Doug Peruski is committed to a career in Theatre. He has a Theatre
Arts degree from the University
of Georgia, and has
appeared in numerous plays in regional theatre and summer stock. He’s even had
a few TV appearances. Doug Peruski is making plans to
relocate to New York
soon, to try breaking into acting in a big way.
But before this period of his life, he worked as a systems analyst at
NCR, a position he held for three years. He says that while “systems analyst”
is a familiar term for many, a lot of people have no idea what a systems
analyst does.
“I didn’t really know myself, at first,” he admits. “The first few
weeks there I had to do all this training – classes on COBOL and JCL. Most of
the assignments after that were for support of existing systems. My first
assignment was on a development team to replace the entire accounting and
operating system for the company. There were a bunch of us on the project,
divided into various sub-groups based on business functions, like accounts
receivable, accounts payable, inventory control, and stuff like that.
“I worked on the inventory control subsystem. My team consisted of
another analyst with five years of experience, plus myself, and a full-time
user, a guy named Ed. Ed had over twenty years with the company.
“After we started designing the inventory control system with Ed, I
learned the true meaning of the words integrated system. The new system
had to communicate with the other sub-systems. Anyway, to make a long story
short, midway through development, the company decided not to build the system
from scratch, but to buy a software package and customize it. Pulled the rug
out from under us. We waited four months for the contract to be negotiated and
signed.
“I also had other duties, of course. I was the data dictionary
coordinator. I was the security request coordinator. I also had to give lots of
presentations to other project teams, supervisors, and users. At first I was
nervous about these public speeches. But then it occurred to me, this is just acting! And it’s what I
want to do more than anything else!
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