OBJECTIVE

My employment objective is to work as a consultant and researcher investigating and transforming technologies and business practices through consulting work, publications, seminars, and one-on-one communication. By combining research and consulting I can produce results that are both rigorous and relevant to the business and technology communities.

Superior verbal and written communication skills.

Excellent analytic abilities honed through years of converting business requirements into technical solutions followed by a highly ranked doctoral program in which I specialized in network analytics, statistics, and quantitative and qualitative research methods.

My objectives are to create frameworks, methods, and tools that facilitate organizational cooperation by making hidden information architectures more visible in such a way that different groups, with different perspectives and work processes, increase their shared engagement in the architecture. My work will help distributed decision makers make better decisions by giving them greater insight into the antecedents and consequences of their decisions, including how their decisions affect the larger system of which they are a part. This work encompasses three types of architecture: information systems, work processes, and data flows.

By representing architectures at the right level of abstraction, and by combining graphs and diagrams with analytics, different organizational groups will better understand how they affect and are affected by the larger organizational systems. My operating assumption is that individuals operate based on their own personal models of how different artifacts and events affect each other. The research has, as one of its goals, the conversion of these limited, often tacit, privately-held models of how organizational systems work into explicit, shared models that organizational members can discuss, evaluate, and maintain. By making these models a sharable resource, I argue that individuals can improve both the quality of their individual cognitive models of how the organizational systems work and increase their ability to coordinate by virtue of having a shared appreciation of the different perspectives of other stakeholders.

EDUCATION

Doctorate, Boston University. Information Systems, 2009

MBA, Management, UC Berkeley, 1987

BA, Computer Science, UC Berkeley, 1983

DISSERTATION

Title: Digital Cement: The relationship between information system complexity and flexibility

Abstract: Organizational agility requires the ability to acquire and exploit information. Information systems facilitate organizational agility by extending access to high-quality, diverse information sources and by providing infrastructure upon which to coordinate rapid responses to sensed opportunities. The organization’s ability to change its information system in order to respond to changes in IT, access new information sources, and exploit new opportunities, in turn, affects its agility. The organization’s ease in making desired changes to the information system is a measure of the information system’s flexibility; understanding the antecedents of information system flexibility is the purpose of this dissertation.

As part of building and enhancing an information system, organizational actors make architectural decisions regarding software components and the integrations between them. Decisions to integrate pairs of components create dependencies between them. These dependencies affect the effectiveness of the resulting information system and its subsequent flexibility. One of the complications in making these architectural decisions is that many of these dependencies are hidden from the organizational actors and their consequences are emergent.

To better understand the consequences of these dependencies, this research develops a conceptualization of the pattern of dependencies among software components as a structural description of the information system’s architecture and builds a system to capture and represent an organization’s extant architecture. It then uses quantitative methods to highlight the relationships between a component’s complexity and its flexibility.

2008, “Managing Architecture Under Emergence: A Conceptual Model and Simulation”, Decision Support Systems (with Bala Iyer)

2007, “A Network-based View of Enterprise Architecture”, In Pallab Saha (Eds.), Handbook of Enterprise Systems Architecture in Practice (with Bala Iyer and Per Gyllstrom)

2011, “Digital Cement: Software Portfolio Architecture, Complexity, and Flexibility”, Americas Conference on Information Systems (with George M. Wyner)

2007, “Competing in the Era of Emergent Architecture: The Case of the Packaged Software Industry”, Hawaii International Conference on Systems Sciences (with Bala Iyer and Chi-Hyon Lee)

2007, “Information System Architecture: Toward a Distributed Cognition Perspective”, International Conference on Information Systems

2006 “Architecture in Design Science: The Case of Stacks”, Design Science Research in Information Systems and Technology (with Bala Iyer)

2006, “Enterprise Architecture: A Social Network Perspective”, Hawaii International Conference on Systems Sciences (with Bala Iyer)

2006, “ECAR: A Repository for Storing, Retrieving and Analyzing Emergent Component Architecture”, Workshop on Information Technologies and Systems

2005, “Knowledge Sharing and Value Flow in the Software Industry: Searching the Patent Citation Network”, Hawaii International Conference on Systems Sciences (with Bala Iyer)

2005, “Knowledge Networks: Concepts and Empirical Findings”, Decision Sciences Institute annual meeting

2005, “Dual Networks of Knowledge Flows: An Empirical Test of Complementarity in the Prepackaged Software Industry”, International Conference on Information Systems (with Bala Iyer, Chi-Hyon Lee, N. Venkatraman)

 “Key Player”, www.analytictech.com, (with Stephen Borgatti)

2008, “Improving Organizational Decision-Making through Pervasive Business Intelligence” (research paper with IDC)

 “Dual Networks of Knowledge Flows: An Empirical Test of Complementarity in Software Ecosystems”, (with Bala Iyer, in preparation for journal submission)

EXPERIENCE

Founder, President, and CEO
DataBase Publishing Software, Inc., Andover, MA, July 1990 – Current

Bootstrapped company to sufficient sales to support 14 employees at its height. Performed customer implementations at AMP, Boeing, Chrysler, Lockheed, GM, Prudential, and many others. Sold products and services to companies in Australia, Japan and Europe. Sold company to AMP, Incorporated.

Managed marketing and sales through trade-shows, direct mail, web, distributors and direct sales force. Managed product development and engineering team.

Architected, developed, and released eight products, plus their updates and upgrades, individually and through hands-on team leadership.

Technical marketing consultant
Interleaf, Inc., Cambridge, MA, 1989 –1990

Encouraged and supported software developers and vendors in their efforts to create applications that complemented the Interleaf publishing system as part of Interleaf’s third-party marketing program. Provided pre- and post- sales support. Wrote technical documentation. Built prototypes.

Technical marketing consultant
Digital Equipment Corp   Nashua, NH, 1987 –1989

Performed internal and external marketing of the VAX/Rdb relational database systems. Provided competitive marketing analysis of Relational Database systems. Developed presentations and provided presales support.

Member technical staff
Ingres, Alameda, CA, 1983 –1987

Developed Ingres RDBMS. Worked with a database kernel team (8-10 members). Specialized in query execution and optimization. Presented at user group meetings and tradeshows.