Screen Wars
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I didn’t know what the MD meant when he said I should have been there a couple years ago. Wall Street was booming. That’s why they were hiring so many programmers, or so I thought.
My first task was to build a screen combining a stock chart with a bunch of other facts drawn from internal systems. The stated goal of the project was to give the sales desk a single place to see everything the firm knew about the stock. I found it strange that something like that didn’t already exist.
According to my colleagues in the IT department it did exist. At least, all of the information was already available to the sales force via other systems. I found myself immediately set upon by a whole gang of IT managers who were afraid that I was “reinventing the wheel” by creating another app containing the same information as existing apps.
“ANOTHER screen?” they exclaimed.
“Don’t you know we have to MAINTAIN these things?”
The thing is, I had been hired to do analytics. But until recently “analytics” had consisted mostly of offline batch systems that would generate reports to be distributed by email or that would be accessible in the user’s web browser.
But the next generation of analytics required real-time data, which was why I had ended up in the seat. I was being asked to reuse a lot of code from the order-management systems because analytics was viewed as an add-on to that workflow. And also because that’s where the real-time data was.
But the framework that had been developed for order-management systems was no good for analytics. This became more and more clear to me as I tried to implement the screens envisioned by my client.
His idea of analytics wasn’t just about providing access to data, and it had nothing to do with math or statistics. It was about guiding the sales team in their work. Helping them get to the right decision faster.
It was all about putting the right information in front of the right person, at the right time, so that they could call their client before the guy across the street.
