Dialog and Roger Summit: Career Bedrock

A recent first post-COVID Dialog reunion has created a flurry of communication, activity and appreciation. As my colleague, Suzy Trigonis, said on social media, “25 years ago, most of Dialog’s employees left with lots of tears & hugs as the company was purchased & moved to North Carolina. We vowed to keep in touch … and we did.” The guest of honor was Roger Summit, founder, President and CEO of Dialog. Here is my appreciation.

On my first day at Dialog, Fran Spigai, who became a mentor and was a great boss, started the process she had promised — “You will receive all the training you need once you are on the team.” When Fran showed me my desk she said – “This is your desk. You will not attend any customer events until both of us are confident you can represent Dialog services with authority and detailed product knowledge.”

All of my initial assignments and projects led to deeper understanding of Dialog. These included two revisions of the Database Catalog (“Pick-a-Subject”), a new four-color brochure “Worldwide Information on Command,” and updating all of the database producer footnotes on “Order Form A” which was used to sign-up new customers.

As mentioned in my previous post, Roger Summit was the Program Manager and the top person at Dialog. He was also the founder. As the organization changed and grew, Roger became President and CEO. He has been called the father of modern online search.

The Dialog Marketing team sat immediately adjacent to the Customer Service Department that staffed the Dialog 800 number. Everyday this team received phone calls from Dialog users that needed help with preparing a search strategy, dealing with problems and issues, and occasionally receiving suggestions and recommendations on the service. The representatives logged each interaction including some detail on the nature of the call.

What was extraordinary, Roger reviewed these call log reports regularly. If he had a question, comment, or suggestion for additional action, he made marginal notes on the report and sent it back to the Customer Service team. Needless to say, timely and complete responses to Roger’s notes was a high priority.

It turned out these marginal notes were a core aspect of how Roger ran the organization. As I started to travel for Dialog, we wrote trip reports that included an overview of the event, notes on all customer interactions, and comments dealing with what we were hearing about the competition. Travelers sent these details to Roger and the Dialog management team, which he encouraged.

Customer support, which set the model for the online information industry, went beyond the search assistance phone calls to include extensive and detailed documentation and training. Roger was supportive of all forms of customer support and often suggested or reviewed documentation, training, and marketing materials.

Beyond these internal interactions, Roger was often in direct contact with customers as he gave numerous talks and presentations. He always made sure his talks were carefully focused on the topic he was asked to speak about. He had a constant need for new visuals to accompany these talks.

The format of the day was the “A size viewfoil” which was a letter size color transparency, meant for use on an overhead projector. With my background in photography, instructional visuals, and image projection, I began to collaborate with Roger to produce the visuals for these talks. Most of my early assignments were creating photos to illustrate various aspects of the Dialog operations.

Later, as my knowledge of the search system increased, Roger often requested sample searches to illustrate the relevance of Dialog results to his audience. Creating sample searches sounds easy, but it is actually a real challenge to make things easy to understand and pertinent. This became a core skill for me. Whether it be on the exhibit floor, creating training materials, or presenting to specific clients or customer groups, the powerful and precise search example was essential.

Roger’s strong focus on the customer and what was going on in the emerging industry drove powerful alignment throughout the organization. As my career moved forward, I came to see that success in business often came through a customer and market driven approach which led to common goals in the company.

At Dialog, these factors were focused due to the leadership of Roger Summit. It did not matter what department you were in, Customer Service, Marketing, Technology, the Product Groups, we were all on the same page.

This corporate culture led to everyone having a keen sense of responsibility and accountability to each other and to the customer. It was simply expected that everyone would be exceptionally conscientious at what they were doing to enable a unified company effort and outstanding customer experience.

This is not to suggest there was not a strong focus on revenue and business. There certainly was. In addition, Roger took excellent care of his employees through development activities, profit sharing, and retirement programs.

Of course, working for a market leader instilled a great deal of pride that also became part of the culture. The Dialog search system, which had evolved from earlier contract work, was the standard for early online information retrieval systems. On-going improvement, in terms of technical capabilities and search features, was especially important. Decades later users still say that Dialog was the most precise and effective search engine ever created. Obtaining the right content based on user input and competitive awareness was also constant.

The technical achievements of Dialog have been documented and commented on extensively. The most outstanding recognition came when Dialog was awarded the 195^th IEEE Milestone Award in May of 2019. “The IEEE Milestones program honors significant technical achievements in all areas associated with IEEE.” IEEE Milestones are vetted “by the IEEE History Committee and approved by the IEEE Board of Directors.”

As evidenced by the recent reunion, the Dialog culture remains strong today. Many lifelong friendships have developed and even more long-term relationships are in place. The most common discussion point is how working for Dialog empowered our subsequent jobs and professional calling. Beyond the staff thousands of clients’ job responsibilities were transformed and elevated by using Dialog. There is no question we are all thankful to the incredible leadership of Roger Summit for shaping our careers and skills!