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As leader of the technical team developing CICSPlex SM, Eric balanced the conflicting demands on the resources of his team, and represented the team within and outside IBM. He presented the product to customers and at international conferences, and published announcements and Internet pages.
In addition to this outward-looking work, he negotiated with the chief designer and development manager of the vendor producing the code, articulating customer requirements and proposing ways to meet them. He responded to queries from customers and other IBM locations, managing a database of the requirements that emerged, and driving the most urgent ones through to solution (for example, a performance enhancement that cut a particular overhead by 90%). He negotiated new data-processing facilities to speed up the development process, so that the extra requirements could be met within the schedule.
During this period he studied for the Oxford University postgraduate diploma in Software Engineering, but left before completing the project for the one remaining component, a dissertation.
Eric previously represented CICS/VM in negotiations with IBM laboratories and marketing, and achieved a design change that doubled throughput. He presented CICS/VM to customers and international conferences, and developed the plan to migrate customers when CICS/VM was superseded by CICS on AIX and OS/2.
Eric was instructor on an IBM course to retrain redundant administrative staff as programmers. He designed and delivered about 40% of the course, as well as learning the language and environment he was to teach. Almost all his students have since proved successful programmers.
He later updated this experience by teaching a foundation course in Computing at LSU College.
When Oxford University Press decided to computerize the Oxford English Dictionary, they sought advice from IBM, and Eric seized the opportunity to assist with a project he cared about passionately. He analysed the structure of the existing dictionary -- 16,000 pages compiled by two generations of lexicographers over 60 years -- and designed a markup language to express this structure. He then took a short assignment to Oxford, and prepared the initial system design for the successful project that gave us the New Oxford English Dictionary (and gave the OUP a further 50 years copyright on this repository of the English language).
Eric designed and programmed IBM's first on-line survey in Europe (on satisfaction with Information Systems), analysed and presented the results, and then followed through with actions to raise satisfaction.
This completed his work as a DP Centre strategist. He also developed the printing strategy for the laboratory, and worked on program library systems (designing and writing a Help facility for the main library in use).
