Promoting technological innovation and the application thereof (Frank Owarish, Ph.D)

I was privileged to work with the Association of Information Technology (AIT) for many, many years. AIT was headed by Mike Lackey, a very dynamic person with an enormous array of connections in the technological world. Together we organized workshops to explain emerging technologies to business executives and delegates from other countries working in the US interested in technological matters. Very often these workshops would include professors from leading universities such as Columbia, Georgetown, NYIT, NYU and RIT etc.  The educational process helped the business executives and delegates understand technologies and application considerations; the educational process itself being neutral not favoring any particular technology providers.

From time to time, in addition to the workshops, technology fairs were organized with on the one hand the technology providers (vendors) and on the other hand the business executives and delegates with AIT providing a linking pin function. It was possible for the users to explore what the vendors had to offer; there were vendor presentations but AIT prevented the vendors from making sales pitches.

Meanwhile in addition to working as a senior executive at the UN Secretariat I was teaching several grad courses including several on computer applications. I was part of a group that was very innovative and in many ways pioneer. I was able to rub shoulders with Prof. Wideman, Prof. Ohara and Prof Benton among others; our colleagues thought of us as the giants in the field in fact pioneers. I was also doing research (the areas included the convergence of computer and telephone systems; digitalization of telephone communication, computer networking with pioneering research on the so-called client-server system; supercomputers including the development of multiprocessor systems; database management systems; data storage; computer security) and Mike Lackey made it possible for me to talk to researchers at Bell Labs obtaining their  views on my research; I produced a monograph entitled’ Computer-Communication Systems for the 21^st Century’. In fact the publication was very far reaching, bold in its outlook and daring in pinpointing specific technological trends and technologies. The book was used in several of AIT workshops and very quickly got sold out. Most of the predictions did in fact happen. Consideration was given to producing an updated version of the book but by then technologies had moved forward so much and so fast that the work involved would have been tremendous and I did not have time to do so.

In the meantime other organizations emerged in the field of technological advancement and companies set up their own internal think tanks and also technological information became more widely available in the public domain mostly through the www and Internet and AIT faded away gracefully with the task of pushing the technological wheel forward considered done.

I wish to quote from a testimonial given to me by AIT quote:

“Dr. France (aka Frank) Owarish has been a guest speaker to AIT seminars, conferences and symposiums on a regular basis (for ten years). He has made presentations to leading executives in the information technologies business on subjects ranging from voice communications, to digital telephony, disaster planning and recovery to computer communication networks including satellite communications. AIT has always received excellent feedback on Dr. Owarish’s presentations which focused on the policy, design and operational aspects of these technologies. AIT considers Dr. Owarish to be a leading specialist in telecommunications and computer communications in general. Dr. Owarish always develops and carries through ideas that are to the benefit of the AIT membership. His keen insight is an invaluable resource to the Association…”

Background

I remember that I liked technical things so to speak ever since I was a kid. Going to school once I picked up a bunch of punch cards and spent time to figure out the meaning of the holes. At school I was good in maths and physics (I liked other subjects too) but these were my favorites. After high school I worked in the government service for a while before going on to college. Again I was interested in computer work being done by my colleagues, one of whom was involved in punching aka coding. At college I used SPSS. When I started working for the UN, I would spend time with my 'mentor' (Michael Bentil) who was in management services (albeit management consulting) and I learned of the need for rigor as well as documentation in analysis. One of Michael's close associates was Hank Willis who was in EDP; he was a fascinating person indeed and I learned a lot from him on the practicalities of EDP. I moved on to Management Services (management consulting) and covered a broad range of subjects including finance and EDP (on some projects I collaborated with Singh (specialist in computerized library services, Syd Cashton (mainframe specialist), Wolfgang Fuerst (system development specialist). I was promoted to a key position in financial services i.e. budgeting; at the time the function was partly computerized and partly ... manual. I took a gamble and working with colleagues in the EDP-Information Services Division to fully computerize the budgeting system (here I wish to pay tribute to Larry Slaughter, Syd Cashton, Jim Brooks among others); a challenging task but done successfully. My colleagues and I worked on improving the interface of the budgeting and accounting systems (particular tribute to Rosemary Hanrahan) and preparing timely reports and converting paper reports to microfiches for custodial and auditing purposes. From then on in every office and positions I worked I made significant contributions in IT. I won several awards and certificates for proposals I made to the UN Staff Incentive Program (SIP), a program aimed at fostering innovation among the staff members; later on I became a member of the SIP Committee (headed by energetic Noel Brown and spearheaded by Cecile Molinier) evaluating proposals made by other staff members.