Ways and Wisdoms
of the Dice

I graduated with a degree in business administration and economics (civilekonom) in the 1980s, the first two years at Kristianstad University and then two years specialization in Economic Analysis at Lund University. In the elective courses I chose courses with a financial focus because they were the most challenging.

Immediately after the thesis I got a job at VPD, a consulting company that operates in the financial market in Stockholm. First I learned to code Pascal on PC, and fairly soon I was placed as a consultant at OM where I helped with OMS (OM's Marginal Security system) written in C on VAX. It went well, one month's assignment was transformed into about 18 months plus assignments for two more consultants from VPD. After some other smaller assignments for me, the grim times in the early 1990s caught up with the company and a number of consultants got the axe, including me.

After a period of wintering with commission work and other things, I started my own consulting company where I took on a number of assignments in programming, education and consulting. However, life was precarious with annual mortgage and 75% interest shock at the same time as we had our first child, so I applied for a permanent job.

I got a job as a programmer at CRM (Currency Risk Mgmt) developing systems that manage the risks in finance departments of exporting companies. Pretty soon I was given responsibility for developing a completely new module, which was a real-time-based and graphical decision support linked to Telerate, Reuters or Findata. The responsibility included everything from requirements spec, design, programming, delivery and user training, which was very rewarding. However, organizational and financial reasons made me move on.

I was hired at Dextel Findata where my job would be to develop a new graphical version of the Trust terminal, a query application for the central Trust database. But the same day I started, I got new, more prioritized tasks because another programmer resigned; to take care of the PC-based application that receives the real-time stream of data. Which was not really my dream, but in the end I got a pretty good grip on that.

Dextel Findata soon merged with the old SIX which became Bonnier Findata which became the new SIX. At that time I was mostly involved in helping to create a completely new Trust database on a modern Sybase platform, and in classifying all the information that the real-time systems handled together with Vinga who wrote a new client application, MIM or later SIX Trader. In addition I spent a lot of time helping the customers who used the real-time API.

After three years I was headhunted to SPP Asset Management, which had a completely different resource level than SIX. Initially I was replacing all consultants making money on SPP's customized information system AIS, ie systems that retrieve portfolio data from the TMS financial system as well as index data from various index providers. I was also given the responsibility to build an intranet for the asset management. At the same time, the fund company, the life company and the brand were sold to SHB and the company changed its name to Alecta.

However, my main job at SPP / Alecta was to create and develop a data warehouse, AIM, which would serve as a hub for other applications that needed data. Among other things we built an e-Commerce site for the PPM election using AIM. The bet simulation on the front office and the risk group's web-based system for bet analysis was using AIM. In addition, there was a lot of work with application integration with the help of Tibco / Rv, as well as with technical support and development for financial real-time programs such as Tibco, Reuters, SIX and Datastream and others.

After five and a half years, the management model was changed and it was decided to halve the staff in asset management, and again I got the axe. After applying for several interesting jobs, I received two tempting job offers the same week! It was the consulting companies Pointer and Know IT who fought over me.

After much deliberation I finally chose Know IT which felt like the best choice at that time. I worked with LDAP, DirectoryServices and database integration on SIS, with PocketPC, Compact Dotnet and SQLCE for FMV in an explosive ordnance disposal application (EODIS), with accounting systems in Dotnet and SQL Server on Zurich, with car financing via the web in Dotnet and SQL Server at SkandiaBanken, and with an advanced monitoring system in C# against Oracle at ACE Interactive.

After three years I switched to Itera, which focuses on BI and Data Warehousing. Practically this means extracting data from different source systems, washing and compiling the data in a data warehouse, as well as creating cubes, reports and dashboards for analysis of the data. My assignments were usually as a BI mentor, DW architect, ETL developer and / or DB manager.

At STFI, Ragnsells and Aberdeen it was mostly management. At Concordia Bus and Danaher Motion I was mentor / architect. At SEB I was developer first, and then architect for ten months, working with DV. At Tidsam, 3GIS and Micronic I was mentor / architect / developer. At Kuoni, I did an evaluation of their data warehouse. At LF, H&M and Nordea, it was mostly development in long-term projects.

After more than four years I was headhunted to Teradata, which sells a database with massive parallel architecture, as solution architect in presales for the Nordic region's largest customer. It was an extremely challenging, developing and stimulating period that lasted almost nine years. During this tenure I also ventured into Hadoop, data lakes, and cloud implementations, as well as pricing, commercial, legal and related areas.

Nowadays I am an architect and DWA mentor at Qlik Data Integration (formerly Attunity). I support our customer sales team, is the link to the product owners, keep track of everything and present our solutions externally. There is a lot to do and I enjoy it!

Curriculum Vitae

Strange this with chance, place and time..