My first years

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As a  young Engineer (27 years) in Oslo Norway i was appointed   the responsibility of the development of SW for a distributed digital switch sold both for civilian as well military applications. This gave me an excellent opportunity to start a career which has been focused on how to manage technical complexities in SW and later system and networks. We were part of a large Telecommunication company (ITT at that time), but we were left pretty much alone from the “mainstream activities ( S12)”. The team was recruited mostly directly from the Norwegian technical universities, so we were all without significant experience from the development of SW. At that time, the efficient development of SW for stored program control switches had been recognised as one of the major visions to open for flexibility and efficient control of the network. However, resulted in huge development delays in many companies due to the new and large complexities in SW.  I had the freedom to choose development methodology which I felt suited  our complexity. And here I learned perhaps some of the most important lessons in my career:

• The military application of the switch with its survivability requirements implied we had to distribute the functions in the network maintaining consistent network states in any degradation of the network. To distribute functions and especially transient data consistently in a network gave me a practical understanding of this complexity.

• The top-down breakdown of technical complexities is crucial. if we take the wrong decisions in the first steps it will be very costly to “repair” this.

• A young team can develop SW extremely efficient (we had the highest productivity measured in the corporation at that time). But only if we have enough highly talented people being able to understand the complexities sufficiently. And with the necessary conceptual skill…

• Being able to take decisions in a small team independently from company “politics” can give an important productivity boost.

The switch became a market success and has been delivered in several decades after the development was finished.

 

After this development experience I decided to move to the largest Technical University in Norway (NTNU in Trondheim). I wanted to explore how the understanding of distributed complex networks  in an academic environment could help me to understand these (as part of my PhD). I also acted as Head of a newly opened development department in parallel. I met some excellent personalities. I am very grateful I have through my career, been able to keep the contact and discuss the different visions developed with them.