Doug Peruski is committed to a career in Theatre. He has a Theatre Arts degree from the University of Georgia, and has appeared in numerous plays in regional theatre and summer stock. He’s even had a few TV appearances. Doug Peruski is making plans to relocate to New York soon, to try breaking into acting in a big way.
But before this period of his life, he worked as a systems analyst at NCR, a position he held for three years. He says that while “systems analyst” is a familiar term for many, a lot of people have no idea what a systems analyst does.
“I didn’t really know myself, at first,” he admits. “The first few weeks there I had to do all this training – classes on COBOL and JCL. Most of the assignments after that were for support of existing systems. My first assignment was on a development team to replace the entire accounting and operating system for the company. There were a bunch of us on the project, divided into various sub-groups based on business functions, like accounts receivable, accounts payable, inventory control, and stuff like that.
“I worked on the inventory control subsystem. My team consisted of another analyst with five years of experience, plus myself, and a full-time user, a guy named Ed. Ed had over twenty years with the company.
“After we started designing the inventory control system with Ed, I learned the true meaning of the words integrated system. The new system had to communicate with the other sub-systems. Anyway, to make a long story short, midway through development, the company decided not to build the system from scratch, but to buy a software package and customize it. Pulled the rug out from under us. We waited four months for the contract to be negotiated and signed.
Doug Peruski
“I also had other duties, of course. I was the data dictionary coordinator. I was the security request coordinator. I also had to give lots of presentations to other project teams, supervisors, and users. At first I was nervous about these public speeches. But then it occurred to me, this is just acting! And it’s what I want to do more than anything else!
“And that’s when I started to think about quitting NCR.”
Doug Peruski 