Profile: Rand Riness

Computer information science Professor Rand Riness never particularly wanted to go into a technological field in and of itself. He got into computers and database management out of necessity early in his career as a public administrator in transit systems. Now, he teaches programming at South Puget Sound Community College.

Riness said computers have been a normal part of his life since his father owned one in the ‘60s. But, Riness said, “I’m not a professional programmer. I’m a problem solver, and computers are the tools to solve some of the problems.”

Riness earned a Bachelor of Arts in Political Science and a Master in Public Administration, both from the University of Washington (UW). Shortly after graduating, he went to work as a transit planner.

“Transit is one of those services that is necessary for the people and can help do some things for people in the community,” Riness said, “All of my career has basically been driven by ‘Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country.’”

Riness said he started using a personal computer for work when he worked as a transit planning consultant for Dave Consulting 1983-1985. Before that, the firm had a shared system called a super micro, he said. This was where he got into spreadsheet modeling and budget forecasting, he said.
Riness said that at UW he had some computing projects dealing with statistics and forecasting, but they used punch cards in the school’s main frame. When he worked at Intercity Transit in Thurston County, Wash. as the planning and development director (1988-1996), they “didn’t have much access to anything computing-wise” at first to do much analysis. It was all paper-based, he said. He said he was glad to get away from the paper, because it just could not handle the data.

Riness also held a position as a senior planner of the Thurston Regional Planning Council 1985-1988, doing mostly transit planning.

“I grew up riding the bus, and you never would have thought I’d end up working with buses, but it was good fit. And, at the time, IT was growing a lot, so I got a chance to do a lot of things and got to hire some good people.”

When it comes to policy and program analysis, Riness said, you start asking, “How do you measure stuff? What’s working? What’s not working? And, you need data to do that, a lot of data.” That leads to using computers to figure out how to collect, store and process data, he said.

Riness said he tells his classes the same thing, and he teaches people to think first about the data they are dealing with and why they are dealing with it. He said you need to “start with the end in mind” a la Stephen Covey, author of “The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People.”

He often takes the time to talk with students about the kinds of conversations they might have with clients and employers to clarify the business needs of a project. Once you have grounded your understanding of the problem in the real world, he said, you can think about coding.

Riness started teaching part time at the college in 1998. He started teaching an Access class first, and the department asked him to teach other classes after the first quarter. He started teaching full time after the first year. Also, in 1997, he was a staff person for the Washington State Board for Community and Technical Colleges creating budget projections and allocations.

Riness said he took the teaching job because he liked the hours better than the hours he had to put in as a public manager. He said that, often as a manager, he would have his first meeting at 7 a.m., and he would not be finished until 1 a.m. Plus, Riness said, “I like change. Every quarter represents something different topic-wise, and different students.”

“The one thing that changes too much is probably the software, and keeping up to date is probably the biggest challenge,” Riness said.

Riness currently teaches four classes at the college: CIS 145 “Introduction to Access,” CIS 166 “Programming Business Objects (C#),” CIS 182 “Structured Query Language (SQL)” and CIS 266 “Developing Database Applications (ADO.NET with C#).” He taught a management class for five years before it got cut. He said, “I didn’t miss it.”

“I’ve been here longer than I’ve been any place else, but I don’t see myself going back to an eight-to-five job. As long as I can keep up with the software changes and the things I have to teach…I don’t see any reason to leave” the college, Riness said.

Riness said he attends South Sound .NET User Group meetings every couple of weeks to stay connected and up to date. He has been involved in the group since 2004, he said.

Every year or two for the last five or six years, Riness has helped organize and promote an event at the college for the Olympia Area SQL Server User Group. Open to the public, the events are to improve skills and focus on particular types of problems and solutions, he said. Each event has featured a number of guest lecturers, such as the experts in SQL Azure and business organization at the event last fall. The organizers have not set a date for the next event, but Riness said he expects it to be next spring or the following fall.

About programming in general Riness said, “We make a lot of this stuff more mysterious and convoluted than we need to.” He said, “I came in with a pretty good set of logic and critical thinking skills, but computers were foreign. All you’re doing is describing stuff.”