My name is David J Stanford. I was born in 1953 in Arbroath, Scotland.
I have been an IT professional for over 20 years. After spending the first decade plus in banking where I worked in most departments at some stage or other, I became an IT Manager in a small city bank where in addition to my duties in the Accounts Department (where I was responsible for all aspects of Central, Branch, and Head Office reporting) I was asked to take over the small Computer Department. I spent 12 years managing staff, and was responsible for installing, maintaining the hardware, and software, that the bank used.
I eventually moved on to a software house as a consultant where I became involved with helping banks configure, use, and test the software supplied. The work was wonderful. In addition to having the pleasure of working in locations such as Paris and Chicago, I became involved with document production, preparing documents describing how the software worked for use by customers, and also I produced testing plans, training documentation and also undertook training classes as well.
The work also took me into a customer facing role in customer support, where cases were logged, problems were analysed and solutions found or cases were passed on where more detailed programing solutions were required.