I’m a businessman … an operator … I do what’s necessary for a business.
I’m not an entrepreneur. I don’t particularly want to own a company. But I’ll sure help run one!

Tony Dye, Project Coordinator

Bald, glasses, “well over” 29
Making it easier to do the right things

Administration ● Operations ● Organizing ● Repeatable Processes ● Checklists
Lifelong Learner ● Mentor & Mentee ● User Advocate ● Clarity Guide ● Connector
Targeted training ● Onboarding

Career:

• Always drawn toward engineering disciplines. So close to majoring in Chemistry or Electrical Engineering, then found the elegance and logic of software. Or maybe it found me! Suddenly, life made sense
• Software development was so natural. Many years of doing fun, and hard, things. “Impossible” was just a new challenge
• Later more of systems design
• Eventually IT management
• Then the “magic moment” … when I realized we weren’t doing a good job for the people using the software. We were blaming them for us not making it easy or obvious! Let’s not surprise people and blast them when they do something wrong … let’s guide them toward automatically doing the right things. Make the easy things both easy and obvious
• Easy, enjoyable, effective
• “We can do better!”

Church:

• As a child, grew up always going, never quite understood why. But it was never questioned; it’s simply what we did
• Early adulthood walked away. I had no foundation, so this was easy. At least I thought it was
• Couldn’t stay away! Drawn back. Then it all began to click. The church matters, the belief matters, the people around you matter. The rules matter, but they aren’t the key. Nobody can ever live up to the rules. We are faced with an impossible situation!
• Until God stepped in and perfectly resolved how rebellious we are with the perfection He requires. Since we can never bridge that gap, He did, in a very strange way. (In retrospect, in the only way.)

And then they came together!

• IT and Administrative work for a church that morphed into training, equipping, onboarding, and generally advocating for the users

A Little Bit of Writing:

• Most software developers loathe documentation. Strangely, I liked it from the beginning! I wanted people to understand what we developed!
• In the Church IT world, I enjoyed sharing “success stories,” best practices, ideas, and even some of the things that didn’t go so well
• Often, I write to learn what I’m thinking, or at least clarify it for myself (thanks to inspiration from Mickey Mellen https://mickmel.substack.com/ and others)
• Maybe there’s a formal paper, or lecture, or booklet, ahead
• From time to time (often quite sporadically) I write about technology, Beginnings and Finishing, making Christianity more approachable, and other subjects on my blog at http://TonyDye.com.

Career Highlights:

• 2021-present:  Administration and minor tech for Grace Community Church (Buford)
• 2007-present:  Administration, training, coaching, mentoring – churches & small businesses
• 2006-present:  Ambassador & Patriarch for the Church IT Network
• 2012-2015:       Higher Ground Technologies – Technology Evangelist
• 1997-2008:       Perimeter Church — IT Director
• 1991-1996:       Intergraph Corporation — Technical liaison with Microsoft

The Church IT Network

In 1998, started hosting some very informal cross-denominational gatherings of people connected with Church IT. Originally, we called these meetings “Tech Talks.” In the fall of 2006, one of the partners in the first “national” gathering of what is now the Church IT Network. Helping Church IT people connect with each other to further the use of technology in ministry. Please check out http://ChurchITNetwork.com for more information.

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I can’t imagine anyone wanting even more detail, but if you do, here it is. (If this interests you, please tell me why)

Early Life

Grew up in a military family – I was an “Army brat.” As a result, I moved a lot – in a different school every year for many years. As a natural introvert, I had to connect with others to survive. It was unnatural, but necessary. It was weird later in life to discover some people had the same friends across multiple years – a foreign, but captivating, concept!

Education

Moving every year wasn’t great for early education! Having a natural “engineering mindset” helped and I was drawn to math and science to the point they were “too easy,” and I learned how to NOT study! And then there was calculus! Uh oh!

While working on an Electrical Engineering degree at Georgia Tech, I “accidentally” (or providentially!) became involved with computing right at the beginning of the micro-computer revolution and owned one of the very first “hobbiest” computers. Through what at the time seemed awful, ended up with hands-on access to a mini-computer and a small, life-changing, class that re-shaped my life. Ever smaller computers were my future for years to come. Information Systems, Computer Science, and other “not Electrical Engineer” terms became the new norm. Somewhere between work and education I wrote most of my own crude operating system.

Early Career

Early opportunities as a software developer in an organization with extremely limited resources and some big challenges. Developed some low-cost solutions for what otherwise would have been exorbitantly expensive. What was once impossible became achievable! This pattern continued for years. It’s fun to do “the impossible!”

Career pushed me toward managing more than doing. Mixed blessing. Being surrounded by brilliant people is humbling and empowering. Developing teams; letting, even helping, others take increasing responsibilities.

Some special opportunities let me continue mostly individual development of things that were unknow at the time yet are now commonplace: A Software Library System, an Installer, and a reliable backup system among other utilities.

Later Career

Didn’t know it at the time, but I kept noticing the “user hostility” of so much software. I had a call toward more user friendly. Later embraced words like “natural” and “approachable.” Not everything can be made simple. But simple things should be simple! Seems a lot of software is more oriented toward impressing the developers than being useful.

Having worked with, and even developed, some early operating systems for Intel-based machines, as well as UNIX, DOS, and Windows (and more), I had the fortune to serve as the Microsoft liaison for an early Windows NT adopter which gave me considerable inside connections withing Microsoft and the opportunity to see future technology well ahead of the general population.

Action Item Tracking. #Finisher

My personality naturally notices when people “agree” to do things. I informally keep up with commitments all the time. Years back I was given the role of “Action Item Tracker” as the interface between our 10k person company and an even larger well-known company where we had a joint venture with lots of back-and-forth commitments. Formal project management was too complicated. A simple database and reminder system better served our purpose. Neither side always did what they said they’d do, but it was never because somebody forgot — choices were made and communicated. This introduced a new concept, and tag line, “Keeping up with all your stuff.” Project management without all the hard stuff!

The crossover to Church IT

In 1997 a great dream was fulfilled when I became the IT manager at Perimeter Church which allowed me to use my technical background in a more direct ministry role. Since that time, I’ve been using my passion for “making things work [better]” through coaching and consulting for business and churches.

One of the Steve Jobs movies had a scene, apparently not real, where Johny Ive and Steve Jobs were talking about the future, and the fictitious Johny Ive said “… the computer should be a natural extension of the individual.” Wow, that hit home! If software is natural, then we need little or no training for it. Doesn’t that make more sense?

Slowly my interests migrated from developing new technology to finding better ways to use existing technologies. I became an advocate for helping users have better experiences with technology, or “Making Technology More Effective.”

Retirement? Or maybe not

Over the last few years, I’ve drifted from full time employment to part time to semi-retired to almost fully retired while staying busy with volunteering. And I’ve gone too far! I need to step back in the work world, at least a few days a week.

Failures

Across the years, I’ve tried a lot of things, some worked well, others … not so much. One of the advantages of being older is I’ve already done a lot of the “dumb things” that younger people haven’t discovered yet. Are these failures? Perhaps. I prefer to see them as “learning opportunities.”

High stress?

Some people look at my career, or the IT business in general, as being high stress. Maybe for some, but not so much for me. Stress, or not, is so much an attitude. And I choose “not.”

In response to the concept of how hard IT work can be, many years ago a co-worker and I came up with a couple of slides we used in presentations:

Slide 1: “This is the most frustrating, exhausting, overwhelming, exasperating, challenging, and thankless job I’ve ever had.”

After a little pause,

Slide 2: “I can’t wait to get back tomorrow!”

2023-0520