Post Office

Initially working in the Technical Assurance Group, based in Farnborough, Stephen provided security consultancy for the Post Office Counter Automation Project: providing retail banking facilities at 2500 branches; based on the UNISYS PC platform, tracking authorisation platform and algorithms for transactions in an OLTP environment through to the Tandem central system.

The group then became part of the larger Technical Consultancy Group where he worked on data gathering software and analysis tools for Quality of Service monitoring at the counter; Post Office Small Counter Project requirements assimilation and clarification software; change management workshops for the Post Office Helpdesk Group; tender and technical assessment for Nottinghamshire Constabulary; an IT Health Check for Brighton South Hospital Trust and IT Disaster and Recovery Check for Post Office Catering (Quadrant).

He also started a company with a remit to gain several contracts for new business, rewriting a Pharmaceutical Distributor\’s sales and ordering system to use new hardware and resources, for example.

During this time he was also involved in the following:

• He held the position of a Director in the Association of Database Users through his involvement as Chairman of the dBASE Users Forum and the dBASE Users Group. This voluntary work enabled him to lead in the contribution to developing a new user organisation, negotiate vendor recognition and support as well as build a voluntary support and membership organisation. He was also the Editor of the organisations magazine, writing many technical articles.
• He contributed to the work of BSI and ANSI Technical Standards Committees by representing the UK on the X3J19 Technical Sub-Committee (Xbase) working voluntarily in the US, providing technical information and support with a liaison reporting line to BSI SC22 and IST/5 (Languages & Databases).
• He was Principal of the Xbase Institute, UK, through which he promoted the Xbase language through attendance at conferences in the UK and USA, writing various articles on the standards committee\’s deliberations and being a prime focus for the language issues in the UK. In connection with this work he spoke at CA\’s conference, chaired the technical focus group and spoke at the .EXE database conference, and spoke at the PC User Group database conference amongst others.