the inmate's journal : the corporation ix : technology iv

For the uninitiated, nights before major presentations are anguished roller coasters of apocalyptic hells, in which every possible paranoia, anxiety, dysfunction, bowel movement, manner of death, and humiliation dance on a stage, laughing at the fools who would dare stand before the Councils of the Powerful, uttering their measly words.  The night before I presented to the ETC, I showered 14 times, masturbated 3, prayed without ceasing to the God I no longer believed in, and rehearsed the opening line 137 times and the rest not at all.

I was scheduled for 10:20am and Lief’s sister met me by the elevators at 10:15.  There’s good news and bad news.  The bad news is you’re going to have to wait—Mammoth and Triceratops got into a fight over ISO standards which has delayed everything … but the good news is their fight’s put everybody in a good mood.  She placed me in a chair outside 20’ high doors and told me to chill the fuck out.

Torturing the hopeful and inexperienced is a common strategy of the powerful.  It tests us—to see if we’ll drown in our own sweat and be defeated by the demons that dominate the weak.  I sat in that horrible chair outside the 20’ high doors, thinking of everything that could go wrong.  It made it worse that the ETC Conference Room’s reputation was fear, doubt, brutality, and intimidation; it was the brain cavity of Tech Division, a resplendent venue of wired power.  Shimmering with a lustrous post-organic purity, reflecting testosterone’s strange ambitions, decisions were made in it that no one understood.  Vast intricate decisions requiring brutalities and subtleties worthy of the immortals.  The room was brightly lit—and white, so white—like infinite deserts and Arcticscapes and 40,000° suns.  Environments not made for humanity or thought.  Around the long glass table sat these lords of light—lost in their common vision, bound by their hatred of each other.  The walls of the room were also made of glass and on the other side austere IBM mainframes stood, like metallic demiurges overseeing their regrettably still organic offspring.  The machines peered at these sons of men around that hard table of decision and maybe mused in their remote dark minds of how they’d cope in a world of blood.  Whether theorems would take on a different character; whether binaries were required to hold sway.

 

After 17 days, 200 liters of sweat, 0 erections, and roughly 38,000 heart attacks, I was summoned.  I walked into ETC Central, fantasizing about the Inquisition, death, time travel, fairies, and raspberry sorbet in Saint-Tropez.

 

The six executives sat on their leather chairs, marking their territories with blue ties and thick fingers.  Lief’s sister went to the podium to introduce me in a magnanimous gleam of a squadron of IBM z900s, Cisco CSR-1 routers stacked on international protocols, a Rittal RimatriX5 cooling system battling seven EMC Symmetrix DMX-4 storage management solutions and a Liebert Series 610 uninterruptable power supply … the machines strangely spurring me on in this den of beasts, with their hairy paws and thick truculent snouts.

 

This is Jude Peer, who’s going to present Project Lazarus to us.

 

I wobbled to the front.  PowerPoint, that assassin of oratory, spun into life on the giant screen.  I tried to breath.  I tried to find Jesus.  I looked at the hard reptilian eyes scanning me for weakness.  I thought, Humans … what are they but hungry fish in a sea of words?  And I leapt in.

 

Thanks for having me here today.  As you all know, communication is at the center of New Bank.  It not only helps us function, but it in a very real sense is our function.  Increasingly of course communication is the function of technology and thus is a strategic and mission critical operation.  In the past we said data was its own entity and we existed to protect the data.  But now we say data is a subset of communication and we exist as the data in a communication framework we are responsible for managing.  This isn’t an option.  It’s a mandate.  It’s one we have been doing well but must ensure we expand our management parameters to include the kind of comprehensiveness that is aligned with our relational, fiscal, operational, development, strategic, and architectural priorities, as well as contributing to shareholder value.  Project Lazarus is about this alignment and value.  As you can see from the screen in front of you, 97.3% of New Bank’s core processes are fundamentally dependent on communication.  But only 31.8% of the communication components of these processes are fully viable.  Lazarus intends to close this gap by 80% by year 2, 90% by year 3, and 99.995% by year 4.  This is a pressure we have no choice over, one that is being decided by global and political forces you are all too well aware of.  The question is not whether we are going to play, but whether we are going to play well, and whether we are going to start playing now.

 

How much is this going to cost Mr. Peer?

 

$120 million in capital, primarily in years 2 and 3.  $60 million a year in operating.  However, as you can see from this slide, payback is over 700%.  Some of this naturally is from slippage avoidance, but the majority is from new market opportunities.  Lazarus researchers have shown that in five years time over 75% of our upper segment clients will relate to us not as a bank but as a communication service provider.  Not only does money talk, gentlemen, but money is talk, talk is money.  Anything less is data … and data is the old paradigm.  We have to begin thinking of ourselves as in the talk business and thus competing directly with traditional talk providers.  There’s a due diligence factor but we’ve programmed this in.

 

How does all this relate to the Woman Problem?

 

I think it’s substantial.  Very substantial in fact.

 

Could you expand.

 

The research shows that women stand at over 50% of the population.  And they’re not lying down.  And it’s not going to stop.  I think these difficult but unavoidable facts can be used to support Lazarus and potentially even to modify our efficiencies so that we exceed our targets in the medium and long-term.  Not only this, but there’s evidence out of Palo Alto that indicates Lazarus can be used to support these facts.  The critical success factors center on our ability to find convergence between technology, communication, and women.  While I didn’t want to go to this level of detail in this presentation, there are a number of sub-projects under Lazarus to ensure inter-divisional and cross-silo maintenance and advancement.  One of these sub-projects looks after this convergence, specifically by allotting resources to finding the common identifiers in all three sectors.  Preliminary studies show that these identifiers are widespread, not particularly costly, and very desirable commodities across the full spectrum of our wealthiest segments.  We’ve spoken to Marketing about this and have their full cooperation.