Ken Brown - Career history

Principal Technical Analyst at Texaco (employed 1985-1999). An operating systems specialist, designing, planning and administering large computer systems for Texaco (an oil major, one of the 10 largest energy companies in the world and amongst the 30 largest industrial companies in UK)

Recent achievements

NB up to this point this is drafted at the DBM multi-company course - the rest is pasted from an older version of this CV.

November 1991-June 1992

I was a key member of of a core team of five which migrated all our mainframe systems from London to Tulsa, Oklahoma, to a tight deadline, which we met. It was achieved in four months from the decision being announced.

I personally:


The mainframe system we migrated included something like 60 Gb of data in 15,000 datasets, over 500 TSO and 1,000 CICS accounts; more than 3,000 COBOL programs for about 20 large and well over 100 small applications; and over 2000 users of Profs email and office systems.

Despite making my own job and a number of others redundant, this was probably the work I most enjoyed doing at Texaco. We worked to an unmoveable deadline - if we weren't completely ready on the day the job would have still been done, but done badly. The effort involved, which included weekend and overnight work, was invigorating.

The project was entirely successful and transparent to the users. This was a world-class success for a migration of this type

My own contribution was both crucial and succesful. This was mainly because I had already developed close working relationships with many of our colleagues in the US; and also because I had both a better overview of all the systems than most of the others, and a detailed internal knowledge of VM and MVS.

Previous career history at Texaco

1988-1991 Senior System programmer.

1985-1988: succesively Trainee Systems Programmer, Junior Systems Programmer, Systems Programmer.

Previous employment

1982-1985: Inland Revenue Statistics Division, Durrington, Worthing.

EO Analyst/Programmer working mainly on the Corporation Tax model (in COBOL) and on a simulation of oil taxation (in Fortran). During the time I was there we moved from George 3 on an ICL 1900 to MVS. I taught myself ISPF development and set up panels and menus to generate JCL for end-users.

1979-1980: teacher, Kiburu School, Kiburu, Kenya.

Volunteer teacher with the Church Missionary Society. I taught English as a second language to secondary school students whose first language was Kikuyu.

I lived in a small village about 80 km north of Nairobi for 4 school terms. The experience was enough to convince me that I don't want to be a secondary school teacher although I loved living in Africa. It was also interesting getting used to life without electricty or running water.

Other jobs

Before 1979 I worked part-time in a library and a small printing works; and I was employed for about 6 months by Durham University Botany Department as a research assistant doing a literature search into the genetics and breeding of field beans (Vicia faba)

Education

1997-date: Birkbeck College, University of London (evenings).

I am currently taking a part-time BSc degree in Biology.

The fields that catch my imagination most in Biology are biodiversity and conservation, particulary microbial ecology, entomology and arachnology of urban areas (I'm a member of the British Arachnological Society). I'm also interested in evolutionary genetics and the origins of the major groups of organisms.

1975-1978: St. John's College Durham University.

BSc General Science, 2nd class. (at that time general degrees from Durham were not divided into 2.1 and 2.2). I took a number of courses, mainly in Botany and Anthropology.

1968-1975: Varndean Grammar School, Brighton

Personal details:

Born Brighton, 11th January 1957 (I am a British citizen).

Divorced, with one child.

I'm an LEA appointed governor of a primary school in Lewisham. I am the numeracy link governor and was on the team that appointed our current head teacher - 6 days work and over 20 hours of interviews.

I have been a member of the PCC of an Anglican parish church, and a member of Deptford Deanery Synod.

My leisure activities include birdwatching and natural history, cycling, reading and writing science fiction, and quizzes. I was on the Durham team which won the 1977/78 series of the TV quiz "University Challenge" - we won 7 games without a defeat. 21 years later I was on the Birkbeck College team for the 1998/99 series. We got to the quarter-final and were beaten - by one question - by the eventual winners.

I've written a small number of articles and reviews for computer magazines and a much larger number of reviews of fiction for SF magazines, particularly Interzone. I collaborated with David Pringle, the editor of Interzone on the first edition of The Ultimate Guide to SF