Scott's memorial service is tomorrow evening and is expected to be a very large gathering. He did suffer from a massive heart attack. His wife Becky has setup up a scholarship fund for the children. If you are interested in donating pvt msg me.
Scott was my co-worker from 1996 - 1997 at State of the Art where we sat next to each other as go to analysts and , then my direct supervisor after that for several years. He then moved on to become a manager, a senior mgr, then out of Support in some cross-functional teams. He was so driven towards meeting customer excellence goals. He was never exhausted or tired and if you ever talked to him on the phone about a case escalation or similar, he gave it to you straight or through one of him famous quips.
He had a great sense of humor, a cross-team functional leader, an innovative thinker, and great leadership overall. He certainly applied his disciplinary skills from his Navy days (""pick up that call!""). It was tough to work for Scott but very rewarding at the same time.
I'm forever grateful to him for recognizing and letting me grow my own talent and skills. It became the framework for my future roles in the company and had he not done this my SOTA / Best / Sage career wouldn't have panned out and I would've resigned very early on.
Instead of relegating me to the ""front lines"" (Inbound phone support), he let me spend a lot of time doing case escalations, improving my product skills better so I could help the team and dept better in both the helpdesk and internal training roles. In the very early days, 25 - 30% of the KB entry content was from me thanks to Scott
Most important to me, the time I spent many nights learning this crazy ProvideX language and the SOTA implementation of MAS 90 but he let me use that in the day time. I got to became a liaison to Engineering and QA teams and key contributor of cross-dept teams. So many times QA couldn't duplicate bug reports submitted by Support (prolly still true) but they trusted me when I intervened and showed them or spoke directly with the Engineer assigned to the bug to tell him in geek what was wrong with the code.
I've always liked George Riviere and his forward thinking and product sense. However his team around him early in the day albeit smart and able to adapt, were perfectly happy being a crusty old bunch unwilling to change. Scott openly challenged this system telling George and his senior people around him ""we need to get MAS 90 into the 20th century"" in reference to technology, networks, operating systems, and print engines (""why the hell do we still have a Device Configurator"") then later when Windows printing was supported ""welcome to 80s guys"". I was there the whole time in those same meetings thinking ""did he just say that"" but thrilled to be part of it. He shook the leaves of the tree and eventually they grew new branches cuz of it. Product Mgmt certainly benefitted too.
A small subset of his accomplishments in the very early years included:
* Creating the SOP manual for Support and creating policies and procedures. One of the roles he created he dubbed the ""Inbox ****"" (he was politically incorrect guy for sure) basically an analyst strictly assigned to manage the case Inbox.
* Creating and growing internal and external Knowledge Base systems
* The original online community for MAS 90 was CompuServ (remember that). After that there were Newsgroups. But then after that he worked with the Webmaster to create Cold Fusion based Best Talk. Today of course it's Sage City and it is whatever it is.
* Working with George's team to get MAS 90 compatible with many high level technology issues. Especially getting Printing issues resolved. This was the bain of MAS 90's existence for the longest time.
* Scott created the very first OSPCM together then later was renamed the Supported Platform Matrix (SPM). He let me maintain most of the content for it the next few years until he got a cross-functional team together every quarter to meet just for that purpose of agreeing on the content in this doc. To his credit, he initially got Sales and Pre-Sales to use it then worked with PM and Engr to make the document external and downloadable. What was originally a single page Word doc became one of the biggest living breathing documents.
Scott's email sig said ""Who is John Galt"" and everybody said what do you mean and he always replied ""gotta read the book"". Well I broke down and read his own copy of hugely long and mind-blowing book called Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand. He was a devout objectivist, a Rand-ian for sure. Back in the days of Best Talk or Sage Talk his handle was Galtus Maximus. Scott was a devout atheist but tomorrow I will say to him R.I.P. Scott.