A new Balinese waitress brought me coffee with soymilk and placed it carefully beside the HACC (handheld cellular computer).  She smiled a reply to my nod of thanks.  I gazed absently at the distant waves breaking on Medewi beach.  As CEO of SITQ, the second largest qualifications organization in the world, I kept on having to try harder.  Fortunately, there was no requirement that I must try harder from any particular fixed location.

I turned my attention to the small gray box that was my new Gospodin model HACC.  It was time to start earning stock options.

I  increased feedback bandwidth and reality blurred as it was overlaid by virtual inputs.

First I composed, encrypted and e-mailed Edouard, Director of Intelligence.

Dear Eddy,

Please get me an estimate of the cost of information showing employment description & average annual income for all our past graduates by subject since graduation.

gordian.

I initiated the daily review of the operation of Phred.   I zoomed the testing module and was immersed in the stream of light and sound that represented students commencing tests around the world.  Korea and Japan were in full swing, China was boosting rapidly as testing offices opened.   On the West coast of Uncle Sam activity was ramping down.  A scatter of night owls were taking tests in Europe.  Panning across to the operations overview module, I noted that the differential operations self consistency checkers were showing green, there seemed to be an insignificant drift in accuracy of examinees response.

I shifted focus and isolated the data stream that represented submitted questions.  Tests were constructed from questions submitted by anybody who cared to design them.  After checking for copyright infringement and logical ambiguity  Phred included those questions in the tests at a rate that never exceeded 5%.  From the responses Phred factor analyzed what intellectual skill vectors the question was measuring, calculated reliability and validity coefficients, determined whether the question contained cultural or other ambiguities, other statistical tests determined difficulty, mirroring, fairness.  If the results were green then the question would be included in the master question bank, and royalties would start to flow to the lucky designer.  A really useful question in one of the popular examinations might make the writer over $10.00 per day.   Top writers with around 300 questions had royalty incomes of around one million dollars annually.

I budded a clone from Phred for an optimization test and did a "what if" on writer's rewards, submitting a band of values for rewards.  The budded model absorbed the changed input, and produced as output a profile indicating that profit and growth were optimized at the current settings.  That was the catch, of course.  Accuracy of Phred's analysis.

Then I budded another clone and set about molding subroutines that would determine question validity based on the income delta information that Edouard was finding.  Come to think of it, there were several variables of interest there.  hmmm....

The pains of hunger eventually drew me back from virtuality.

I saved the results and dissolved the clone & scanned incoming mail.  Edouard had responded.  Akiro & Natasha had left messages.

Sometimes days went past without any Directors contacting me.  Like all useful computer professionals since the sixties, SITQ directors were an eccentric lot.  They rarely talked to each other.   Most top computer professionals are misanthropists.  Each observed at the interface what the others was doing, and based on their speciality each made a contribution to produce the optimized product.

Eddy had sent me a model showing cost increment per respondent against percentage of all graduates.  I picked a figure near 71% which was going to cost about $500,000 million, and asked him to order it.  To get 99.9% of the data would have cost $42 million.

Akiro was Director of security.  His mail came in on full visual, a modern day Samurai warrior.

"Excalibur's inferential reality analyzers picked up indications of an attack on system integrity.  I have hired Pinkertons & increased your security coverage.  Keep a watch out for anomalies in Phred."

Excalibur was Akiro's personalized security program, as much a part of Akiro as Phred was a part of me.  So perhaps that smiling Balinese waitress was a Pinkerton.  Those anomalies I had noticed earlier would have to be reviewed.

Natasha was my predictor.  When the headhunters had found her she was an eighty year old Russian gypsy fortune teller living in a yurt in Kazakhstan.  She was a natural on computers, and held the patent on mandelbrot crystal balls.

When she first introduced a prediction, it seemed like she was just making stuff up.  In a few minutes her vision seemed to come into focus, and a few hours later looked to be the most likely outcome of the present situation.   Natasha was paid a bonus for performance, and was currently making as much as me and any two other directors added together.   She was why we had passed SUNY & were catching up with C&G.

Natasha had sent a plugin for Phred.  It was a large plugin, so I left it for after lunch.  I started the walk up the hill to the restaurant.

Thoughts while hiking up to the restaurant.

It had taken a while, but eventually investors had learned.  Companies managed by non-IT managers tended to optimize their company into a vicious inward spiral until it disappeared in a puff of bankruptcy.  Naisbitt had been correct when he wrote "Global Paradox".  Corporations were getting smaller.  In 2005 Microsoft had splintered to five "Baby Bills", each of which divested staff until they had reached a total staff count of about eight.  The Baby Bills had grown savagely, their aggregate value now exceeded the GNP of the peoples republic of China.

Over the last decade the quality of management had changed.  Smaller corporations mean less people.  Less people meant fewer internal communications.  Consequently communication skills were not in demand.  The absolutely vital and essential management skill was IT.   Most managers were recluses who were soaking information from the www 90% of the time, dealing with AI's for 9% of the time and talking to other managers 1% of the time.  I suspected that all of the directors except perhaps Barnum and Natasha and I were certifiable autistics.  And I wasn't too sure about we three most of the time.

SITQ was one of the Fortune top 500 companies.  It had a total staff of eight.  It's success was based on a reputation for having a valuable and recognized qualification. The value of that qualification was dependent on the functioning and good health of Phred.    Phred was my baby.  I was Phred's designer, creator, wetnurse, doctor and everything else.  It was my task to make Phred perform the task of assessment more effectively & more efficiently.  To do that I had to establish efficient procedures in RL.  (Real life).   Accurate alignment of Phred with RL was what kept Phred and SITQ competitive.

Why did all of the large corporations settle on a staff of about eight?  I can't speak for other CEO's, but after studying neural circuitry and the Chings I decided to use the trigrams as a framework for thought.  Now, after about forty years, the trigrams are an intrinsic element in my thought.  I pattern my environment around the eight concept principles expressed in the trigrams.

I fired up Phred and loaded Natasha's plugin.

She had used maximum encryption.   As the plugin came online, three viewports onto Phred functions appeared.  One was performance, the second showed a testing summary, and the last was integrity testing.  A fourth viewport showed a "Drudgereport" dateline with today's date.

The Drudgereport dateline advanced a day and the testing summary redlined.  Another day's advance and the integrity checker indicated failure.  On the next advance Drudgereport headline became visible but was blurred.   One of the eight staff at SITQ was a victim of some kind of attack...