Bio

This bio is STALE. Sorry. I'll update it soon, I hope.

My specialty is Technology Shepherd. I'm good at making sense of unfamiliar technologies or processes, and then translating that sense into comprehensible form for the other interested parties. Working as organizer, facilitator, documentor, implementor, debugger or whatever role is needed, I guide people, projects and product to success.

I particularly enjoy the challenges of making broken programs work, saving projects at risk, and getting dysfunctional teams back on track.

It was in high school at Choate Rosemary Hall that I used a computer for the first time -- a PDP-8. I discovered I was good at computers, but even better at the politics of expanding the facilities, and collaborating with vendors.

I strive to be The Collaborator from Heaven. I don't let promises stay broken. I'm always ready with suggestions for how to recover from some failed interaction. I make a convincing business case when important people up the chain of command need to get involved in fixing a bad situation.

I graduated from MIT in 1983 with a Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science and Engineering.

Bolt Beranek and Newman was my first job out of college. There I had the good fortune to learn networking from the guys who invented the Internet.

I returned to MIT to pursue a career evolving educational computing by joining Project Athena. I stayed at MIT for 24 years in various capacities -- shepherding emerging technologies into ubiquitous enterprise services.

Facinated at an early age by Isaac Asimov's Psychohistory as a tool for stewardship of the human condition. I've sought out real-life tools with similar applicability. I've studied Peter Senge's Systems Thinking, and read various management theory books as their various paradigms rose and sank in popularity. It is for this reason that I compulsively read The Economist and The Wall Street Journal.

At the present time, I believe key works to study are:

• The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell,
• Good to Great by Jim Collins,
• Freakonomics by Steven Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner.

They are making a good start at helping us model systems of computers, business, teams of people, even political processes in a helpful way. Dubner and Levitt are apparently fans of Psychohistory as well. They opine that Economics is as close as we're likely to get to Psychohistory for a while.

Last updated: 29 March 2010