Technical-Legal Confluence News

My expertise focuses in two major areas.

The first area is mainframe business systems, particularly in areas like life insurance, health care, accounting and credit reporting. I spent over thirty years in the “bread and butter” mainframe culture of batch cycles with careful testing, implementation, and capability for on-call production support. A lot of emphasis in my career focused on absolutely accuracy, recovery, production scheduling, and reliability. Most of this experience was on IBM mainframes with a heavy emphasis on MVS JCL and some of the common databases (IMS. IDMS, DB2) and teleprocessing monitors (including CICS, mostly command level). Toward the end, I migrated into “client server” with a heavy emphasis on end user telephone support.

I “retired” from this 31-year career at the end of 2001, as part of a corporate downsizing.

I have also spent, since retirement and actually dating back a few years before retirement, a lot of attention on web publishing, particularly researching the novel legal and ethical issues posed by the Internet and the World Wide Web. There are many unresolved and developing problems including security, censorship (and protection of minors), labeling, online reputation, spam, and political participation. Technological developments including the semantic web and social networking present both challenges and solutions.

I came to become interested in these problems because of the confluence of three or four factors. First, for about 19 months I worked for a small health care policy consulting firm just before 1990, and learned something about how the public policy research business works. Then, for reasons at least partly related to unusual personal history, I became involved in the unsatisfactory attempt to lift the ban on gays in the military in 1993, resulting in the policy known today as “don’t ask don’t tell”, and that led me into writing my own book and learning about the publishing world. Finally, as I moved into Internet publishing, I delved into a number of related problems, and became a plaintiff in at least one censorship case (COPA). Along the way, I worked on a National Change of Address project, with enough component exposure to see how it could form the centerpiece of a strategy to improve consumer security. All of this history leads me to the view that policy problems are interconnected, like “dots to be connected” in intelligence circles. Although the short term job market (and political climate) often favors people with narrowly focused expertise, it leads to economic dead ends when professionals “win battles” but then “lose wars” because of lack of longer term understanding and focus.

I want to work on problems in such a way as to bring long term dependable and sustainable freedom and prosperity. In the mainframe area, I would be interested in projects related to restoring financial ability or improving consumer security. I am an analytical person, who would rather solve problems (and implement solutions) than build lists of people to sell stuff to, or simply become the salesman for someone else’s agenda. The economic events in recent history may justify this approach.

There is a blog posting regarding protection of confidentiality and privacy in normal business relations with others (including but not limited to employment), here.

Linked-In Profile link is here.