About Me

My name is Rich Stone

I have been doing some kind of IT work for a long, long time.  I tend to think of myself as a “Systems Analyst”.  That is an old world “Data Processing” term.  Data Processing is what computers used to do.  Information Technology is the replacement term, but it doesn’t necessarily have the same meaning or connotation.

Systems Analysts evolved from the operations research (OR) discipline from the time before computers.  Now that computers are EVERYWHERE, we tend to think more in terms of IT rather than DP, we tend to focus on our role within the IT community.

At the end of the day, I still like systems analyst, because everything whether automated or not is a system.  And introducing automation to existing systems is what I tend to get paid for.  If those systems are already automated it means replacing capabilities, and if not, it means building new ones.  Either way – the resulting system is never the same as it was, and the way that people think about that system and interact with it is inevitable different.