J.P. Morgan

The ever widening ripples my mailings are causing in Earth's ether-consciousness have now roiled the Ohio Board of Education, which will hold a full-scale hearing next month to consider a challenge to the established science curriculum by the "intelligent design" movement. As the NY Times reports:

Supporters of this theory acknowledge that the earth is billions of years old, not thousands, as a literal reading of the Bible suggests. They also accept that organisms change over time, according to commonly held principles of evolution. But they dispute the idea that the astounding complexity of the earth's plants and animals could have just happened through natural selection, the force that Darwin suggested drives evolution. An intelligent designer -- perhaps the God of Genesis, perhaps someone or something else -- had to get the ball rolling, they contend....

Critics say [that inserting intelligent design alongside evolution in the state's new teaching standards] would make Ohio a laughingstock to rival Kansas, where school board members voted in 1999 to delete evolution from the state's recommended science curriculum and standardized tests. The board was eventually turned out by voters and evolution was restored.

["In Ohio School Hearing, a New Theory Will Seek a Place Alongside Evolution," February 11, 2002]

Loons? Or do they have a point about that "astounding complexity"?

There in fact turned out to be life after Genesis. But BCL, surprisingly, rather than slinking off and disappearing forever into the primordial sludge, paddled furiously with all its reptilian limbs and pulled itself back into my personal ether-space with a dirty splash. It reappears a little later in my tale.

After a 3-week stint at Refco Inc. which did nothing to redeem Corporate America in my eyes, I joined the august J.P. Morgan company, right across from the New York Stock Exchange. I was in one of the towers adjacent to the historic edifice, at the corner of Broad and Wall streets, which Morgan the man deliberately built to be only 4 stories as a demonstration of his firm's wealth.

My relationship to the Morgan firm was somewhat indirect. I was technically an employee of a headhunting firm which paid me by the hour while renting me to Andersen Consulting, which in turn placed me in its "Pinnacle Alliance" engagement onsite at Morgan.

Pinnacle Alliance was a 5-firm consortium made up of J.P. Morgan, AT&T, Andersen Consulting, Bell Atlantic Network Integration, and Computer Sciences. Morgan had signed a seven-year, $2 billion outsourcing contract with Pinnacle in 1996. By 1998, there were 2400 people working for Pinnacle onsite at Morgan, including 900 former Morgan staff members and contract employees who had been transferred to the alliance partners.

In the Andersen group I initially joined, my co-workers were like frolicking children. Barring some dire emergency, they were always walking around and chatting and laughing with each other, or showing each other photos, or talking on the phone, or planning vacations. One thing that struck me was how these people, who were nominally software developers, never worked singly at a computer, but always in pairs.

The group had 3 leaders, whose relative standing was ambiguous. One was dead serious and never uttered anything intelligible; another was a warm and cheerful but frenetic woman who spoke very fast, occasionally tripping over her own words; the third was an amiable jock type who was liked but was a butt of jokes even among the troops for his technical ignorance, which he made no attempt to conceal.

It took a week before I had my own desk, and a little longer before I had a PC that was working right.

The group was supposed to be developing a system called ESP, which had something to do with monitoring inside activity at Morgan to ensure compliance with SEC rules. My job was to figure out how to convert ESP from version 4 to 5 of PowerBuilder, the language ESP was programmed in. This was actually a rather intriguing challenge involving several hurdles.

As I sat among them in the midst of their play, absorbed in my computer work, I naturally attracted some suspicion. But after two months I delivered results and they were suddenly impressed. The conversion worked very nicely and was especially pleasing since PB 5 enabled some useful application features which were not possible under PB 4. I didn't just convert a static copy of the system, but gave them a document (cutely entitled "Fiving ESP") detailing the steps involved.

But I'd been focussed close up on my technical task. As usual, my sandcastle was to be swept away in the corporate tide.

My assiduousness had been noted, and with the conversion work complete I was hired into a new role as the PowerBuilder leader within Pinnacle, working in the core Andersen group that offered guidance to the other Andersen groups at Morgan.

I learned later that the conversion work I'd done had been at Andersen's initiative and at their expense, not Morgan's. But Morgan procedures called for extensive testing if the system was to be converted, and Morgan was unwilling at this point to undergo the time and expense. Maybe Andersen had not understood this, or maybe they didn't look that far ahead. Maybe, I was told, it would be done after the RFP.

Morgan had put out an RFP (Request For Proposal) for continuing work on ESP. Presumably the frolicking children were not delivering awesome results for Morgan. The result was announced some months later, when I was in my new role. The children were out; another firm was in (Cooper's maybe; I forget), and it took over ESP. The children ended up in a dungeon -- a gloomy, subterranean assortment of cubicles, at the base of the same Morgan building, where, when I visited, no laughter and no chatter could be heard. It was not clear what they were all doing there. Maybe nothing.

There was a certain amount of industry interest in Morgan's Pinnacle experiment. Peter Miller, J.P. Morgan's chief information officer, had focussed on Pinnacle in his keynote address to 160 technology, corporate services, and financial executives at the Sourcing Leadership '98 Conference in Costa Mesa, California. ("The payoff," he told them, "is enhanced strategic and operational capabilities.") Maybe, to avoid signs of dysfunction, like removing people, Morgan just kept them -- like a guilty maniac who endures the worsening stench rather than drag corpses out of his home and risk apprehension.

Anyway, my conversion work never ended up being used.