Without Susanne Beck, operations would quickly grind to a halt at Brooklyn North Software Works. She's got a challenging job: managing the company's Windows NT network, responding to computer problems and implementing database design changes. And because Susanne has spent most of her career in a different area of electronics engineering technology, she's doing lots of on-the-job learning.


Brooklyn North, a small company in Halifax, develops applications to help companies use the Internet as a business tool. The company has a network of about 25 computers, and Susanne makes sure they can communicate with each other and the Internet. She calls her job "sort of schizophrenic" because, in addition to her network responsibilities and her role supporting the system's users, she also works on a database, extracting information and doing Visual Basic programming.

Susanne is a one-woman support team, doing everything from troubleshooting hardware problems to supplying new passwords, to solving network trouble.

"One important responsibility is acting as a resource for other people in the company. Certainly the responsibility to keep the network running and functional is a major one. It's also the one I'm most paranoid about, so I'm studying it the most."

She faced one of her worst crises early on. "Not realizing that sending out great globs of e-mail very quickly could clog our server, I did my morning check and realized the server was not responding - and that our people could not get onto the Internet. Now that I know how to fix it, it seems trivial. But at the time, I felt really sick for about an hour as I slowly, slowly figured out what to do."

The feeling that she just doesn't know enough is what Susanne likes least about the job. On the other hand, she says, "if I knew everything about it, I would be bored."