James Carlini started out at Bell Laboratories in 1977 when it was still part of Western Electric and AT&T.  He left the Labs to work at Motorola for about a year and a half on Police Dispatch Systems and then returned to Illinois Bell Headquarters on the technical marketing staff.  In all that time with the Bell System, he was getting extensive training at Bell System courses as well as MIT besides getting an MBA at DePaul University. 

Right around the Divestiture, he was recruited into Arthur Young & Company, one of the Big 6 Accounting firms in late1983, to become their Director of Telecommunications & Computer Hardware Consulting until 1986 when he opened up his own firm, CARLINI & ASSOCIATES, INC.

I have known him through conferences in the Cabling Industry where we both were featured as speakers as well as exhibitors at various national conferences.  His one quote of “Leading-Edge Organizations do not maintain their position with Trailing-Edge Technologies” has rung so true across all industries since he first said it in 1984.

Here is my interview with James Carlini:

BISBEE:                What types of consulting do you perform?

CARLINI:              My firm provides executive advising and expert witness services in both civil and federal court for major organizations on technology procurement, E-Commerce, computer forensics and mission critical networks.  I also provide due diligence for corporate capitalizations and venture funding.

Along a different area, I have worked on several marketing strategies that included very unorthodox competitive analyses and the development of customer yardsticks to compare products and services in both the Telecom industry for AT&T and the real estate industry.

BISBEE:                Has your consulting evolved?

CARLINI:              As you know, all of the technology industries have evolved quickly and it is important to keep up with the changes.  Some of my consulting has expanded and, surprisingly, some of it has come full cycle.  For example, cabling infrastructure and intelligent buildings were very important in the mid-1980s and now there are more issues related to that again.

BISBEE:                What else has come full circle?

CARLINI:              Municipal broadband and connectivity to the premise is very critical for global competitiveness.  Intelligent buildings with connectivity are critical again today.  Some just do not see the significance as some of our foreign competitors do.

The constants have always been “How do you apply technology to the organization” AND “How do I know I’m getting my money’s worth?

BISBEE:                Do you think real estate people have to change their focus?  

CARLINI:              They, as well as their customers, have to evolve.  Their old real estate adage of “Location, Location, Location” has to be updated to say “Location, Location, Connectivity” because if you do not have broadband today, you are not competitive.

BISBEE:                When did you start working as an expert witness?

CARLINI:              One of the first cases I worked on was in the first year of my own company, 1986.  I reviewed the cabling infrastructure at the old Southwestern Bell Headquarters in Kansas City and wrote up my assessment for the new owner.  He was looking at suing some of the new tenants because they really wrecked some of the cabling infrastructure including drilling a hole into a roof beam to see how thick it was to determine if it would support a large satellite dish.

BISBEE:                Don’t you need a lot of credentials in order to work on these cases? 

CARLINI:              You do but it’s not just waving credentials.  You need to explain the technology in a way that everyone can understand what you are talking about.  THAT wins cases, not paper, certificates or degrees.

                This also works in dealing with executive management as well.  People want to know how to apply technology to their business, they do not want to be mesmerized by definitions and acronyms.

BISBEE:                What about big court cases?  You hold the distinction of going up against some of the RBOCs and actually winning.

CARLINI:              Only a few consultants will go up against an RBOC and their staff of experts and attorneys.  Out of that few, I doubt if anyone else can claim they have a three-for-three win record which I think is a solid credential in itself.  

BISBEE:                Were there any other significant court cases you worked on?  

CARLINI:              Court cases are always intriguing and unique.  I have been on wrongful death cases, E-Commerce cases, network failures and large monetary lawsuits involving tens of millions of dollars in either network services or cabling infrastructure disputes

I was even an expert witness on a military court-martial involving the Internet and child pornography, but I guess the one with the most significant dollar amount was a public utility commission hearing where I was an expert witness on the collection of 911 Surcharges in Illinois.

BISBEE:                What was the level of money you found or discovered?  A couple of hundred thousand dollars?  Maybe a Million or two?  You said tens of millions, that sounds like an awful lot.

CARLINI:              Actually, there was a formula used in Illinois for calculating the amount of surcharges to be charged for CENTREX customers that I reviewed and pointed out that it was not part of the state statute to give any “discounts” on 911 surcharges. There was a significant amount that was not only uncovered from past years but also calculated to be collected into future years.  The bottom line was that the City of Chicago alone got an additional $6 Million a year more since 1995 after that formula was questioned and then modified.

BISBEE:                Wow, that’s a lot of money.  Since WIREVILLE is focused on cabling was there any cabling, infrastructure-based lawsuits that you thought were significant?

CARLINI:              There were several significant ones including one at a major casino in Las Vegas that was a combination of $5 million final payment dispute as well as a $10 Million performance bond linked to the outcome of that case. 

The bottom-line was the parties settled out-of-court and the Performance Bond did not have to be paid.

                People do not realize the significance in the area of fiber optic technology or network infrastructures in general. As I have said economic development equals Broadband Connectivity and having Broadband Connectivity equals Jobs.

BISBEE:                What was the most significant and satisfying project that you worked on so far, besides the court cases?

CARLINI:              There are several significant ones depending on what area you want to focus on, but two come to mind.  One was being the Mayor’s Consultant on the planning and design of the Chicago 911 Emergency Communications Center and the other was working on developing yardsticks for customers to measure technology where none previously  existed.

BISBEE:                What do you mean by yardsticks?

CARLINI:           These yardsticks were developed to be used to measure up to the competition.  One was for JMB Property Management.  It was sort of a yardstick to measure the amount of technology in a building.   Measuring a Building’s IQ was the concept which later turned into a chapter for Johnson Controls’ Intelligent Buildings Sourcebook in the late 1980s.

The other “yardstick” that I developed was for AT&T when they still had LUCENT under them as AT&T Network Systems.  It was a yardstick to compare central office based services and PBXs .

I am currently talking with another organization to develop a new yardstick to measure capabilities within the delivery of triple-play services.

As I tell my clients, if you don’t develop the yardstick to measure your products and services by and give those to your customers, your competition will.  In addition, you never measure up well to someone else’s yardstick.  It is a very slick way of giving the market a way to compare products and services.

BISBEE:                What was so significant about the Chicago 911 project?

CARLINI:              The significance was told to me on the first day on the job by its Project Director.  It was a once-in-a-lifetime project to be a part of.  Few people could ever claim they worked on building a state-of-the art facility for a mission critical application for a city the size of  Chicago.

We were given the marching orders to build a showcase, which we did.  It opened in 1995 and is still rated the number one 911 Center in the country by the Homeland Security Agency.

One of the significant features of that project went beyond the center itself.  The City of Chicago also built a 176-mile SONET network connecting all the police and fire buildings, which was significant at the time and still is today.

BISBEE:                Have you seen more projects putting in fiber optics today?

CARLINI:              Yes.  There have been several since the 911 Project.  Now, there are more projects looking at fiber as the primary network infrastructure interface.  The most significant one that I worked on is the DuPage National Technology Park, which is an 800-Acre project focused on providing a 10Gbps access to various carriers via StarLight, a switch/router facility that provides access to various high-speed networks like the National Lambda Rail.

BISBEE:                I know you have taught at Northwestern University for over a decade, any significant contributions there?

CARLINI:              Actually, I taught there for nineteen years at both the undergraduate and Executive Masters levels as an adjunct faculty member.  I have always taught from a practitioner’s standpoint and tried to combine the practical and the academic.  I coined the phrase “Pracademic” to signify the approach I used in both undergraduate and graduate level courses. There are several significant ones depending on what you are focusing on.

BISBEE:                What was the most significant contribution to Northwestern?

CARLINI:              Developing an undergraduate curriculum in Communication Systems, an alternative to Computer Studies, was a big contribution.  Remember, I was only a part-timer.  The new curriculum really provided a practical perspective that included courses that were never offered not only at Northwestern, but also the surrounding universities.

BISBEE:                What types of courses did you recommend that they provide?

CARLINI:              Well rather than programming courses and the typical software development courses, I focused on practical courses like Managing Mission Critical Networks, International Applications of Technology and even Advanced Network Security (Computer Hacking) which no one else was offering.

The International Class was so ahead of its time in 1993 that we had people coming from different universities and transferring that course out as graduate-level credit.

BISBEE:                What about seminars?  Didn’t you talk about the Sarbanes-Oxley Act impact on the IT area?

CARLINI:              Yes.  I spoke earlier this Summer at a Mergers & Acquisitions Conference this year as I did last year at a Compliance Conference at the Harvard Club in New York City on that subject.  That is an area that is costing many companies a lot of money to comply with and, if they don’t, they can have heavy fines levied on them.

BISBEE:                Reading your articles across various publications, I have seen you come up with pearls of wisdom that you call CARLINI-ISMS.  How did that start?

CARLINI:              Well, I always tried to give some practical perspectives in classes based on the work I did with clients as well as in various litigation situations.  People responded to those as helpful hints or rules-of-thumb, so I started writing them out on a regular basis.  Many people like them and some even use them at work and in other courses.

BISBEE:                What CARLINI-ISM can you leave us with?

CARLINI:              Everyone seemed to have Best Practices as one of their “buzz-phrases” for quality.  This is my CARLINI-ISM for that:

Best Practices are a moving target. What you did last year may already be obsolete.  And, Best Practices change with the weather.