No babe in the IT woods

Even in the early 1980s, programming in assembly language was already considered eccentric, an esoteric skill that only a few purists bothered to use. But Mark Anthony Javier’s career in information technology dated even farther back.

Javier, who is now the chief information officer (CIO) of Ayala Corp., was first-hand witness to the entire gamut of the IT phenomena as it swept through industries and changed the very culture of economic activity.

Javier started out not as a software vendor but as a programmer – one of the few IT executives that get respect from the elite class of IT people because he actually had his hands in the soup. You’d never guess it just by looking at him; he doesn’t fit the stereotype – no spectacles, no pizza smudge on his collar, no classic spaced-out look.

During the early years when mainframe computers occupied whole buildings, Javier was already working as a programmer for the biggest mammoth of them all: IBM. Those were the days when only a handful of visionaries even considered the possibility that ordinary people would someday find practical everyday uses for a computer.

"I was a very good programmer," he recalls as-a-matter-of-factly.

"During those days, you had to write the program for everything you needed. There were no ready-made solutions that you could use."

"I wrote programs in assembly language, Fortran, COBOL – the stuff of legend these days," he said with a chortle, referring to ancient programming languages that are now programming what Latin and Sanskrit are two spoken language.

Seeing the future

Javier worked for IBM for 16 years before he went to work for Eastern Telecommunications. By then, he was already a junior executive and he already saw what was to be the combined impact of computing and telecommunications.

"It was obvious that there was going to be some kind of revolution when these two combined," he said. "The only thing that I don’t think many people in the industry anticipated was the speed at which it actually happened."

"One moment we were working with punch cards; the next moment, we have the Internet," he said. "Things changed fast and have not stopped changing."

"These days, a programmer’s life is made easier by solutions that are already readily available. Maybe, he will write a few lines of code, but that’s it," he went on. "Why reinvent something that has already been tried and tested to be effective? It actually gives you more space to be creative because you don‘t have to be bogged down by grunge work."

Far beyond the realm of creation, however, Javier said the impact of these changes was felt to the very core of the way people did business. Companies, he said, normally bought computers to support their financial operations. These were machines that did accounting and auditing, used mainly as glorified calculators that happened to have the added capability of storing data. "Just imagine the adjustment it took when it became clear that computers were no longer simple adding machines. Now, they are powerful tools that could handle, process and manage information to such an extent that you need it in all aspects of your operations from finance to records to manufacturing and, now, even procurement and sales," Javier said. "Applications have matured into all areas of the enterprise. Functions that didn’t directly fall under information systems now fall squarely under it."

Unthinkable things

Fortunately, Ayala Corp. had been one of the local companies that saw the critical role of information technology in doing business and saw it early. "The group as a whole had been more receptive than I would imagine other companies," Javier said. "It helped that Jaime Zobel is IT-savvy. He envisioned the changes that would happen before most of his peers did."

Technology, according to Javier, has made it possible to do what was unthinkable in the past. "In the days of the mainframe, you couldn’t adjust the way you do now, it was too expensive to do it," he said. "Now, technology has allowed us to do iterative alterations without being prohibitive, cost-wise. The software and even hardware products now available are specifically designed to be adjustable."

As a result, Javier said it has become easier to justify the expense of investing on IT, especially since the impact on efficiency, productivity and streamlining is easily quantifiable.

With the advent of the Internet, Javier said even more changes would be in the offing. "We haven’t even begun to unlock the potentials of the Internet," he said. "When we do, you will see a change not only in business but also in the very way people behave."

Even Ayala Corp., according to Javier, is still a babe ion the woods. Although the group was one of the prime movers behind BayanTrade, a business-to-business Internet-based marketplace, he said there were still basic adjustments that the conglomerate has to do in order to get the full benefits of the Internet.

According to javier, Ayala had only begun the process of shifting information system from a strictly client-server environment to a web-enabled system that would radically change the way the group does business.

"Security had been one of the primary concerns," he said. "Web-enabling your system would open the Internet to you but would also open you to the Internet. This is not a small step."

Although IT industry welcomed the promulgation of the E-commerce law, Javier said there was still palpable concern over the capability of the government to implement it. "We have the law and it is very good, but there is no organization right now that exists that has the expertise to deal with cybercrimes," he said.

On the whole, however, Javier said the risks were manageable and the rewards more than justify the expense.

"In the end, what we want is for our people to be able to make better-informed decisions," he said. "Information is the only way to do this. If you have it, you need not make mistakes that you would undoubtedly make if you didn’t know everything you could possibly know about anything.