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John Donohue
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Work History 1988-1989 Fayetteville, NC Mid-State Financial Services |
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From the fall of 1988 through the spring of 1989 I resided in Fayetteville while engaged in a full-time project to computerize the operation of a financial services firm. The main focus was the integration of the in-call and out-call telemarketing operation with a rather gigantic hand-worked direct mail campaign. Previously, leads were kept in numerous shoe-box-like containers, each holding hundreds of hand written cards from which hand written mailers would be sent.
Beginning with the purchase and installation of a file server-based network and a bank of input stations, the task was attacked. There are many humorous stories associated with this project, not the least of which was the impact on the employment demographics of a small military town as a substantial portion of its un-armed work force transitioned from handwriting professionals to data entry clerks. Likewise, early IT nightmares: the project demanded sufficient main memory in the server. The timing was bad. US policy had caused failures in US Memory companies, and Japan was arrogant at the time. In Fayetteville, we struggled mightily to work around the dreaded purchase, but in the end could not avoid it. A check for $3200.00 was written. With it, the server was bumped up from 1MB to 8 megabytes of RAM. That is the correct value: $400/MB for memory. The project on the output side required advanced strategies for intelligent manipulation of the mailings, timing of followups, and emulation -- to the extent possible -- of formally handwritten cards with script fonts. Zip code optimization, backup, system resource allocation and personnel management also came into play. From nothing, the project soon became a 120,000 record monster, straining the capabilities of desktop database management as it stood in the mid-eighties. The savings and leveraged flexibility afforded the client, however, amounted to a revolution. |