The First 25 Years: From Golf Ball Typewriters to an International Clientele Base

It all began because of a 1960’s IBM golf ball typewriter...

Lee Dicke, the founder of the infraWise/IRC group of companies, fondly remembers the 1960s: the camaraderie of life in the Naval Reserves, getting his first job at IBM, and entering college. He eagerly served his apprenticeship as an engineer, fixing those ancient IBM typewriters that many of us remember affectionately.

Upon getting his degree, Lee was thrust into a pilot scheme to use the first ever "service desk knowledge base" in the history of IBM. In fact, Lee and his team spent 3 years being guinea pigs for this cutting-edge research project. It was rocket science stuff in 1971, but Lee had a moment of Newtonian inspiration to make it work even better, as well as provide IBM with revenue opportunities. "What if we could develop a problem, change, and configuration tool that manages information," he asked, "but also allows contextual searching?" IBM executive management liked the idea of this commercial "Dicke information management tool" but needed some clarification as to what all this contextual searching stuff was about. Lee described the blueprint using his golf ball engineering experiences. "If I report a typewriter problem and log it into the current system, there is no way of knowing if a word is a noun or verb, or something that has a totally different meaning. I mean, just look at the word ‘run’ or ‘down.’ Our system will get all confused and that means one of three things will happen when somebody searches the database: too many hits, too few hits, or the wrong hits."

IBM gave the thumbs up, and a rather generous IBM research budget was earmarked for the project. In 1976, under the influence of Harvard professor Leonard Bernstein, Lee led the design effort for a prototype.

At around that time, Lee partnered with John Bodoh, an IBM technical guru in database architecture and system design. (As a point of note, John is now part of the infraWise/IRC group management team.) Amazing things happened.

Within a few short years, Information Management Version 1, affectionately known as InfoMan, was developed and shipped around the world. It became an overnight global success. Remarkably, it was one of the fastest-selling mainframe products in the history of IBM. It grew 4 times faster than what was initially envisioned. Furthermore, the preliminary estimates had predicted a 6 or 7 year life span. Nearly 30 years later, InfoMan is still around.

But Lee had a vision to enhance IBM’s product. Not everyone wanted to run mainframe computer centers IBM’s way, so he headed a team of technicians to enhance ‘his’ InfoMan system with a customized programming language. In 1982, Lee’s PMF language was ready and soon after, InfoMan Version 2 was released to the world.

Lee had an even more long-term vision. He could see the huge commercial potential of this niche market, so after much deliberation, he left IBM to set up a complimentary organization that would expand the functionality of InfoMan. IRC was incorporated in 1983. It was Lee’s second job.

In those first few years, IRC developed and licensed a number of utilities to make InfoMan easier to customize. They were an instant success and many customers still use these products. In 1991, Lee and his development team branched out with a suite of applications that made InfoMan much easier for end users. It incorporated something quite revolutionary in the InfoMan world: a way to define and edit workflow using simple administration screens. Quite ironically, the man who had invented the PMF language had found a way for end users to avoid having to use it! IBM was very impressed and IRC became a joint founding member of IBM’s elite SystemView Alliance. Meta (now part of Gartner) coined the headline "IRC rescues InfoMan!"!

"Man’s mind, once stretched by a new idea, never regains its original dimensions." -Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., Supreme Court Judge

Over the years, various attempts were made by well-known organizations to buy Lee’s companies. These lucrative offers were all declined. Lee enjoys his autonomy, and, although majority shareholder of a successful group of companies, still runs the technical development side of the business hands-on; but he still empowers his management team to run day-to-day operations.

In 1995, IRC developed a PC front-end to InfoMan, which was very successful, and the forerunner to standalone iWise.

In 2002, Lee incorporated a sister company to IRC and named it infraWise, Inc. Its mission was simple: to take all the years of experience gained from how Service Management is run across the world, and create the ultimate system that could run on any platform. Many man-years of development effort resulted in the iWise software suite of programs that had to be out-of-the-box, ITIL-compliant, yet tailorable to fit business needs. Of course, Lee’s way of defining and editing workflow, developed 10 years earlier, is a standard iWise feature.

The IBM golf ball typewriter that started it all has long since been turned to pulp. Technology changes, and iWise software is a superb example of how a simple idea born many years ago evolved into a state-of-the-art strategic product used by large government and commercial organizations in the world today.