A Personal History of Computing - Part 6

By January 1985, I was up to my eyeballs in the commercialization of a maintenance management-inventory control-purchasing software product at EMA, Inc., in St, Paul. – Part 5, June 28, 2008.

When I was hired in January 1985, EMA, with corporate offices in downtown St. Paul, Minnesota, had two divisions – EMA Technologies, and EMA Services. Most of the company worked for the second of these, an engineering unit that designed control systems for water and waste water facilities. Of course, I worked for the other one.

EMA Technologies grew out of a contract with WLSSD – Western Lake Superior Sanitary District, in Duluth, Minnesota – to design and develop a computer-based equipment and facilities maintenance and inventory management system. This had been completed successfully enough – at least in the view of EMA executives – that it was decided to purchase the rights to the system and market it as a software product. Soon after, the sale of a corporate license to 3M convinced the company that it was on the right track. It wasn’t.

I was hired to be Technologies’ Product Manager for its key – only, actually - product. A multi-user, mini-computer-based, maintenance planning, scheduling, work order, and inventory control system written in COBOL (COmmon Business-Oriented Language) and running on Hewlett-Packard’s HP3000 line of mini computers. It seemed a natural fit. My resume included oversight of the development of just such a system at Chevron, and my education was in marketing.

Short of writing a business case study, I’ll just enumerate the problems with EMA Technologies. Most of the company, the engineers who worked for EMA Services, hated the product (actually hated the idea it was a product at all), and hated the computer it ran on (if it wasn’t a DEC VAX, it wasn’t worth spit). They wanted nothing to do with it and prevailed on the company’s CEO to bar any realistic attempt to sell it to the municipal and regional utilities with which the company routinely did business and with whom the company had a positive image. So the only market in which EMA had any contacts or credibility was off limits. The accidental sale to 3M – a scandalously cheap corporate license, little more than a give-away – convinced the geniuses running the company they could succeed in a competitive market after giving away their only substantial competitive advantage. It didn’t take long to figure out this might be pretty difficult, but heck, there were three small children at home in Apple Valley, and I was at the age at which I could do almost anything – or so I thought.

Technologies was headed by a 3M refugee named Doyle – his last name escapes me – and had a salesman named John Stack. Techies included two project managers and three programmers. And me. The Product Manager.

It had been some time since the 3M sale – since any sale – so Doyle was on the hot seat. That summer Stack, an officer in the Naval Reserve, went on temporary active duty in Hawaii (a better deal than mine in the Minnesota National Guard, a couple of weeks at mosquito-infested Camp Ripley). Anyway, Doyle fired John when he returned. I wasn’t there long enough to know whether John was a good salesman or not. Not long after, Doyle called – or was asked to call – a meeting, a strategy session at which a new direction could be found for Maintenance Manager (that was the product name) sales.

That meeting was a disaster – even before it started. Doyle had invited the CEO, Exec. VP., and other senior employees. Doyle was running around the conference room, hanging paper on the walls, paper that represented the discussion of the group. It wasn’t going anywhere, aimless chatter, when what was expected was leadership, from Doyle, who was supposed to know where we should be going. Alan – he was the CEO – finally got tired of it all, ended the meeting and left. Doyle was gone the next day. Randy, the Exec VP and CFO – the guy who had overseen the development of Maintenance Manager and created Technologies – took over. He was a pretty good manager, but this was a product not going anywhere, anyone could see that. Well, not anyone. I couldn’t. Not then, anyway.

You’ll find out why when I get around to Part 7.