One of my mentors from Hyperion days passed away yesterday.
Dick Antalek was the CIO when I first joined in 1999.
He was a remarkable man: patient, insightful, experienced, and humble. I remember he came into my office one day to talk about methodologies for driving out business system requirements. I showed him a couple I had been working on and learning (one of them developed by Simon Tucker). I started walking him through the Zachman Framework like I knew what I was talking about, and he looks up and says “yeah, it’s pretty complete, isn’t it? I worked with John Zachman at IBM when he came out with this…..” So Dick had been WAY around the I.T. block before I even put fingers to a TRS-80 or Commodore PET.
He was never too busy to take a call or e-mail from me, and gave me great advice around learning business and the business use of technology. He got me started on learning to connect financial statements with business systems (“it’s great that you’re measuring call center volume, but what’s the impact on the P&L?”)
He took me to lunch at a Thai restaurant in Old Town Alexandria, VA, one day. We both ordered our food “Thai” spicy (as opposed to “American” spicy). He didn’t make me feel embarrassed when I started choking and coughing on the spices: he just regaled me with stories of his visits to Thailand.
Dick was a great man, he will be missed by many, including me.
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