Mark Cecil and the art of making things work

In 2007, Mark Cecil had a small instrument for judging a large piece of software: a stopwatch. His team at DataWorks timed the forms people opened while doing their jobs. If a form needed more than three seconds, they examined what it was loading. A delay became a design problem with a number attached. For someone trying to finish an inventory task, three seconds could be a surprisingly articulate complaint.

The release was called SandFlea. Software names often promise a voyage into the future; this one suggested something you might prefer to remove from your sock. Behind the joke sat careful work on what users saw, how information was grouped, and how many movements a task required. Cecil’s explanation was concerned with the ordinary mechanics of a working day. The cursor had places to go. The person moving it had other things to do.

A circuitous apprenticeship

Cecil arrived at business software by way of painting and sculpture. He earned a painting BFA at Florida State University in 1980, followed by an MFA in sculpture at the University of Cincinnati. In Ohio, he built robotic sculptures, taught himself assembly language and made electronics. In 1984, while employed as an arts-center curator, he wrote a mailing-list program. Two years later, he helped establish DataWorks.

The educational detour had witnesses. Scott Lang, a student at Fostoria High School and Sentinel Vocational School in 1985-86, remembers Cecil’s time as an artist in residence. Art, carpentry, metal and electronics came together in his projects. Lang recalls working on electronic projects with him and credits Cecil among the people who inspired his career in automation. A workshop could be a useful classroom for someone whose interests crossed the timetable.

The company’s early motto was “Write code, be creative, have fun, make money”. It makes room for both the making and the bills. Retail had supplied another apprenticeship: Cecil worked at an apparel store, eventually combining cleaning with bookkeeping. He credits retailer Ed Verdesca with helping steer DataWorks toward inventory control. His route into the business joined an artist’s experiments to a shop’s daily arithmetic.

The three-second objection

By SandFlea, those interests had a very specific application. NeXT, DataWorks’ inventory software, contained forms people used repeatedly. Cecil described reworking their visual organization and reducing keystrokes and mouse movements. That is where an interface acquires its real weight: through repetition. A modest irritation, encountered throughout a day, has plenty of opportunities to make itself memorable.

The stopwatch exercise led the team to reconsider when information needed to appear. Related data could be reached through hyperlinks rather than all arriving with the initial form. The question was practical: what belongs in front of the user now? Waiting for information you have not asked to use is a peculiar sort of service.

The release also added retail markdowns, a recipe subsystem and employee access policies. Its work therefore moved between capability and convenience: more things the product could do, alongside attention to how people actually did them. The name was playful. The account of the work was full of small, observable obstacles.

When the office disappeared

DataWorks had already encountered an operational problem that could not be solved by rearranging a screen. Hurricane Charley damaged the roof and windows of its Bonita Springs offices in August 2004. The company spent roughly fifteen months in temporary arrangements, returning to its offices in November 2005.

Internet tools, remote access, telephone technology and daily calls helped keep the business running. Cecil drew attention to a less mechanical difficulty: bringing new staff into a company without its usual home. An established employee carries a certain amount of workplace knowledge around. A newcomer has to acquire it, sometimes through conversations that nobody thinks to schedule.

“Culture is built upon place and people.”

Mark Cecil, December 2005

His account describes finding a working rhythm again through temporary accommodation and regular meetings. DataWorks also moved servers and data into an off-site facility. The response addressed both the equipment and the group using it. It is an unusually revealing episode in a software company’s history because Cecil’s chosen difficulty was teaching people how to belong.

A January 2006 decision put another part of the company’s working method under examination. After seven months of testing, DataWorks selected GoToMyPC Corporate and GoToAssist for remote support. Its support director, Laura Dwyer, reported an 80 percent fall in open support cases following use on new installations. That was the company’s account of a particular change, rather than a general promise about remote tools.

Cecil welcomed the selection on security grounds. The episode adds something to the picture of his job: alongside writing software, he had to choose the tools through which colleagues reached customers. A product continues into the conversation that happens when someone needs help using it.

A long goodbye to ARMS

At the 2008 users conference, Cecil announced the retirement of ARMS, DataWorks’ first product. It had shipped in 1986. Its history ran through AT-class personal computers, SCO Xenix, early networks, Novell and Windows 95. The list reads like the contents of a computer cupboard that nobody has quite had the courage to empty.

ARMS had received its last major improvements for Y2K, with final maintenance upgrades in 2001. Some users had moved to NeXT; others still used its features and DOS interface. That distinction matters. A developer can be ready to replace a product while a customer remains perfectly familiar with the old routine.

DataWorks set an August 2009 deadline for module sales and a March 2010 end to support. Registered users could convert to NeXT without paying for the software, while training and project management required professional services. Retirement, in this case, came with a timetable and a practical acknowledgment: moving people takes work, even when the replacement is ready.

Twenty hotels, countless small decisions

The same year brought a different milestone. In April 2008, DataWorks announced that twenty Ritz-Carlton properties were using NeXT across the United States, Puerto Rico and the Caribbean. Five installations had gone live in late 2007. The latest property in the rollout was Kapalua in Hawaii.

Cecil’s description focused on maintaining inventory while communicating with existing point-of-sale and accounting systems. New items, prices and quantities needed to move between them. The guest-facing world of a hotel has a corresponding world of records: things purchased, received, sold and counted. The two meet whenever a transaction changes what the business believes it owns.

That number belongs to a particular rollout and date. Its interest lies in the operational picture behind it. A product originating in a small software business was handling the unglamorous details of geographically scattered properties. Purchase orders have limited prospects as travel writing. Their accuracy, however, can make quite a difference to the people running the destination.

A subscription and a conversation

In February 2010, DataWorks announced NeXT on a subscription basis over the internet. Cecil described pricing and simpler deployment as ways to make the software available to a wider audience. It was a change in how customers could obtain the product, following years spent developing what it did.

Subscriptions put a different frame around a familiar operational tool. Access, deployment and cost become part of the product decision alongside features. For Cecil, the announcement connected a commercial arrangement to an expressed aim: reaching more prospective users. There is no need to turn that aim into a claim about results to see why the change mattered to the company.

Customers also had a place in planning. At the May 2008 conference, where Cecil introduced the forthcoming NeedleFish release, he invited attendees to vote through the client portal for features they wanted in later versions. The invitation gave an everyday frustration a possible destination. Somewhere between a user’s complaint and the next release, somebody has to decide what deserves attention.

Where two systems meet

A recurring piece of Cecil’s work sits at the boundary between products. In 2010, he explained SmartSpoke, an interface connecting NeXT’s central operation with local point-of-sale systems. Inventory and price changes moved outward; sales and customer information came back. The company first shipped it with Microsoft’s retail management system.

The following January, Cecil described DataWorks’ return to a market it knew from its early years: small and midsize retail. The RMS integration connected local operations with a central inventory and purchasing environment, including the complications of different countries and currencies. A sale happens in one place. Its consequences may need to be understood in several others.

In April 2015, DataWorks named Cecil as architect of its two-way Simphony II interface for Oracle Hospitality. It had gone live the previous month at a Palm Beach resort. The project addressed outlets, languages and differing prices within a shared procurement and inventory system. Breakfast, lunch and dinner can each have their own price. Software has to keep up with the menu.

Those details bring the founder into focus more clearly than a string of titles. The painter and sculptor became someone who worked on the relationships between systems, while continuing to deal with people using them. His projects give that work a tangible shape: a slow form, an ageing product, a new price that must arrive in the right place. Each asks for a different kind of judgment. Each ends with somebody needing the parts to work together.