All Roos have their Roo groups. One of mine meets this weekend. I
won’t be able to make it, in part because of bad timing. The reunion is
sandwiched between family vacation and Bastille Day (July 14th). UT
System Information Technology (I.T.) work absolutely requires my
presence on July 14th; that day for me is non-negotiable. Have fun
fellas!
Why do I write Roo Tales? Cause tales of history and
sport are awesome. They’re much better than writing about my
profession. Stories from my career in I.T. might be good for helping
you cure insomnia, but not much else.
Then again maybe not……………………
We’re waxing nostalgic here in my office at the University of Texas
System. The team I’ve been fortunate to be a part of is going through a
major “modernization” initiative. It’s work which continues alongside
other projects both at System (SIS/Peoplesoft) and UT Austin itself
(Workday). Modernization is a huge lift, yet the experience is also
allowing us to all reminisce about just how far our office, the
University of Texas System, and UT Austin itself has come over the past
half century.
And guess what? The University of Texas has Roos to thank.
The big I.T. goal is simple: automation. The electrons that make up
all of those “1”s and “0”s are just waiting to be put to work. Written
well, they’ll perform the duties they’ve been instructed to perform much
faster than humans, with dramatic increases in economic productivity.
Automation y’all! That’s where it’s at. The industrial age in the
early 20th century was replaced with the digital age in the late 20th;
the globe has flourished as a result, and so has the University of
Texas.
Christine Bunce here in the office asked me for a list of
automation accomplishments by my awesome team members over the past 20
years, and boy did I go to town. Our office is tasked with
administering non-salary benefits for the quarter million UT employees,
retirees, and dependents. Automation? Those folks need a lot of it.
Electronic enrollment? Yup. Electronic communications? Si senor.
Online documentation. Online Evidence of Insurability. Automated
billing. Multi-platform logons (SSO). Electronic Beneficiaries. Total
Compensation reporting. Flexible spending accounts. Retiree billing.
And more. You name it, it’s now online.
And yet, my team is
simply standing on the soldiers of giants who came before us. Like the
team of John Cotton. I walked into John’s office for a job interview
back in 2000.
“Where did you go to school?” “A little college in Sherman, Tex…….” “You’re hired.”
OK, not quite. But it’s a good story.
Yeah, my colleagues are awesome. But it’s John’s incredible colleagues
in the 1990s who built the foundation upon which all of the 21st
century UT System automation has occurred. John was “present at the
creation” in the early 1990s, and pushed for the first systems to track,
bill, and transmit benefits. The impetus for the creation of the
office and development of these systems was due to failure by private
vendors; where the private sector stumbled, John and team thrived.
Their efforts made in-house computing the “bleeding edge” of the state
of Texas and the envy of companies across the nation.
Part of the
success of John’s team was the decision to utilize the technology and
support of the University of Texas in Austin itself. The flagship
campus had already invested significant resources for decades into its
infrastructure. During this time, John’s team launched the first touch
tone phone enrollment system, standardized data transmission to vendors
and UT campuses, finished work on the system which administers the
benefits for 250,000 Texans, and built the billing system which
accompanies it. After some insane hours during that decade, the mission
of UT Benefits was put on a firm footing. We old timers refer to the
work of John’s team in the 1990s as the “cot” days; Cotton spent much of
his time sleeping on that office cot when he wasn’t coding like the
wind a la Mark Zuckerberg in The Social Network.
You know John,
right? He’s an Austin College Kangaroo too. Class of 1984. John got
his start at UT around 1988, the same year I arrived in Sherman as a
freshman.
You should hear John talk about his 1988 University of
Texas job interview. John apparently had a few strikes against him and
was in danger of not landing an I.T. related position on campus. That’s
when fate intervened. The person interviewing said “John, I’m going to
give you a shot. And here’s why. You graduated from Austin College,
and a ton of smart folks come from that school. I know that because
there’s a guy here at UT Austin who is practically the godfather of
University of Texas Information Technology. And he’s an Austin College
Kangaroo.”
In many ways, John’s team was itself simply standing
on the shoulders of the giants who came before them. One of those guys
is named Ken Gregory.
From John:
“My understanding is that
after AC graduation, Ken enrolled in a graduate program at UT Austin
for a Masters in mathematics. It was four or five folks in that Masters
program (including Ken) that started UT Austin administrative
computing. Ken…and a couple of others were the main guys that put [the
original] mainframe system together.”
John adds that while there
were many very important players from UT Austin that extended
administrative computing to UT System, Ken “was my main technical
contact.”
Ken is now retired, after spending decades developing
the mainframe (legacy) computing upon which the University of Texas at
Austin & UT System has developed its insane amount of automation.
Ken Gregory is an Austin College Kangaroo, Class of 1963. He was a
classmate of Coach Don Newsom and a member of Beta Chi Omega in a year
when the fraternity sweetheart was Annette Apple of the legendary AC
Apple family. Ken left Sherman for Austin, where with others he began
UT Austin’s “Apollo-like” mainframe computing endeavor during a decade
in which NASA itself was undertaking an Apollo program to get Americans
to the moon. As Tom Hanks said in a movie about the Apollo program, it
was a time when one could amazingly “fit a computer into a single room.”
Or in this case, a single UT Tower.
The incredible
teams and colleagues of three Roos spanning 50 years took the University
of Texas flagship and member institutions from an old world of pen and
paper to a new world of electron productivity. The 50th anniversary of
Apollo 11 next week makes it all the more appropriate to reflect.
Those systems, born at the birth of automation, are slowly being taken
offline. Replacing it all through a modernization effort is a herculean
effort that will take decades to accomplish, with an uncertain future.
But hey, I’m sure there will be a few more Roos to lend a hand.
It’ll be one final July 14th enrollment “go / no go for launch” for this
old timer. My Roo buds won’t mind me missing the reunion this weekend.
They’re doing their own cool things themselves.
