From paper to proactive registration
On the banks of the Schelde and under the smoke of the industrial Antwerp harbour lies the council Kruibeke. We paid a visit to this council’s system manager and reported at the monumental building on the central square. We were received by Pierre de Rijck, a man who has been a system manager since the beginning of the IT era. In some ways we felt like archaeologists at a historical site. Have we managed to get hold of the first ever system manager in Belgium?
In 1968 De Rijck began working at Rupelmonde council, a rural village in the Waasland, Belgium, whereby the administration consisted of four civil servants, including the mayor, a secretary, an administrative officer and a local police constable. He became administrative officer with career growth possibilities to the position of secretary. His work consisted of handling citizen affairs and processing driving licenses and immigration affairs, as well as some financial tasks. In 1977 the three councils of Kruibeke, Rupelmonde and Bazel merged and the tasks had to be reviewed and reallocated. De Rijck became the head of Citizens affairs and held this position for 25 years, until the position of system manager became a full-time job.
A primitive means to an end
The council first began working with computers in 1972. This meant an improvement in the registration of all staff data. At the time this was done rather primitively – grid paper was used on which the information was filled in, which was then processed by the National registry in Brussels, where the transferred data were coded. After a time this information was sent back and forth via a network, which took place first via a telex, followed by very slow terminals connected to a mainframe and eventually using the LAN (Local Area Network) as we know it now. Nowadays the servers in Brussels track all the data for the various councils in realtime.
More than just programming
Why were all the automation tasks appointed to De Rijck? “I actually had a mathematical-scientific education and a natural interest in computer science grew as a result. The first computer science course I did was during the mid seventies. I learnt to work with the old DOS system, Dbase among others - anything with code. This gave me a lot of insight, whereby I could design menus myself on the workstation. It’s a real shame that the nostalgic idea of programming code yourself has been lost. I really loved that investigative work.”
From mainframe to PCs
De Rijck remarks that it is relatively easy to bring his built up knowledge into practice. He works on the financial service of the council – this was also the first department to be equipped with terminals and because these were so costly, several people had to work at one terminal. The evolution of this then progressed rather quickly - from mainframe to stand-alone PCs by the end of the seventies (the PC of IBM and later the 286, 386, 486). He was able to both programme and write programmes for each PC. This all took place before the network made its debut.
Rapid development
How exactly did this computerisation of processes in 1972 take place? De Rijck: “We put all the data from our community on paper and then sent them to the National registry in Brussels, where all data from all of Belgium are tracked. At the end of the seventies the Centre for Informatics (CEVI) was founded, which shared its data with every council via a network. The first connection for this was established in 1985, whereby it was suddenly possible to share information in realtime. This development was overseen by the government; however there were other things that we wanted to automate ourselves, such as the registration of driving licenses. We wrote our own programme for this during the first half of the 1980s, and did this on the only available PC. During the second half of this decade, information science moved rapidly.”
De Rijck tells that he took care of the IT during the 1980s and until the end of the 90s, alongside his job as head of Citizen Affairs, as these activities were still very limited. At the end of the 1990s the position of IT manager became full-time. In 1999 an entire network was laid. Even at this stage he was able to foresee that information technology was to become increasingly influential.
Proactive registration
Was it easy to convince his colleagues at the council of this? De Rijck: “Yes, that went pretty smoothly. My proposal for the use of TOPdesk also went down well. I thought it was necessary to implement software to support the help desk. In particular I needed to be able to make inventories of the computer park. Nothing had been written down and everything was guesswork. Inventories became important when we went to renew the entire network in 2005. Since then all data are adjusted immediately as they are changed. If you don’t register proactively, then you’ll get left behind.”
The importance of registration and overview has increased since 2005, when the police, fire brigade and council began sharing their network. Even so, De Rijck finds that the work has become increasingly easier during the last few years. They now have more and improved means at their disposal, which make the work more enjoyable. De Rijck frequently uses remote management. He has discovered that working with an application is more efficient with regard to both time and money. Yet systems have become increasingly complex and dependence on the network has greatly increased.
Will such management tasks continue to grow in the near future? De Rijck: “Now we have every means to manage the network even more efficiently. All hardware is relatively new and there are fewer incidents. This will probably be different again in two years. If the number of incidents stays the same and the intensity of the work does not increase, then you also do not need to expand.”
Pierre de Rijck has followed the developments in IT from the earliest stages and applied them to his work. System management in Kruibeke has nothing to do with archaeology after all. It does however show the evolution to a professional service provider. 
A short history of Systems management
The very first version of the computer network as we now know it originated in the sixties. By order of the United States Department of Defense, the ARPANET – the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network – was developed. The direct cause for creating this IT infrastructure was not so much, as the myth goes, the threat of a nuclear attack by the Soviet Union, but the need to share knowledge. It resulted in the first packet switching network, which enabled various computers to use the network simultaneously – a significant improvement on the circuit switching network that was used before, which allowed only one data stream.
1980s
During the eighties, almost every organisation could install its own IT network, which was mainly thanks to two major developments – the PC and the modem. After attempts, from Apple for example, that were less successful commercially, IBM launched the Personal Computer in 1981 – the first computer that could be used and afforded by the average consumer. The modulator/demodulator (modem) that had been developed in 1960 for data transmissions between mainframes was commercially reintroduced for the PC, enabling various PCs to communicate with each other. Handwritten documents and tables were digitalised by means of software programmes such as WordPerfect and Lotus 1-2-3.
1990s
In the nineties, IT networks in organisations grew significantly and the design and maintenance of these became a full-time job. This task was carried out by the systems manager, whose main job was to optimise the complex system of hardware, software, telephones, etc. The software applications became increasingly user-friendly; an important factor in this was the advent of the Windows operating system (NT for the server, 3.0/95 for the workstations), in which the interface of various programmes were geared to one another. This development contributed to the PC being an indispensable part of every workplace at the end of this decade.
2000s
The worldwide catastrophe that the millennium bug was supposed to cause in the IT industry, never really took place. It is unknown whether this was because the consequences were dramatised, or because the precautions that were taken – backup servers, firewalls, etc. – cushioned the blow. Whichever the case, it resulted in an increased stability of the IT infrastructure. This was also partly because it is less dependent on cables; in this decade, wireless is the key word. More and more, UTP cables are being unplugged and replaced by wireless connections.
The organisational structure of the IT is also in full development. The task of the systems manager is being subdivided in multiple jobs; an independent network architect is hired – often part-time – to set up the infrastructure as efficiently as possible, a project manager attends to the communication entailed in the installation and management process, and the systems manager focuses on the actual management of the IT infrastructure.
Future
Over several decennia, the IT infrastructure has grown into a very prominent phenomenon and intrinsic part of every organisation. Setting up, managing and optimising this system is becoming more complex by the day. One of the problems the IT is currently facing is the impending deficiency in IP addresses. The transfer from IPv4 to IPv6 is a possible solution – going from less than one address per person to over octillion – yet this is a process for which the end is not yet in sight. On a more positive note, the willingness to make substantial investments in IT is growing, both in the business community and the government. Plans to provide wireless internet for entire cities have been instigated and in some cases already realised. The realisation has dawned that every organisation, from small companies to large countries, is dependent on a stable IT infrastructure.
Leave a comment