 Welcome to Think Tech Talks on Think Tech. I'm your host, Carol Monly. Our show today is called, A Career Beyond Coding. And we're going to talk about what it's like to be a tech executive and address the issues of whether being in the management of large tech companies is a very exciting experience. If you want to ask a question or participate in the discussion, you can tweet us at thinktechhi or call us at 415-871-2474. Our guest for today is Ralph Pacheco. Thank you for coming, Ralph. We appreciate your being here. Well, it's great to be with you. Thanks for having me. OK, so tell us how. What kind of educational background do you have to get into the tech tech business? Well, I kind of, in a way, kind of semi-backdoored in that I wasn't a computer science major, per se. I studied languages, international relations, and did a combined master's PhD program, which I almost finished, except I got into the tech field, in instructional science. And basically, the first year of that was a lot of technology, because you have to use that. And where was that? That was at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah. I see. Did they have a computer science major at that case? Oh, yeah. Yeah, absolutely. And taking those technology courses just kind of opened up a whole new world for me. I see. And I was very much into languages, real languages. And so I was just so excited, because all of a sudden, you have here these languages, and you can talk with these machines. And there's just like regular languages. There's syntax. There's semantics, in other words, the meaning of the different parts of the language. And it was a fabulous experience to do that. And as I got more into that, I realized, you know what? I think I'm more interested in this than in the whole instructional science big program. And so I ended up getting with a startup company. About what year was this? Oh, my. We're talking this is ages. This would be in the late 70s. In the late 70s, OK. So I know now you're a retired tech executive, but you've worked in several different large companies. Oh, yeah. Yeah, absolutely. You know, I. So right out of school with your background in your budding interest in hands-on technology, where did you go first? What kind of a start? You said it was a startup. Yeah, it was a small startup out there in Utah. And they were basically, this was the dawn of what they called mini computers back then. They didn't have the PCs even yet. And this was a vast departure. They were making huge inroads into the business because all of a sudden these were much more affordable than a big mainframe and a multi-million dollar contract. And so just as an anecdote, one of my first clients we had was the, we actually had rented space in a building that was owned by the Osmond family. Think Donnie and Marie, Osmond, et cetera. Well, and they had a, there was a Donnie and Marie fan club and pillowcases, posters, all the knickknacks that come with being a fan of a superstar, which I'm sure that practice continues today with all of our things. And what was your role as far as things? And so what I did was they basically had a, he took me to a kind of a warehouse building next door and it was filled with mailbags. And they said, you know, there are laws. You have to get this stuff out the door within a certain period of time. Otherwise there's, you know, federal laws that say, otherwise you need to send people their money back, you know? So basically I wrote an inventory control in order fulfillment system for them and they were able to just knock that out and. So that was coding? That was, that was writing, that was programming. And that was where I took the principles that I learned in school and actually applied them to a real-life application. And that was just, that's just one example of what I was doing. And so then how did that evolve then to the next level? Well, then I came to a small company that was working in the same with the same kinds of computers back east and was there for just less than a year. And then a good friend of mine was with Sperry Corporation. It was Sperry Univac at the time, ultimately came Sperry Corp and now has of course been absorbed into Unisys. And so I became a systems engineer with them and was working with a number of really, you know, really large clients and probably one of the most fun experiences I had. So I was still, you know, I was working with a lot of people and then they had me kind of managing, you know, a group of systems engineers as well. But I, my particular project that I was interested in was with the Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory where they had a contract to provide basically data verification, specialized hardware to provide data verification for data coming from these new satellites. And the programmers who were writing the applications, in other words, the people at Hopkins, they didn't have a way to communicate with these specialized hardware. So I took it upon myself to write a set of interface programs that are basically the tech world, we call it a subsystem, that allowed these programmers to talk to this specialized hardware. I see, and before your program, they couldn't do it. That is correct. Oh. And so that was really exciting and to see it all come together. I mean, you have the satellite launch and then you have this and then we went and installed the system down in White Sands to Mexico. If you've seen the movie with Jody Foster Contact, they go out in the desert and they have these big, huge dishes there and it lined up in the desert. Well, that's where the system was actually installed. I see. It was down there. No, is that where you did, you said speech development recognition? So what I do is after a while, I had some contacts and this is important. Networking is really important, okay? So this is a suggestion for our young people who are in the field. Absolutely, and if you're already somewhere, I mean, it's who you know is huge in terms because you're just not, you know, another name on a stack of resumes. You're a real person that knows somebody and can vouch for them, et cetera. And so an opportunity came up with a friend of mine at IBM. And so they were in the process of staffing up some things and so I worked with some of their internal systems and then after a couple of years, I went and they had a lab there in the Washington, D.C. area in Maryland and it was dealing with the emerging field of artificial intelligence. It hasn't taken off the way it has now due to a number of limitations, but they had a product line. Are we talking about the 70s or the 80s now? We're in the 80s now. We're in the 80s moving in the 80s and 90s, early 90s. And so we worked with the expert systems and then IBM made some decisions about where they were gonna go and that kind of fizzled out. But at the same time, some of my colleagues had been working with Carnegie Mellon University and our CMU, which was fascinating and it was the whole area of speech recognition. Now the state of the art back then was basically you had specialized hardware, okay, and that you had to use. So it wasn't standard PCs, personal computers, and also you had to train the system to your voice. In other words, I would train my system but you couldn't come talk to it because it was trained to me, not you. And also it was the technology was isolated word, meaning you had to pause in between each word and dictation was the big thing rather than just commands the way you do now. And so our lab that I formed up, first of all, we got some sponsorship from within the corporation which was wonderful. And we formed a partnership with Carnegie Mellon University and they had done a lot of very important work in this field of speaker independent, continuous speech recognition, which is what everybody's used to now with things like Siri, you know, et cetera. And I'm not sure what they call it but same thing in Android. And so we started that, we got that and we took that code and we assembled a team of just top flight scientists and engineers, okay. And developed a system that would run on standard hardware. It was continuous speaker independent. It was wonderful. We had privilege also of working with the, you know, the IBM research group up in Armont, New York, which had some very intelligent people but I must say the people that were part of my team were second to none. So how long did it take to go from the previous form to where you now have this voice recognition that is years, many years? No, no, actually, we moved really, really quickly. You know, we were starting to put stuff out and talk to clients about it within the first year. Okay, so it was pretty. What's the name of that system? That was called, at that time it was called the IBM Continuous Speech System, okay. And ultimately, IBM, over time, IBM kind of faded from the speech record thing as they were trying to get a hold of what they were all about and they're still trying to get a hold of, you know, they're doing some great things, but at any rate, so we had a wonderful time working some large, large organizations and we're able to, I think, make a difference but really, really to change the focus instead of this more methodical, you know, step-by-step to move things really quickly. So within a larger organization like IBM, okay, wonderful company, they had a group that was able to, we operated like a startup. In other words, we were kind of encapsulated and able to move forward really, really quickly. We had supported management all the way up to the executive levels and so that was a great... And where's that software now? What is it called now? Is it still in the market? I have no idea, you know. So it's similar to what we experienced with Siri now, voice recognition and... It was that kind of software. Clearly back then, they didn't have the power that you, they didn't have cell phones, per se, except these huge things, you know? The bricks. So yeah, and so that was, so we were, now we're talking basically the mid-90s, okay? And as a result, we were, you know, we were able to make some really, really great strides and then IBM as they kind of shifted their focus, okay? Then we moved, you know, I began to think, okay, well, I kind of see where this is going, okay? And once again, leveraged some other connections that I had that were doing something else, this was outside of IBM, okay? And so we moved on to Computer Sciences Corporation. At that point in time. Well, let's take a break right now and get follow-up on Computer Science and some of the other software and interesting developments that you've been involved in from, looks like, sounds like from the ground up. So we'll be right back with my guest Ralph Pacheco, a retired technology expert. And this is Think Tech Hawaii, I'm Carol Monly. Aloha, my name is Steven Phillip Katz. I'm a licensed marriage and family therapist and I'm the host of Shrink Rap Hawaii where I talk to other shrinks. Did you ever want to get your head shrunk? Well, this is the best place to come to pick one. I've been doing this, we must have 60 shows with a whole bunch of shrinks that you can look at. I'm here on Tuesdays at three o'clock every other Tuesday. I hope you are too. Aloha. You're watching Think Tech Hawaii, which streams live on thinktechhawaii.com, uploads to youtube.com, and broadcasts on cable OC16 and Ollello 54. Great content for Hawaii from Think Tech. Welcome back, this is Carol Monly with Think Tech Talks and my special guest, Ralph Pacheco. Who is a retired tech expert, executive. So we were just speaking about your transition from IBM to Computer Services Corp. Where I know. You're a sciences corporation. Sciences Corp. I see, and you were the chief information officer there. I became that ultimately. When I started, I was basically involved in with their consulting organization and essentially hooked up with a, it was actually an internal program that was called the corporate knowledge program. And that ultimately developed in, first of all, in the consulting business, there's a really kind of an important mantra and that is reuse is more important than reinventing. I see. So in other words, if you can take knowledge or software or documents or whatever that have been done, that have been used successfully in the past and you can leverage either the whole thing or pieces of those, instead of developing them from scratch, hey, you're ahead of the game, right? And so that's what a knowledge program is all about is the reuse of these assets. Now, CSC is a 90,000 person plus. International. International company, 160 countries or something like that. And so this program was to develop both communities, communities of practice, communities of interest among these, you know, thousands of employees as well as to provide an infrastructure that would allow the sharing and easily allow the sharing of information. So can you give us an example of how that was put into practice? Yeah, we, ultimately we, CSC felt it was important enough that they appointed a chief innovation officer, chief innovation officer. And so he did things across multiple areas, not just in the sharing of knowledge but in many other areas as well. And to foster innovation and just, you know, we could take a whole other segment just talking about him is just a brilliant person and a very good person as well. But essentially one of the things we ended up doing was we didn't have the capability to share information, to comment things. So think, this is a very simplistic way of thinking it but think Facebook within a corporation, okay? So we were able to put in place a system that allowed that kind of collaboration within, you know, across these thousands, you know, of employees. And that was- So all through computers and technology. Yeah, technology. So if you, you know, combining that with, you know, obviously leveraging, you know, the video conferencing technologies and things like that people were able to, you know, really get a leg up and begin to, you know, to share information in a way that was meaningful to the business, okay? So within your corporation of 90,000 people and how many locations around the world? Oh, it'd be probably over 150 offices, you know, across the planet, yeah. And so, but, you know, that's one of the miracles of the internet. I mean, as you can see, and of course that, although it sounds large in comparison to something, you know, like on the consumer end, like Facebook, it's very, it's very tiny. But the fact of the matter is that technology exists to be able to do that, okay? And so I think, you know, that the open-mindedness of the top executives, I mean, I was like one step, two steps away from the chairman of the board, you know, and, but the fact that our chief innovation officer and the corporate CIL were open-minded to this kind of approach, which was radically different than anything that had been done before was an amazing, you know, transformation. Right. Is that something now that we take for granted to most corporations now function that way in that open communication? You know, I'm not sure. I know, I certainly know that companies like, you know, IBM, Microsoft, Jive Software, all the, I mean, these are, these companies are providing and Google has a, you know, people are using these kinds of things now to, I think if you went into some companies now, you would basically wouldn't even be able to conceive how they could operate without this kind of functionality. Okay. And going to the extreme, you see now where private offices are no longer standard. Hours are not even standard. I know some of the new high-tech companies, you don't even have vacation anymore. You can take vacation whenever you want. You can work seven days a week. Of course, they'll feed you too. So is that also part of the type of innovation that you incorporated in your structure? Well, the system that I talked about actually facilitated the kind of home office-based or wherever office-based operation that we were able to adopt. Now to accept right. I'll give you an example. The people that were, you know, my direct reports, I worked with hundreds of people, but the people that actually directly reported to me, not one single one of them worked in a standard CSC office, except me. Okay, and I did because of that, all these other responsibilities that I had with interfacing with corporate staff, et cetera. And so this kind of technology enables companies to leverage that kind of thing. Now, of course, I hear things like, you know, Yahoo basically bringing in, you know, saying, okay, come in from the wild. You know, come back to the offices. IBM just gave their people an ultimatum. I haven't read the details, which basically said, okay, you have the choice of coming to work at office X, Y, or Z, or leaving the company. Okay. So it's kind of come around. Yeah, so I'm not sure all of the, you know, I guess they want the kind of synergy, the kind of, you know, I mean, Google has offices and I think every, you know, people don't have to be there all the time, but the kind of collaboration you can get, you know, as one of our guests that I hosted, at one point said, who was doing stuff within the federal government with, you know, tens of thousands of people. And he was leveraging things like wiki, think wikipedia and things like, but with the information that they needed to run their department of the government. You know, I think it was the EPA and we had him come talk to our group. And he said, you know, the stuff we're doing is really cool, but nothing beats a good in-person meeting. True. Okay. So what, if you compare, since you left school and started on this progress through the tech world, how has it evolved and where is it going now, now that you've been retired? Well, you know, the power on the hardware side is just amazing, okay? And, you know, think about the power you have in your hand. Right. Okay. And I think about my, as an IBM employee, spending thousands of dollars for the PCXT, which had a whopping 10 megabyte hard drive. Oh my goodness. And so that was like the cat's meow. I mean, you know, hey, you know, and I had to have one personally, of course. And so you think about that evolution and then the sophistication of software where you're abstracting away from the hardware. So at the user experience, you're less and less having to be familiar with the machines. In other words, these are things that actually perform functions for you instead of you having to become a techie. Okay. You know, the joke used to be, imagine what it'd be like if computer scientists invented a toaster. You know, you'd have to, you'd have to boot the toaster. You'd have to, you know, I mean, way back then it was insanity. And you want to make things into appliances. Okay. So that they can really, you know. And that's where it's been going. Yeah. And where do you see it in the future? Well, I see that becoming even more ubiquitous. I see the, my view of things is, I see the cloud becoming more and more and more important as we go. That these devices where you can do important things on them, but they're basically becoming gateways, okay, to very powerful function that lives in the cloud. Okay. And I'm gonna have one last question, which is security. How do you see that developing? Well, I see that that is front and center in any kind of technology evolution. Okay. Not only in terms of security of transactions like banking and things like that, but also just privacy. Privacy is huge. Okay. Do you want, you know, somebody to spit, you know, how is your stuff stored on these servers in the cloud? Is it encrypted? Okay. Can an engineer who's managing those servers just will we nearly go in and see your stuff? Okay. You know, that's, so it's a very important question that you asked. I see. Well, we only have a few seconds left. So I'm gonna let you have an opportunity to look into camera four and to give our audience some suggestions or recommendations or thoughts that you have. Well, you know, especially to those who are either just getting in or getting education or whatever, I see that the hands-on technical background that I received was fundamental, fundamental to my being able to move and progress because there were certain concepts, certain things that I was able to do and to understand that if I had just focused on the business, I wouldn't have been able to do that. At the same time, an understanding of the business that you're in is critical. So you need what they, the term of art is a double deep employee. You need somebody who can understand the technology, but he also knows why the business is operating and how the business operates so that they can bring everything to bear in terms of making things, taking the company forward. So, you know, there's a little sign in here that talks about lifelong learning. And you never stop learning. You've got to continue to learn. And when you stop learning, then you become stale, then you become unable to do that. So even now, I still have these tech, you know, feeds coming in so that I can do that. So that would be my suggestion. And so for the young people, learn the technology. Learn the technology. If you're going into business, that's great, but learn the technology so you can use it as well. All right. Okay, well, that was very helpful. Thank you so much, Ralph, for being our guest today. And that brings us to the end of our show. We've enjoyed bringing it to you. I'm your host, Karamon Lee, and our guest has been Ralph Pacheco. We've been talking about a career beyond coding and addressing the issue of whether being in the management of a large tech company is a very exciting experience. And the answer is yes. So thanks to our production engineer, Ray Tsangalang, and our floor manager, Robert McLean, and all the people who care and contribute to Think Tech Production. If you wanna see our show again, go to thinktechhawaii.com or youtube.com, thinktechhawaii.com, where there will be a link to more shows just like this one. Thank you for watching and we'll see you next time. Aloha.