When I was 2 years old, during my birthday party, my mom heard someone playing Happy Birthday on the piano in the other room. They had just finished singing Happy Birthday to me so it was odd someone was playing it again. As she went into the room to see who was playing…it was me. Apparently I knew how to play the piano. When I was about 4 years old I took a large poster board and some crayons and drew an exploded view schematic of how a lawn mower could be built using lasers instead of blades to cut the grass. Granted it probably would have set the yard on fire, but who knows…some day. Anyway, shortly after that my mom came into the living room to find every piece of the television laid out across the floor in a very orderly fashion. I had disassembled the television; tubes, transistors, wires and all. My mom just said, “You’d better put that back together in working order, young man”. Well, I actually did and it worked. I’d like to say we got more channels after that, but alas no.
Later on, when I got my first car I again took the engine apart and laid it all over the yard. I cleaned each piece, painted it and put the whole thing back together. Worked like a charm, well at least it did after I corrected the direction of the gaskets. Oil and water don’t mix so well. Then when I got my first computer, boy did I go to town. To this day I am still building my own computers. It seems I have always been able to take things apart, see how they work and put them back together.
For the last 14 years I have been fortunate to work at Citibank, Citigroup, Citicorp, … or whatever you want to call it (I’ve always just called it Citi to keep it simple). I’ve done everything from booking Foreign Exchanges to migrating country functions to trying to get trades to settle with a client on one line, a broker on another and treasury asking me where the funding is! I’ve worked on international teams, US teams, top tier clients and all the while also doing special projects.
Over time I have found myself uniquely positioned as a Business Analyst that has actually worked in most of the products and departments within my business. I have also maintained my pursuit of learning technology. On my own I have achieved certification for A+ and Net+ from CompTIA. I administer a MS SharePoint site for my current team and have recently decided to beef up my game by learning Java. Having worked my way out of the day to day turmoil of being a Knowledge Worker into a position of being able to analyze the work we do, in order to improve upon it, I remembered something I had been told long ago.
Back in High School, on a day when we were complaining particularly much about having to do work in Prof. Barry’s Chemistry class, he turned and said, “When your opinion carries weight in the scientific community, then I will listen to you!” Well, this isn’t the scientific community, but people actually do listen to me when it comes to our business process. Therefore I decided it would probably be a good idea to start sharing my opinions and experiences, hence this site. It may not be perfect and I may not always be on mark, but just like any process, it’s ongoing and changing with time.
In addition to the previous, I’ve been in a band (yes something came of that early piano playing) and actually earned a 2yr degree in Music. I’m also a photographer and have done the whole weddings and Christening thing, as well as some previous work for magazines from exercise models to boat equipment. Of course, computers still come into play, as I run an online gaming server that has made me some very good friends over the last 10 years. I have done my student teaching in 1st grade and 3rd grade for Elementary Education, but eventually ended up with a Bachelor Degree from Nova Southeastern University in Applied Psychology (you’ll need to be pretty adept at Visio to map all this out).
There are a plethora of other things I have done along the way, and some probably to come, but for the most part, this should give you a pretty good idea of where I’m coming from. It’s not always easy, well pretty much is never easy, to look at BPM when you’re the guy in the trenches doing the day to day business processes. At least now I get the chance to try for those that are still in them.
