“I was ready to learn,” said Counsellor, who had taken a data-processing course at a community college but had never before used a computer. “I was looking for a job that would train me to do this sort of thing.”
Although your people may need more guidance than Hunt’s staffers in learning computer skills, you can take heart in the results of a poll reported in InfoWorld. Of 500 personnel managers and over 500 clerical employees, 87 percent said “on-the-job training to learn new technologies” is important.
Micros and the Data-Processing
Department
Bertini and the employees in Hunt’s office were lucky—the powers-that-be were encouraging the introduction and use of micros.
Within American corporations, however, many data-processing departments have looked askance at small computers.
They’ve seen them as a threat to their power. So American executives have bought millions of dollars of “typewriters” and “adding machines” from computer stores, hoping to fool Data Processing (DP) and bookkeepers. One man lost his job after Data Processing wouldn’t let executives buy micros and he falsified an expense voucher to smuggle in an Apple. Dishonest? Yes. But a micro martyr, too.
This atmosphere may be changing, of course. As early as 1983 Computerworld reported that of 220 data-processing managers replying to a poll, 62 percent said they would encourage the use of personal computers.
Beware of the De Mille Syndrome, however. It’s the fondness of many data-processing managers for what one consultant calls a “Cecil B. De Mille production” with “a cast of thousands, millions of dollars and years in the making.”[[32]]
The poor, ignorant people outside Data Processing, meanwhile, can’t enjoy all the micros or advice they need. “Last year,” went a plaintive letter to a computer columnist, “we purchased a microcomputer and VisiCorp’s VisiCalc software for the company accounting office. The micro was idle for about six months until someone decided to figure out how to use it. Since then, half a dozen people in our office and at least as many in other offices keep the system tied up.” But the firm’s computer people wouldn’t budget more machines even though the $5,000 micro in the accounting office had “paid for itself many times over.” The excuse from the computer pooh-bahs was this: several accounting systems were on the way that would do the job, and why allow micros to proliferate? “Money,” said the letter to the columnist, “has never been a question.”[[33]] Power, apparently, was. In that sense also, many data-processing biggies are like De Mille.
“Programmers in general are pretty control oriented, pretty methodical in nature,” said Adam Green, “and usually the most methodical, the most control-oriented person becomes the head of DP.”