Professor Katz's Bio

Professor Katz's Biography

The degrees I've earned are:

B.A. in Computer and Information Science, University of Florida, 1977
M.S. in Management, College of Business Administration, Georgia State University, 1987

Jump to the following sections:

The US Army
Coca-Cola USA
Georgia State University
Great Dane Trailers
Savannah Foods and Industries
HO Systems and Verisign
Armstrong Atlantic State University

I attended the University of Florida (click on the Gator head to visit UF on-line) from 1973 to 1977. I am a BIG Gator fan, as evidenced by the stuff in my office, and my role as secretary of the Savannah Area Gator Club, a chapter of the UF Alumni Association. Visit our club's web site

While at UF I was an Army ROTC Scholarship cadet, and after graduation, served four years in the US Army as an Combat Engineer officer. I served as a platoon leader, adjutant, and battalion maintenance officer in the 92nd Engineer Battalion at Fort Stewart. For six months I helped test the TADS/PNVS laser guidance system for the Hellfire anti-tank missile, fired from the AH-64 Apache attack helicopter, at Redstone Arsenal, Alabama. The castle is the emblem of the Corp of Engineers, and the shield is the crest of the 92nd Engineer Battalion.

	After serving in the Army for four years, I left and went to work in the Atlanta office of the Management Information Consulting Division of Arthur Andersen & Co. (became Andersen Consulting, and is now Accenture) as a "staff consultant," doing programming and analysis jobs for clients in Atlanta and throughout the Southeast.
While I was working for them, I got married to the former Jan Freedman of Savannah. After a year and four months with AA&Co, I left to become a Programmer/Analyst for the Coca-Cola Company. Click on the Coke logo to explore the world of Coca-Cola.
Various IT methodologies, programming skills, and operating systems I learned and worked with in my five years at Coke USA:	Advanced PL/I programming COBOL programming on both a OS/MVS IBM mainframe and on the IBM midrange S/36 Ken-Orr Structured Programming Techniques 4th GL FOCUS

Coca-Cola was also the most fascinating company I have ever worked for. The five years I spent there included some of the most dramatic changes in the company's history, and I was involved in :

Programming the point-of-sale purchasing materials for the roll-out of the caffeine-free products in 1983
Programming for control of the point-of-sale materials for the ad campaign for the 1984 Olympics. At the Coke Corporate Olympics (prior to the real Olympics in LA) in July 1984 held at Stone Mountain, my team finished first, enabling me to meet world famous athletes Hank Aaron and Julius "Dr. J" Erving, who handed my team our medals

While working at Coca-Cola USA, for four years (16 consecutive quarters) I attended Georgia State University at night, earning my M.S. in Management (concentration in Human Resources Management). GSU is considered one of the top public graduate business schools in the US. Click on the logo to the right to take you to Georgia State University..

	After five years with Coke USA, we moved back to Savannah, and I went to work for Great Dane Trailers, Inc., as a Systems Analyst. I was placed in charge of all of the programs on the IBM/S36, most of which handled the company's after market parts sales operations at 17 different sales and service branches.
After seven years, I left GDT in early 1995. By the time I left, I was responsible for three major systems containing over 300 COBOL programs on the IBM AS/400. Included were:	The New Trailer Sales system, which took one year to develop and implement - it included sales quote and commission calculation capability The Used Trailer Sales system The Parts Sales system The conversion of all of the above from decentralized IBM S/36's to a central IBM AS/400 in Savannah.

I left Great Dane for Savannah Foods and Industries, manufacturers of Dixie Crystals Sugar and various other sugar-related products. I was given the title of Projects Manager, and based on my previous experience, I was given responsibilities in the Purchasing/Payables/Inventory Control area.

Our Enterprise Management software was BPCS (Business Planning and Control System) from SSA (System Software Associates). Designed for the IBM AS/400, BPCS was similar to a RDBMS, but not quite. BPCS was coded in RPG III, but SSA provided an efficient code-generating programming language, ASSET, which created RPG III code. Projects included improvements in BPCS's inventory weighted average costing methods; streamlining inventory month-end; the consignment inventory system for packaging; and the ELKE manufacturing equipment management system.

In December, 1997, SFI was bought by the Imperial Sugar Company, of Sugarland, Texas. After working on several major conversion projects to join the two companies' information systems, I left in July, 2001.

I joined HO Systems in July, 2001. HO was founded in the late 80's as a small start-up software house, literally in a Savannah garage. Their product is billing software for the cellular phone industry, a very complex industry. By the time I joined them, the company had nearly 300 employees in Savannah and throughout the US. I was assigned to the Billing Support team - responsible for maintaining existing (and sometimes developing new) billing programs. HO was on the cutting edge of new technology and the use of IT to support its many clients and integrate its myriad systems. HO was bought by VeriSign, Inc., in February, 2002.

In August, 2002, I left the corporate world behind and began my new career in academia as an Assistant Professor of Information Technology here at AASU.
At the School of Computing's 2003 Spring Banquet, I was inducted into AASU's Gamma Chapter of Upsilon Pi Epsilon, the National Computer Honor Society. I am also a member of the Association for Computing Machinery, the world-wide computing professional society.