And Still I Persist

I’ve known Ruby for a decade or so. She came up to me after I gave a session at a technical conference on the need for leadership in IT organizations and offered both cogent observations and useful criticisms. We’ve been friends ever since and just recently co-authored an article for Cutter IT Journal titled “The Longest Yard: Reorganizing IT for Success” (which we may post here on the blog sometime soon).

Ruby may well be the finest IT project manager I know. Her professional career (as I’ve observed it) can be summed up by the famous quote: We the willing, led by the unknowing, are doing the impossible for the ungrateful. We have done so much, with so little, for so long, we are now qualified to do anything, with nothing — except that Ruby has to do the leading as well. Or to put it another way: if I had an absolutely critical, save-the-world IT project I had to get done, I’d hire Bruce Henderson as the chief architect and Ruby Raley as the project manager, then spent the rest of my time running interference for both. ..bruce..

Well, the Wordpress problem continues, so I can only post from my server system at home. Combined with the travel I’ve been through over the past several weeks, I haven’t gotten on here much. However, I’m not going anywhere until Christmas, so I’ll aim at posting daily here.  ..bruce..

I get to have some interesting encounters in my job. For the last 18 months I have been campaigning first in the DoD and then in the commercial space to bring to market a new kind of software. It’s job in life it digest massive amounts of data and event information to come up with a series of metrics and conclusions about what is going on, and what the state of key indicators and factors are. This applies to how much money is sitting in your bank vaults, how many customers are visiting your property (and how much they are spending) to things such as “show me the last 4 images of the Korean Yongbyon reactor that have trucks in them”.

This software tends to get wired into the guts of the business cycle for our customers. We set it up and maintain it, and as such we get to occasionally glimpse what is going on. Without naming names, and without getting anyone (especially myself) into trouble, here is some of what seems to be emerging.

Hospitality Customers - In general they are down in every category. The number of people coming to visit and spend time at these destinations are down between 10% - 20%. Fewer people are coming, and when they come they are spending less. The last 3 years have been very good for these folks, and they know that leaner times are coming. When they read the results of our software, they agree that things are slowing down now.

Financial Customers (Credit) - Our customers tend to focus credit to consumers. The application for new credit, falling off rapidly. In addition a higher percentage of exiting debt is going bad. Surprisingly enough this is even reaching into some “seasoned” credit is going bad. Seasoned credit are accounts that have been around for a few years, and have established and stable payment track records. They are looking for a slowdown, according to them things have actually started to slow down now.

In case you may not have read, the US economy is slowing down. Some segments that are “wants” are slowing down a bit faster than the “needs”. That does not mean that the US economy is in a recession, or going into one. But it does mean that it is trending this way now.

Update

Wonderful site for tracking the economy is Calculated Risk. The most recent post has a clip from the Orange County Register’s interview with economist Chris Thornberg. The key point is:

Q. What might change your outlook — good or bad?
A. The key is consumer spending. If people respond to a cooling in housing prices by cutting back on home spending it could get ugly out there in the rest of the economy very quickly

While my evidince is not a very large data set, it does point to a measurable slowdown in consumer spending.

It’s called Deviation, and it’s “filmed” within the FPS game Half-Life: Counter-Strike. Since I have three sons who collectively have spent more hours and years playing first-person-shooter games than I can comfortably conceive, I find the film particularly amusing. ..bruce..