Bill Rutherford spent most of his working life at the Electricity Supply Board in information technology roles, but he regards motivating people and enabling them to develop their careers as his most significant achievements. He not only participated in the formative years of computing at the ESB, but also in the later transformation of traditional mainframe operations and jobs.
In 1964 Bill became the third computer programmer in the administrative arm of the company. Five years later he was selected as one of its first systems analysts. From 1980 to 1997 he held a series of IT management posts.
This testimony begins in the ‘Ireland’s first computers 1956-69’ archive. Click here to view.
After I left systems analysis in 1976 my first move was into a small team that was looking into the future of meter reading. The ESB wanted to eliminate handwritten meter books and customer cards. We carried out research into replacement technologies and proposed a two-stage modernisation project. Management, however, wanted a one-step transition and appointed a second project team consisting of Tom Bolton and Pat Ryan. They came up with the same recommendation as we had made. By then, however, I was working in the Middle East.
ESB consultants had started to advise the electricity service in Bahrain and the energy minister there had asked if someone could sort out its customer billing system. Five people, including me, went out in November 1976. We found a typical example of a western system superimposed on a culture that it was not suited to. Bahrain in the 1970s was like Ireland in the 1920s. The electricity authority had no computer of its own and just one programmer. The government’s computer centre carried out all of its processing operations. The software was a mess and the logistics were archaic.
I went to the Middle East as a manager, not as an analyst, but I ended up designing a new system. It not only handled electricity metering and billing, but also supported water charges. That work would have taken a year with a dedicated team inside the ESB, but I had to do it in three months. In total, I spent one year and eight months in Bahrain.
That project was highly exciting and highly pressurised, but it was exactly what I needed to get off the treadmill at home.
When I got back to Dublin, Sean O’Neill had become manager of the computer division. I was moved sideways as a line manager at the Dublin city office in Fleet Street, where I saw how the wages system that I had developed with Tom Bolton was faring. It was interesting to see how the people in Fleet Street had overcome difficulties with it – a chance to see how the other half lived.
I returned to head office in 1980 as operations manager for the IBM systems. That job was not about capacity planning or which type of equipment to get. It was all about getting the bills out. The ESB lived off meter reading and billing.
Paddy Kelly, the new computer division manager, gave me free rein to innovate and implement change. The operation of the mainframe computer installation had become a more sophisticated and complex process since my early days in the 1960s. There were now two eight hour shifts five days a week.
Two computer operators worked on each shift. The company now saw this job as a development role for its staff and recruited new operators from the executive officer (EO) grade. A new deal for clerical staff was concluded in 1980, allowing clerical officers to apply for EO positions. This gave us the opportunity to open this career path to the data entry staff. There were some misgivings at management level about women going home on their own after midnight, but this got short shrift!
This June 1983 photograph shows Ann Foster operating the Lundy Farrington scanner that captured customer data from meter reader sheets and cash receipts. The two men on the left represented the vendor of the optical character recognition machine. ESB chief executive Paddy Moriarty and Bill Rutherford are standing on the right.
Photograph by Liam Kennedy courtesy of ESB Archives.
Data entry was still very labour intensive. The punched cards were gone and the customer billing information was now held on tapes, but the work had not changed much. Someone had to key in the figures on every meter reading sheet and cash receipt and someone else had to verify them. There were still 50 people working in this way and they were subject to strict rules as to what level of accuracy was acceptable.
Recruitment was a problem and the resulting staff shortages meant that I had to pay bonuses to punch operators who agreed to work overtime, which was unheard of before. Then I focused on reducing the number of data entry staff and on reassigning people to more satisfying work. There were always vacancies to be filled in the ESB. Getting new staff into the company was as hard as getting blood out of a turnip.
Stage one in these reforms addressed the verification process. We ran experiments to find out how many errors there would be without it and found that the number was minimal. We stopped data verification and freed up 20 people from dead end jobs. At the same time we began to study OCR and OMR equipment. We installed a Lundy Farrington character recognition machine from the UK, then changed the meter reader sheets and cash receipts documents so that they could be read by the new machine.
By 1992 the old data entry process was gone and remote data entry methods had been developed. Where there had been 50 data entry operators, just four people could run two OCR systems. Indeed, they were able to handle a 20,000 a year increase in the number of customers. We also produced statistics on the length of time between the reading of a meter and the customer receiving a bill. That reading-billing gap was like a sacred cow inside the ESB and we reduced it to three days.
We also replaced our old fashioned IBM line printers with laser printers, but I was unable to persuade the organisation to stop using pre-printed stationery. The new equipment could have printed whole documents instead of superimposing data onto standard forms. We also updated the machines that inserted paper into envelopes and reduced the number of people on that job from ten to five.
Another new device that arrived in the 1980s was known as Arthur. This was a state-of-the-art Memorex tape management robot that was christened by Martin Keating after a well-known beverage. Arthur moved tapes in and out of storage when they were required, but I don’t think that it would have done too well in any cost-benefit analysis.
When I went into operations I had no idea how good or bad the ESB was in comparison with other organisations. I launched an initiative to form a group of operations managers and gained valuable insights into the practices in other organisations. For example, those discussions influenced how the ESB changed its data entry process. The group meetings were also a trigger for our move to third party maintenance.
The ESB computer division had been reorganised while I was in Bahrain and it was reorganised again some years later to support distributed processing. However, the company still ran a separate telecoms division which was responsible for the leased lines that connected the computer centre to the district offices. This meant that we did not have control over the quality of data communications and there were often problems with the leased lines. We therefore started holding weekly meetings with the telecoms people and encouraged them to upgrade their capabilities. Communications and data processing continued to work separately, but we became more attuned to each others’ problems.
I stayed in the operations management job for ten years. We added more processing capacity to cope with new management information systems and costing applications. We brought in IBM 4381s and in 1989 we switched from IBM to an Amdahl mainframe.
There was always talk about contingency planning. How could we prepare for recovery if our installation was destroyed ? I got a phone call at 4 am one morning to say that there was a fire in the computer installation. This was the first step in a simulated emergency test by the contingency manager. We never had a real emergency. But the costs of back-up services were always high. Memorex and IBM sold “hot site” services and we used both at different times. We also considered building a hot site of our own at Treasury Building in Grand Canal Street or at a place on East Wall Road. I argued that sea levels were rising and that East Wall might be flooded in 20 years time!
I was also responsible for maintenance services – not only for the IBM systems but also for the Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) computers that ran engineering applications. I looked at the options in depth and decided to use third party maintenance instead of the vendors’ own services. We saved millions in that way. Eamonn Allen and Joe Murray were the main drivers of this initiative.
Bill at work in 1996 at ESB head office.
Photographer unknown. Photograph courtesy of Bill Rutherford.
During the 1980s the computer division was absorbed into a new IT department, headed by Paddy Kelly, which consisted of four divisions. Tom Bolton was responsible for operations, Tom Keenan for planning, Sean O’Neill for data management and Des Gilhawley for applications development. I succeeded Tom Bolton when he retired in 1990, taking charge of a division with three groups: IBM operations, IBM technical support and DEC operations/technical support.
Straight away I took the opportunity to amalgamate the two operating functions under Joe Murray and the two tech support functions under Mick Conway. Thus we made a fair job of breaking down cultural barriers that had existed between these two disciplines for years. At the same time Noel Moran finalised the phasing out of data entry and managed the redeployment of staff with the able assistance and cooperation of Maura Cosgrove and her deputies Linda Hamilton and Deirdre Collins.
I took over the applications development division in 1994 and retired from the ESB in 1997. I cannot finish without referring to the loyalty and dedication of the staff I worked with during my 30-plus-year IT career. They always gave 110 per cent discretionary effort and ensured that I could skive off on golf trips knowing that the ESB’s critical systems were in good hands.
Last edit: June 2020
© Bill Rutherford 2020