Founder, Principal at Jay Conne Consulting
Somerville, Massachusetts 02145
United States
www.jconne.com
February 1993-Present

After being laid off by DEC, leveraged my 30 years the computer industry with a variety of consulting roles ranging from technical training development and delivery to technical leadership recruiting, small business website development, business development for a new web language development company and coaching a PhD CS/SE candidate thesis at MIT/Aero-Astro. In March 2003, I discovered Agile/Scrum/XP/Lean and have been a trainer and coach for Agile transformation in small and large companies since 2005. The Agile community has been a great resource for learning approaches to this evolving and highly conflicted domain. I have focused on simplifying and grounding the principles, practices and coaching techniques to the benefit of my many clients. Done right, Agile demands uncommon honesty and courage. My clients quickly sort themselves out on this issue. A book in development has the working title, "Agile as an Ethical Approach." Please see my website for more detail.

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4 distinct roles in staff and mgmt... at Digital Equipment Corp. (DEC)
Maynard, Massachusetts
United States

December 1980-February 1993

Four roles in twelve years: 1) Principal SW Eng. - Transaction Processing and Database Technologies Consultant on an internal tiger team with a mission of bring DEC internal systems into the current decade. Actually ended up being the sponsor on all internal beta testing for newly evolving TP and DB products as well as publishing a state of all engineering projects across engineering departments. 2) Corp. Manager of continuing field education on new products at a time when DEC was the 2nd largest computer company in the world - delivering hardware, communications and middleware products at a furious pace. We created and delivered semi-annual "Success Train" training road shows. These traveled the world starting with 9 North American cities in 5 weeks. 3) VAX Engineering - Commercial Performance Mgr. for 3 generations of VAX 6000 Series systems. Coordinated DEC participation in Transaction Processing Council TPS and TPS/K$ performance benchmarks. Also, was on call to resolve critical customer performance issues. 4) Transaction Process Systems Engineering - Initiated DEC's Program Office for MIA international consortium serving NTT and NTT Data - the largest market cap. corp. in the world at that time. The consortium mission was to develop new, general purpose computing procurement standards for NTT & NTT Data after them having 20 years of proprietary hardware and software designs. This precluded them from benefiting from the worldwide innovation taking place. After the standards were codified, I was DEC's Systems Integration Manager to deliver to that with hundreds of components from dozens of engineering DEC engineering departments.

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Founder at MedRx Systems, Inc.
Boston & Concord, Massachusetts 02145
United States

February 1981-July 1986

Developed corporate business plan and, together with three colleagues, founded company to supply computerized, clinical medical records and office management systems to group practices. Founded company working evenings and weekends with knowledge and consent of daytime employer, Digital Equipment Corporation. This early electronic clinical record captured the imagination of early adopters including the Head of Surgery at Boston Children's Hospital, Head of Neurology at Emerson Hospital, the Boston Chinatown Community Medical Center and even the Joint and Bone Center in Tyler Texas.

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Database Manager at Bankers Data Processing
Boston, Massachusetts
United States

September 1976-December 1980

Tying to get back to NYC from Detroit & Burroughs Corp, I got an offer I couldn't refuse from a Burroughs customer I had taught about their new B6700 multiprocessor system. For four year I single handedly managed this banking service bureau database serving over 200 banks in seven states. This was a tightly integrated Algol-based hardware, operating system and database management system. That's what made it manageable by one person. This was full online update - at transaction end, all master records were updated: accounts, tellers, branches, banks and all transaction logs. This contrasts with typical systems of then and now based on transaction memos that are applied to the systems of record over night. I was responsible for database/program interaction discipline, integrity, security, operations, reorganization, recovery and disaster recovery planning and policy.

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Manager of Large Systems Education at Burroughs Corp.
NYC and Detroit, NY and Michigan
United States

September 1972-December 1976

Joined Burroughs in their NYC Financial District, learned Algol programming on their B-6700 systems as part of a bank consortium, IGIC, systems conversion team from NCR to Burroughs systems. I became their lead trainer for NYC and then for whole of Burroughs Corporation in 6 months. I subsequently moved to their headquarters in the Detroit, MI area. In this role, I became a subject matter expert and led the evolution of the curriculum and courseware as well as delivered training, trained trainers and managed the course developer/trainer team. All training was developed as train-the-trainer material so it could be used world-wide. I doubled the team size and established a reputation for exceptional quality.

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Communications Software Consultant at Programming Methods, Inc.
New York City, NY
United States

September 1972-July 1973

PMI (Programming Methods) was a part of Sulvania/GTE. While PMI was primarily an IBM services body shop, I joined a special team with custom communications hardware and software. I developed communications software for custom communications computing hardware. Clients included Sulvania, Corp, The FBI and The Social Security Admin. While the company was based in NYC, all my assignments were outside of the city. I had moved to NYC for specific educational opportunities and left for Burroughs when that opportunity beccame available.

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Computer Operations Manager at Telstat Systems
New York City, NY
United States

October 1971-July 1972

Managed computer operations for this spin-off of Standard & Poor's service for financial institutions needing to valuate their portfolios daily. We took daily post-market-closing data, cleansed and packaged it for each client institution. These were many of the major banks and brokerage firms around the country. We took AP high-speed data feeds from US exchanges, and batch cleansed the data for QSIP and trade accuracy. Then we generated hundreds of custom tapes for courier delivery locally and overnight air delivery for more distant clients. I was responsible for operations and deliver functions. The technology was SDS-9 and XDS-9 systems.

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Lead Central Region Trainer at Honeywell Information Systems
Chicago, NYC, Phoenix, IL, NY, AZ
United States

July 1970-September 1971

As a continuation of my role in GE after the merger with Honeywell, I led the HIS-6000 training team for their Central Region. This included leading a 5-week training for Honeywell's HQ technical team on the GE-600/H-6000 and DN-355 technologies in Minneapolis, MN. As part of a promised transition to NYC, I spent the summer of 1971 at the GE/HIS computer department HQ in Phoenix developing new operating systems functionality. This was not my strength and led to me being fired from my NYC role - some politics was involved :-).

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Systems Analyst ... Lead Trainer at General Electric
Chicago, IL
United States

September 1967-June 1970

Started learning and developing GE-400 applications including a finished goods inventory control system for Abbott Labs in No. Chicago, IL. This involved building a transaction processing monitor from scratch with my mentor and boss. Later, my passion for learning and training led me to become the lead trainer on GE's Large Systems - GE-600 series as well as develop and deliver training on GE-400, GE-100, and DN-355 systems. In 1970, GE left the general purpose computer business and with Honeywell formed HIS (Honeywell Information Systems) by combining their general purpose computer businesses and consolidating them under the books of Honeywell Corp. I therefore moved to HIS in the same role.

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Associate Systems Equipment Engineer at Western Electric
Chicago, IL
United States

March 1963-September 1967

Laying out telephone central offices for three years and then liaison from that engineering group to a "Floor Plans" Group attempting to automate my job. It's been computers ever since. These roles gave me access to IBM technologies 1410, 1401, 7084, 360-60 and 7094. We built an engineering simulation in COBOL on the 7094 as a proof of concept, bringing it to its needs. Talking to people at Bell Labs, I learned that they were checking out a new GE computer that is a superset of the 7094. they said they could probably bring us over in 6 months. In less that 6 months I had moved to GE's computer department.

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