An Interview with John Howard Oxley

askSam Helped Substantiate Simulations

Reprinted with Permission

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askSam:   Mr. Oxley, as a Research Director, we understand that you made good use of askSam.  What was the mission of your company and your role within the organization?

JH OXLEY: The company had a general mission of creating medium - technology simulators for simulating decision-making at the operational level in a military or civilian environment.   The company's specific mission was to marry computer routines with a realistic command centre locus (often the actual centre used by the organization using the simulator) thus allowing testing of lines of communication and authority, standard operating procedures, and alternative response mechanisms.  For the military environment, this involved development of a brigade battle simulator for ground combat operations; for the paramilitary/security environment the development of a terrorism simulator; and for the civilian environment, the development of an emergency measures organization.

As a collateral development in the company's history, a military database was developed and various training aids were created and sold directly to interested organizations.

My role in the organization was to direct a small staff in finding and evaluating the information and materials needed to ensure that a simulation was grounded on facts rather than opinions; this included the development of a corporate special library, and most crucially, an indexed database of information relating to various projects which were ongoing (frequently simultaneously).  An additional major role was creating spreadsheet models designed to check the validity of specific simulation functions.

askSam:  What applications did you find for askSam for Windows?

JH OXLEY: askSam was used to integrate the information resources of an information-dependent company.   All citations in the corporate special library were keyworded, with a free-text summary added instant retrieval of the free-text summary was often sufficient to answer specific questions.  All correspondence was logged into a correspondence database (with outgoing correspondence imported through a macro process). All project development / versions were controlled through a text database.

askSam: How did askSam made your job faster or more efficient?

JH OXLEY: The ability of askSam to gain access to abstracted *contents* of articles made rapid and effective library searches a snap. Correspondence could rapidly be accessed by addressee, originator, or topic, effectively enabling templates for repetitive correspondence, contract generation, and proposals. Whenever corporate resources / activities needed to be demonstrated for a new customer, the information could be generated on the fly, often in response to telephone inquiries in real time.

There is another point worth emphasizing.  By using askSam's capacity to hypertext over a group of databases, it was possible on occasion to generate quite novel and unexpected ideas simply by following through the keyword chain.  This proved a rapid way to associate information resources which could otherwise have failed to be so useful, simply because trying to correlate such material by hand would be difficult if not impossible.

askSam:  What kind of customer support have you received?  

JH OXLEY: The best kind -- none, because the product caused no problems.

askSam:  Would you recommend askSam and why?

JH OXLEY: I would recommend askSam to anyone who had masses of unstructured information which they wanted to be able to access instantly.  This was the major use I have seen for the product.  

Oddly enough, even if someone was interested in structured information a la dBase, I would still get them to consider askSam because it also contains structured fields which can be used to generate reports.

Most of all, I would recommend askSam because it is a quality product which goes about accomplishing its task with a minimum of fuss and effort, and provides powerful results to users with only a minimum of training required.

In a nutshell, I can see how the product can be used for anyone with large amounts of information, particularly that which is down-loaded and archived from the Internet.

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John Howard Oxley, Proprietor

Oxley Investigative Systems

48 Piers Avenue, Halifax, Nova Scotia

Canada  B3N 1Z5

Email: oco81945@ac.dal.ca