My career began straight out of the University with an enormous assignment: design the Pizza Hut point-of-sale computer system and move their stores onto a distributed network for sales, store, and employee management. My employer, Norand, had been courting national brands like Winchell's Donuts and Denny's without success. I was handed full responsibility — design, testing, implementation, and user training.
I attacked the project with my full effort — usually first into the office, last out — and I discovered something they don't teach in engineering labs: hard, focused work is not always welcome. On more than one occasion a technician leaned over my cubicle wall and told me to slow down; I was making the others look bad. Senior supervisors had hired their wives as secretaries, and when I delivered the mountain of Pizza Hut documentation that needed typing, it came back by way of a supervisor husband informing me his wife doesn't type. Eventually those wives stopped appearing at the office at all, while keeping their positions. I was naive.
I believed hard work with real, tangible results gets rewarded. Not at Norand — the environment pushed against the ambitious employee. And yet the work spoke. The system sold to PepsiCo for $40 million — the largest POS sale in the industry at the time. Then came the final lesson: after the sale went through, I was fired, with two months' severance in my pocket. My hard work had made other people wealthy, and the people who'd told me to slow down kept their desks. It was my first lesson after graduation. I made sure I never needed it twice.
At Main Hurdman, contracted by the Department of Energy, I audited the contractors managing nuclear disposal sites. My reviews were often conducted under armed guard, inside security-clearance rooms with locked filing cabinets. That part was fascinating. The rest of the work was accounting — and I am no accountant and never wanted to be one. I quickly understood that Main Hurdman was not where I belonged, and that the next name on my paycheck should be my own.
I founded Digital Performance to provide systems consulting to the State of Utah — this time as the owner of the work. I designed two new computer systems managing the State’s Professional Licensure and the enforcement of issued licenses, and conducted an analysis across seven state agencies, finding the data-flow bottlenecks and delivering the solutions.
The hours were long, but every one of them was mine. I served the Department of Transportation and the Department of Business Regulation under Executive Director Bill Dunn and Deputy Director Peter Van Alstyne, where my first assignment was to review every division, identify the bottlenecks, and put fixes on the table.
Digital Performance was a one-man company that kept landing contracts sized for firms many times larger. On the big ones I hired contractors — notably for the Utah Transportation Division’s move off mini-computers onto local area networks and new software, where I organized and managed teams of outside instructors and technical support staff.
As the reputation grew, the State of Utah awarded me a pre-approved contract with an $800,000 limit — the first of its kind in the state, offered to only four companies. Three were large national firms. The fourth was me and Digital Performance.
There’s no greater loss then to forget the memories
of those that built the foundation that give us opportunity.
John F Cruz
Progress is the end product of an individual's developed innovation and vision brought into the materal world.
John F Cruz