Europeans do suspensions."

Favorite Quote: Mark Twain--"The problem with common sense is that it just ain't common."

Childhood Ambition: To become a psychologist, the "next B.F. Skinner."

Open Systems Pet Peeve: "The whole idea of standards and compatibility. No one I know who's actually involved in applying this technology in business really cares about COSE, CDE, Spec 1170, etc. It's all smoke. The thing to remember about open systems is that it's just not that open. You can't always use one vendor's hard disks on another vendor's machines. You can't even use certain relational database management systems on all the machines of a single manufacturer. The open systems community dreadfully overpromises on compatibilty."

Hugh Brownstone has always taken a pragmatic view of education and training, seeking to build up his weak areas and balance his strengths. He also describes himself as a synthesizer, someone who is comfortable with the marriage of left- and right-brain thinking required in the business development of an information technology company.

So it should come as no surprise to learn that Hugh took the long way around to reach his present position as VP of strategic development at IMS America, a major marketer of health care information. In fact, as an undergraduate at Cornell in the late 70s, he avoided (for the most part) technical courses and majored in psychology. "I specialized in human intelligence and motivation theory," says Hugh. "It was one of the few things I thought would be pragmatic after I left school."

Hugh found Cornell to be a wonderful school: "very tense, very beautiful, and a tremendous education." As he approached his senior year in 1979, however, he began to change his mind about his major. "I found that there was a very fine line between being a psychologist and needing one, between being on the couch and being in the chair." Not feeling any urgent need for analysis at the time, he looked around for a new career path.

But which career? The answer came in part from his roommates. He describes them as being a pair of extremely focused business majors. "Here they were, maybe 20 years old, already talking about pension plans and retirement." When the roomates took the GMAT graduate business aptitude tests, they were overjoyed to have placed in the upper percentiles. Hugh looked over their shoulders at the sample questions, thought the test "looked interesting," and, being a competitive sort, took the test himself. When he received even higher scores than his roommates, he knew that an MBA was in his future.

Culture Shock

Hugh attended the Wharton School of Business from 1979 to 1981. After Cornell, Wharton was a culture shock. "At Wharton, I learned that it wasn't raw intellect but the application of intellect that made a difference," he recalls. Since he had finished his B.A. in three and a half years, most of the other students were older, and some were already working in business. "They were focused, they were committed, and they were experienced," he says.

It was a challenging graduate program, and Hugh learned a great deal. In addition to studying finance, he began his technical education. At Cornell, his only brush with computers had come from a single course that he had taken at the urging of his father. He found the experience less than satisfying. "Although I had an aptitude for computing, I hated the course," he says. He worked in PLC, the Cornell derivative of PL1, using punch cards. "I'd been told how computers were so wonderful," he explains, "but if I made one typo, I had to throw out the entire card. So I knew there was something reallly wrong with computers."

At Wharton, however, his experience was completely different. "I thought I'd discovered God in APL. It was a tremendous language." In addition to teaching APL, the school furnished students with a DEC System 10 and interactive terminals. "I could write a ten-line program that could do incredible things," he says. "The only problem was that five hours after I wrote it, I had no idea what I'd written, because APL is so dense. But that language put me on the road to what computers could do."

In the Business World

After graduating from Wharton in 1981, Hugh began work as a senior business analyst for American Management Systems (AMS), a systems consulting firm. He describes the job as a "terrific first exposure" for a green MBA. "If you really don't know what you want to do, you definitely want to be a consultant, because you get more exposure to different businesses than anything else."

At AMS, he studied data model editing and data flow programming, in addition to working as a business analyst. After a few years, he decided to become a "PC guru" and started his own PC consultancy. He enjoyed running his own business, but found that he often had to be two places at once. "As a consultant, I learned that I was really good at consulting, and really good at marketing myself, but not at the same time."

He rejoined AMS for a few more years, moved on to Barclays Bank for six years, and then arrived at IMS America in 1992 as VP of research and development.

In 1995, he was appointed VP of Strategic Development for IMS America. "It's a fantastic role and I just love it," he says. He is currently working on developing new business through acquisition, alliances and systems development. Much of his work involves data warehousing and decision support, creating systems to gather and manage the enormous amounts of marketing and sales information used by the pharmaceutical, hospital supply, laboratory, and animal health industries.

A Technology Credo

If you go into technology, you tend to have almost religious convictions, says Hugh. But at this point in his career, he declares that he is past the "religious wars." As he puts it, "I don't care about languages, operating sytems or hardware any more. What I care about is simply making things happen."

At the same time, he has definite opinions about technology, and isn't shy about sharing them. "I believe in relational databases," he says, "but I don't believe in object-oriented databases." In fact, he belives that an object-oriented database is "an oxymoron" since it attempts to combine data with procedures. "It's an inherent philosophical and executional conflict," he declares.

However, he does believe in open systems as a part of the democratization of technology. "Open systems has helped level the playing field," he says. Now companies can compete in business on the basis of intellectual capital and not on the basis of financial capital. "You can't use mainframes as a barrier to entry anymore; you can't even use computers as a barrier." Hugh, a past member of the UniForum Board of Directors, adds "knowledge is not power, it's the application of knowledge that is power. Open systems and the democratization of IT makes that application for everyone more possible."