(If you’re looking for an abbreviated BIO, please see Martin Littmann Abbreviated Bio – AskMartin)
I have worked in the information technology arena and in several different industries since 1983.
My original education was focused on preparing to become a pastor in the Lutheran Church – Missouri Synod. But after completing 3 years of a bachelor’s degree in psychology/sociology I decided that professional church work might not be my calling. Aside from the church political issues of the time, I was drawn to my love for science and technology. Thanks to influence from family rock-hounding while growing up, I focused my sights on becoming a geologist.
By this time my family had moved from Canton, Ohio to Dallas, Texas (my father, a metallurgist from MIT, had moved from research at Timken to oilfield tools with Dresser). This made the University of Texas at Arlington an affordable school to pursue my geological studies.
In spite of being in the heart of the oilfield, I focused my attention on “hard rock” geology and geothermal exploration. At that time the Hunt family had a bit of interest in geothermal exploration and I had the good fortune of having a professor with a former graduate student in the business. I met with him to learn about the business and was soon offered a job on his team. So I slowed my school pace a bit as I began full-time work as an exploration geologist.
My college graduation came at a down-turn in oil prices. Low oil process meant there were less reasons ($) to pursue alternative energy resources and the Hunts cut back on their geothermal efforts. So in the course of about 30 days I graduated, got laid off, bought my fiancé a ring, and started looking for my next step. What happened next was another example of Divine care I have experienced my whole life.
A related Hunt company, Placid Oil, picked me up within 2 weeks and I became a liaison between the MIS department (as IT was called in those days) and the engineering and exploration “users.”
My initial work as a scientific programmer (I had taught myself BASIC and Fortran) later led to a supervisory role. Supervisor led to manager and technology eventually led to business as well. By the early 1990s I was leading a development organization that provided application support to both the technical and administrative side of the exploration business.
Those were the days of corporate re-engineering and I was now part of ENSERCH Corporation, an energy company involved in exploration, refining, utilities, and engineering construction. Following a business side re-engineering of the gas company, I was part of a team responsible for re-engineering IT. I learned a great amount about process design and emerged as the new director of “Solutions Delivery,” the new name for the old Application Development department.
It wasn’t long after that I began looking for opportunities outside of my current utility-minded employment and found a home in Houston at Compaq Computer Corporation working for a former co-worker.
At Compaq I was part of the central Information Management organization. It was an absolute kick to be part of a successful global organization. The Corporate Administrative Systems organization I was in worked closely with the CIO, CFO, CEO, and HR. I had the unique opportunity to be close to the corporate action and was involved in acquisition and integration teams when Compaq acquired Microcom, Tandem, and Digital Equipment.
After the DEC acquisition, my focus shifted from application support to data warehousing. My team was responsible for developing data warehouses and reporting cubes for HR data from SAP and PeopleSoft. Our headcount reporting became an essential tool to give senior management insight into the headcount and job types throughout the global corporation.
My team also developed the first useful financial data warehouse-based reporting tools. By integrating data from 20 global order management systems, we were able to produce a daily balance sheet report that was demonstrated to match the monthly financial close to within pennies. This gave senior management a daily view of the corporation’s financial performance.
But the HP acquisition of Compaq also led to my next career change. I joined a former co-worker from Compaq at MD Anderson Cancer Center in an application support role running a “shared services” team. My team’s role was primarily focused on providing the technical services and database support for the PeopleSoft environment. But we also served a technical team leads and consultants for all clinical application projects and liaison with server and information security teams.
I found that I was really energized working in a healthcare environment. More than just contributing to the financial success of an organization, I was now involved in the health and well-being of many people. In many ways, my work in healthcare took me back to my core being and made me feel that much closer to a much Greater Purpose.
My path lead to consulting with Healthlink Incorporated once I found that my lack of an advance degree would keep me from growing further at MD Anderson. But soon after joining Healthlink the company was acquired by IBM. I was initially excited to join a company I had admired for years. But within a year it was clear that IBM would ultimately waste the acquisition as it forced the once-great provider-focused consultancy to fall in line with its other consulting services, so I moved on.
While I was at Compaq, I took up “the Internet” as a hobby, of sorts. I familiarized myself with domain management, name servers, and web hosting companies. Soon I took over maintenance of my church’s website. My web development took me from FrontPage to Dreamweaver. I began a side business (AskMartin) that provided affordable websites for small businesses and organizations. One of my early successes was with Allied Siding and Windows. I developed their website in Dreamweaver and utilized SEO principles to get them to the top of Google and other search engines for the phrase “hardiplank houston.” They held this position for more than 10 years.
Before long I found myself in need of a more robust delivery capability and I began investigating the CMS world. My timing couldn’t have been better as the Joomla team was just forming as a fork from Mambo. I decided to pick up Joomla and grew with it. I first converted my church site to Joomla and then began utilizing the platform as my only approach to delivering websites.
But my corporate responsibilities have always taken precedence and it wasn’t possible for me to grow AskMartin or devote much effort to marketing. So I officially closed out the business in 2010. I still help a few folks with their website here and there, but mainly to keep technically exercised.
So if you’re read this far, you should know a bit more about me. I have much more to tell you. I hope you’ll learn more about me and my passions as you read my various posts on this website.
If you have questions for me or just want to network, you can reach me through my contact form on this site or through social networks. My public profile can be found on LinkedIn at http://www.linkedin.com/in/martinlittmann. You can also find me on Facebook.