About DecisionPro, Inc.
DecisionPro and Marketing Engineering
Marketing Engineering was originally a research project funded by the ISBM / Smeal / Penn State, by Gary L. Lilien and Arvind Rangaswamy. In its first incarnation, it was a suite of applications--many written in Excel's VBA language--that were designed to teach advanced marketing analytics concepts to graduate students, advanced MBA students, and marketing executives.
Several years later, we made the decision to abandon the bulk of our applications that, while very good for teach concepts, weren't ready for prime time. The remaining apps were converted into VB.NET for an Excel COM addin that leveraged Excel's spreadsheet, charting, transportability, and existing user base, so I, as lead developer and frequently sole developer, could focus more of my energies on the analytics that make Marketing Engineering such a powerful product.
My Story
I was interviewed and hired on my 20th birthday, and am still with this project 18 years later. For the interview, Arvind wanted a code sample, so I printed out the entire project of a Win16 code I had written on green bar paper (think mainframes, not Irish drinking holidays), threw the thick stack in my backpack, and walked across campus to the Business Adminstration Building. I don't think he looked at one word of it. On my way back after getting hired, I bought myself a planner, and I actually used it for about a week before dismissing it as unnecessary.
My first project in there was a joint-space map that, at the time, was generated as an ASCII chart in Fortran, written out to a text file. It was very frustrating at the time to integrate that into a Windows application, because while I knew how to make the GDI calls in C with the Windows SDK, I didn't know much about how to change fonts. Other factors beyond my control meant that we couldn't change the Fortran to write out an array of points, instead, but Virtual Reality was supposed to be just around the corner, so I figured I would bide my time and see if I could be involved in a version to be used with goggles slightly smaller than a football helmet, once the prices came down and everyone had one.
My second project there was Adcad, a knowledge-base tool using the M.4 library from Teknowledge to help find appropriate ad campaign characteristics for household items.
During that time, I was partially supporting the ISBM, the eBRC, as Marketing Engineering wasn't bringing in enough funding to support me full-time. I was involved in 3 business trips for Marketing Engineering executive education, and ISBM tech support, including one trip to Dallas where I had a day off and ended up watching Spice World in the theaters to pass the time. I like movies, even bad ones.
I never was thrilled with the job of fixing printer jams, so when the Smeal College of Business's IT group offered me a position as a web developer, I jumped at the chance, but stayed on with Marketing Engineering on a very-part-time basis as I ended up having every non-instructional database problem in the college heading my way. After helping the college's sysadmin install DB2, hiring some students, training them on adding intelligence to their HTML and developing a toolkit for them to use, the syadmin quit and tried to name me as his successor. I was having none of it, but after interviewing several less-qualified candidates, I broke down, let myself get hired, and got down to hiring my replacement.