Jon Husband carries out research into business strategy, organizational structures, management and work design in the interconnected Knowledge Age. He studied the sociology of organizations and social psychology in university, and after several years in banking moved into consulting with the Hay Group in Canada, with an initial focus on job analysis, competency analysis, performance management and compensation strategy and practices. As a Senior Principal in Hay’s London, UK office he worked on HR strategy, organizational effectiveness, organizational change and leadership development issues with key multinational clients. He left the Hay Group in 1994 to focus on stakeholder-driven strategic planning and organizational development, mainly involving large-scale bottom-up high involvement methods. Over the past decade he has concentrated on the growing impacts of IT and now the Web on the design and dynamics of knowledge work. He coined the term “wirearchy” in 1999, and has been speaking about the impact of the Web on work, business models and the way(s) we live and work since then. He has also co-founded a leading Web 2.0 software company, and delivers workshops about wirearchy and its impacts for clients such as Athabasca University’s Executive MBA program, and the Banff Centre’s Leading Innovation program. Jon just finished writing a book about the impact of Web 2.0 on knowledge management, published by the ARK Group (UK), writes several blogs about social media and Web 2.0, and is an active speaker in Canada and internationally about the Web’s growing impact on enterprises.

Bill Ives has worked with Fortune 100 companies in knowledge management, portals, and learning for over 25 years. For several years he led the Knowledge Management Practice within the Human Performance Service Line at Accenture and was an advisor to their internal KM group. Currently he is focusing on business applications of web 2.0 and enterprise 2.0 and working with a number of clients in this area. He has published extensively on these topics and is a frequent conference speaker. Bill recently completed a book on the business applications of blogs, Business Blogs: A Practical Guide. Prior to consulting, He was a Research Associate at Harvard University exploring the effects of media on cognition. He obtained his Ph. D. in Educational Psychology from the University of Toronto. Bill can be reached at his blog, Portals and KM.

Jevon MacDonald, based in Toronto, runs firestoker.com, a startup that builds enterprise social software for both large and small companies in North America. He is a partner of The Renewal Consulting Group in Renewal’s loose network of consultants and has worked on creating and coordinating major change projects for organizations such as The Pizza Delight Group, York University, National Public Radio, the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce (CIBC) and others. Previously, he acted as Vice President at Argenus, Inc., a insurance comparison and recommendation tool for the life insurance industry after time spent at Whitelands Studios which became silverorange, inc. where he was a partner. He also ran an experimental online blog aggregator called blogtrack.com which had almost 8000 users at its height and aggregated 25,000 websites, most of which did not have RSS at the time. He blogs at www.socialwrite.com.
Jim McGee is currently a Director at Huron Consulting Group. He has spent much of the last 30 years working to understand, design, and apply information and technology innovations in organizations. Before Huron, Jim taught at the Kellogg School and was one of the founding partners of DiamondCluster International. With Larry Prusak, he was the co-author of “Managing Information Strategically” (Wiley, 1993). Jim has both an MBA and a doctorate in Information Technology, Organization, and Strategy from the Harvard Business School. He blogs at McGee’s Musings and Corante’s Future Tense.

Joe McKendrick is a widely published author and consultant with deep knowledge and insights regarding trends and developments in the technology industry. He is the author of ZDNet’s blog on service-oriented architecture and is a contributing editor to a number of national and international publications and websites including Database Trends & Applications, Webservices.Org, ENT Online, and Enterprise Systems. He also serves as analyst for Evans Data Corp., for which he coauthors Evans’ Web services survey reports, and is lead analyst for Evans’ enterprise development management issues and database development surveys.

Robert Paterson: “I think that do indeed live in “Interesting Times”. Will we find a way of democratizing the institutions that govern our world before they use our obedience to destroy it? Can we develop a food system that enriches the planet, feeds our farmers and us? Can we develop a healthcare system that makes us healthy rather than just makes a few companies rich? Can we have an education system that helps most of our children become the best that they can? Can we have a political system that really is responsive to what we need? You can add your own ideas – I am sure that you see where I am going. My hope is that Social Software can help us do this. My work is helping people in a few key areas discover how best to enable people to help each other rather than to rely on institutions. I have had a rich and varied life. Here is a link to more detail if you are interested. In my posts for Fast Forward I intend to tell you about the pioneers that I am working with who are putting it all on the line to change these institutions.”

Paula Thornton says, “Understanding human behavior and designing interactions for human expectations are the means to achieve strategic differentiation. This is the focus of our discipline. It is not just nice to have‚ and is not, like documentation once was, an afterthought. It is the means by which to start a strategic discussion and the means by which to drive a tactical initiative. All design should be evidence-based.”