Don’t let anyone look down on you because you are young, but set an example for the believers in speech, in conduct, in love, in faith and in purity.
1 Timothy 4:12 (NIV)
Looking back at my early years at ICL in the graduate intake, following the gruelling 10 week induction course at the Beaumont Training Centre, it seems somewhat of a blur because I did so many things in a relatively short period of time. Settling down and developing my career in the Software Service Centre (SSC), where I had worked in my placement year, wasn’t going to happen because the company had greater plans for its graduate intake and we all were expected to try different things.
Most of my peer group, whom I met at Beaumont were quite different from me in that they had been recruited from non-technical degrees and gone through a selection process that was looking for sales and management potential. I however, was more of a “geek” and all I wanted at the time was to get my hands dirty on all this wonderful new technology, while being paid for it.
One of the things we all had to do, was spend some time answering the phone on a customer service desk. This was a completely new concept at the time because the idea of anyone who wasn’t already a computer expert calling ICL was quite alien. ICL had taken over a company called “Singer Business Machines” which was an offshoot of the famous sewing machine company (having not being able to find the type of computer they needed to run the Singer retail business, they bought their own computer company). The Singer derived computer that was being sold when I joined ICL was the System 25 which was a minicomputer, meaning that it was fairly small and didn’t need a dedicated computer room. This embryonic service desk handled calls from users of these System 25 computers, mostly being used by retail businesses. My colleagues and I didn’t know the first thing about these computers so all we could do was to take details of the customers problem and refer the matter to the experts elsewhere. This took me in particular, way out of my comfort zone because I have always been a lot happier when I know what I’m talking about. To this day, I think that having people with no clue as to the subject matter, taking customer calls is a flawed idea.
There were about half a dozen of us taking calls and we each had a telephone console with a line of switches that we could use to answer calls and pass them to another operator (this was called a “key and lamp” system). We also had to operate an early call database system where when the customer called, the details of their enquiry would be logged on to the system from where it could be followed up. This is how every call centre on the planet operates today but back then, it was all new.
One of my graduate colleagues, in the “sales and management” mould, was told by our manager to see if he could reduce the call backlog (the number of outstanding issues were recorded in the database). He discovered that you could simply press a button to make the call go away on the database, simple! He managed to drastically reduce the backlog, as recorded on the system and got a “pat on the back” from the manager. What the customers thought, we will never know. This person became a very successful salesman.
The company had undergone one of its regular restructures and the latest thing was the division of ICL UK into regions, each region handling both sales AND service for customers in those regions. In those days, ICL had a lot of large and medium sized customers all over the UK and having the organisation close to these customers was convenient.
I found myself working in the “Regional Technical Support Unit” (RTSU), which was a general pool of technical people who would help both pre-sales (specifying which type and size of computer was required to meet the customers requirements), projects (installing and setting up the computer on the customers premises once it had been delivered) and then helping out when things went wrong.
Then, and subsequently in my career, I thrived in the pre-sales environment where you got to meet customers, find out what their business needs were, and then designing innovative solutions to meet those needs.
In those days, we would then be able to follow-up by being part of the project team to build the system we had designed and then help the customer make the most of what we had sold. You could see what you had conceived come to reality.
The other thing that I thought was extremely positive was that all the technical people (Customer Solutions Architects, or CSAs as we were called), were encouraged to develop a broad knowledge of different technologies. This made sense to me because we would be able to be self-sufficient in each situation without having to bring in other, possibly expensive experts.
For me, these were formative years which had a big impact on my future career. I was able to get a broad knowledge of the different technologies offered by the company and being able to work with customers to help them do amazing things with that technology.
When I paid a recent visit to the National Museum of Computing in Bletchley Park, it was sobering to see many of the things I was working on in those times, 2900 Series mainframes, ME29 minicomputers and DRS20s are in the museum. But these were exciting times and things were changing at a breakneck pace. I had joined a mainframe computer manufacturer but with all this change, what would ICL become?
Richard Mann 