Contributor Bios

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 served for over 25 years in leadership positions as a consultant in learning, knowledge management, other business applications of emerging technologies, and most recently with social media such as blogs and Twitter. He has worked with US Fortune 500 companies in a range of industries, along with a number of leading European firms. Bill has also supported a number of small to mid-size businesses. He is currently working with a variety of firms and individuals helping them with their blogging and Twitter strategies. Prior to his current role, Bill led the Accenture Knowledge Management/Portals client practice and was responsible for numerous knowledge management and portal strategy and implementation engagements. A number of these won industry awards for innovation and effective knowledge sharing.  He also served as executive sponsor for the firm’s Plumtree, Epicentric, and Lotus alliances.  Bill has written over 100 articles and several books on business uses of the web, knowledge management, learning, and psychology. He is a frequent conference speaker. Prior to consulting, Bill 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 own blog, Portals and KM and through Twitter @billives.

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 For over 30 years, Jim McGee has been helping organizations become more effective by making better use of information and communications technology. He’s attacked these problems as an entrepreneur, senior executive, professor, author, blogger, speaker, systems developer, designer, and consultant. Today, he works with senior executives in organizations to formulate, structure, and solve problems in the effective use of information technology in complex organizational environments. Jim has worked in senior positions with a variety of leading consulting organizations. In 1994, he was one of the Founding Partners of Diamond Management & Technology Consultants. Dr. McGee was also Clinical Professor of Technology, Innovation, and Electronic Commerce at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management in Evanston, IL where he developed and taught courses on knowledge management and the application of information technology to strategy. His knowledge management course was the first to require students to maintain their own blogs. He is the co-author, with Larry Prusak, of Managing Information Strategically. Jim is also a frequent public speaker on topics of knowledge work, knowledge management, organizational impacts of technology, information analytics, and learning.

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 WE 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.”

GUEST CONTRIBUTORS

Charles Armstrong is an ethnographer turned technology entrepreneur. He is the founder and CEO of Trampoline Systems, which grew out of his research into how small communities distribute information to relevant recipients. Trampoline is the first European “Enterprise 2.0” company to receive institutional investment. Its products harness social behaviour in organisations to pinpoint expertise, leverage relationships and relay knowledge where it’s needed. Clients include Raytheon Company and the UK Foreign Office. Charles graduated in Social & Political Science from St. John’s College, Cambridge and was subsequently mentored by the eminent sociologist Lord Young of Dartington. Prior to Trampoline Charles founded Circus Foundation, an independent think-tank and research lab. Charles is also a fellow of the School for Social Entrepreneurs and the Royal Society for the Arts.

Sean McClowry lives in London, where he leads BearingPoint’s UK Information Management practice and is the firm’s global offering leader for Enterprise 2.0 / Collaboration. He founded www.openmethodology.org and is the architecture and delivery lead for BearingPoint’s Information Management Solution Suite. Sean specializes in the areas of Information Management, IT Strategy & Transformation, Enterprise 2.0 and Open Source. He has worked in a number of industries, including telecommunications, media & publishing, government, financial services and manufacturing. He also has a blog on the subject of Information Development.

CONTRIBUTORS EMERITI

Rod Boothby is an entrepreneurial executive with 9 years of experience in financial derivatives, enterprise software, web technology and management consulting. Rod’s professional experience includes four years with Wells Fargo Bank, two years with enterprise software companies, and two years with one of the big 4 global audit/consulting firms. Rod’s white papers include “The next phase in productivity tools: Web Office” published in February, 2006, and “Turning Knowledge Managers into Innovation Creators” published in October, 2005. He speaks frequently at industry conferences, is a member of the Enterprise Irregulars, and blogs at Innovation Creators.

Jerry Bowles blogs at EnterpriseWeb2.0 and has more than 30 years of varied experience as a writer, editor, newsletter publisher, marketing consultant, and corporate communications director. For the past 20 years, he has produced and written special supplements on new technologies for a number of magazines, including Forbes, Fortune and Newsweek. He has also written strategic white papers for major corporations and consulting firms. He was the creator and editor of award-winning corporate magazines for KPMG (World), Ernst & Young (Viewpoint), and the American Quality Foundation (The Quality Review). He was the co-author of “Beyond Quality: New Standards of Total Performance That Can Change the Future of Corporate America” (G.P. Putnam). He is a member of the Enterprise Irregulars, an influential group of tech industry leaders and bloggers, and an expert contributor to WebProNews.

George Dearing is an enterprise technologist and consultant. George works with early stage startups, system integrators, and enterprise software companies helping them identify, adopt, sustain, and market solutions built on enterprise and web 2.0 platforms and tools. He is a frequently quoted industry analyst and contributes to publications ranging from WebProNews to AIIM’s E-Doc Magazine. His blogs: The Enterprise Content Management Blog and WOW Feed.

Carl Frappaolo is Executive Vice President and co-founder of Delphi Group, a Perot Systems company. With over 25 years of experience working with a broad array of business solutions including knowledge and content management, portals, search engines, document management, workflow, BPM, records management,intranets and electronic document databases, Mr. Frappaolo is well versed in the practical business aspects and technical aspects of implementing large scale e-applications. He has consulted with a variety of organizations spanning multiple industries. Carl has authored over 300 studies on the technology and practices of e-business, Knowledge Management and enterprise content management and has been cited and published in leading industry periodicals including, Forbes, The Wall Street Journal, BYTE, Knowledge Management Magazine and ComputerWorld. He is the author of four books: Electronic Document Management Systems: A Portable Consultant, (McGraw-Hill, 1995); Smart Things to Know About Knowledge Management (Capstone, 1999); ExecExpress Knowledge Management (Capstone/Wiley, 2002), and Knowledge Management (Capstone/Wiley, 2006.)

Dana Gardner is president and principal analyst at Interarbor Solutions, an enterprise IT analysis, market research, and consulting firm, and has covered the emerging software development and enterprise infrastructure arenas for the last 16 years as an industry analyst, pundit, and news editor. His spectrum of coverage includes enterprise software technologies and business development issues: Web services, application development tools, and application lifecycle optimization techniques. His specific interests include enterprise infrastructure and processes, developer tool advances and trends, embedded software advances, infrastructure outsourcing and utility usage trends, SOA infrastructure and integration developments, and open source development and deployment initiatives. He is a former senior analyst at Yankee Group and Aberdeen Group, and a former editor-at-large and founding online news editor at InfoWorld. He is also founding member and a weekly contributor to the Gillmor Gang podcast.

Kathleen Gilroy develops the use of new communications technologies for professional education. She is the founder and CEO of The Otter Group, a company that designs, builds, and manages e-learning programs for the world’s most prestigious corporate and academic universities. Since 1985 Ms. Gilroy has developed electronic education programs for over 100,000 professional learners. She was responsible for developing Harvard Business School’s first e-learning program, “Achieving Breakthrough Service” (1992), which was seen by over 7,000 HBS alumni and colleagues. In 1995, Ms. Gilroy developed the first e-learning program on e-commerce, “Competing in the Marketspace.” She has worked with leading figures in academia, science, politics, and journalism, including Peter Drucker, Andrew Lo, William Sahlman, William Ury, Len Schlesinger, Earl Sasser, James Heskette, Mark Moore, Martin Linksy, Deborah Ancona, Jeffrey Rayport, Henry Kendall, Joseph Nye, Joseph Wiesner, and Richard Garwin.

Tom Mandel is a long-time entrepreneur and strategic marketing consultant. For nearly thirty years, he has founded companies, helped other startups succeed, and consulted with organizations of all sizes. Tom concentrates on using new technologies and original thinking to create innovative business models, products, services, brands and business practices. He has been working in the area of social computing for more than a decade. Tom is also a well-known poet. More about Tom Mandel at his website.

James Robertson is a recognised thought-leader on intranet strategy and content management systems, as well as the author of the “Improving Intranet Search” report published by Step Two Designs. James has published over 150 articles on a range of information management, search and intranet topics. His blog, Column Two is also widely read. James is based in Sydney, Australia, but spends a lot of his time travelling the globe speaking at conferences and events.

Euan Semple is an independent advisor on social computing for business. He is a well known writer, thinker and public speaker on the subject and in recognition of his many accomplishments he was voted Information Professional Of The Year (2005) by Information World Review. Euan pioneered the use of weblogs, wikis and online forums while at the BBC and his work there continues to enable staff to work more effectively and more collaboratively across the entire organisation. While at the BBC Euan also worked on their award winning leadership programme and gained unparalleled experience in how to engage and inspire people with the possibilities of social computing as a business tool. Since going independent Euan has worked with wide range of clients including the NHS, BP, AIG Insurance, Bell Pottinger PR, ARM Processor Design Cambridge and Scottish Enterprise. He has also run workshops for The World Health Organisation, the UN and The British Council. He can be reached at euansemple.com and his blog is The Obvious?.

Phil Wainewright is CEO of strategic consulting firm Procullux Ventures and an influential commentator and strategist on Internet computing and its impact on business, specializing in on-demand services (SaaS), services architectures (SOA) and Web 2.0/Enterprise 2.0. In his work, he focuses on identifying the practical business applications (or shortcomings) of emerging technology innovations. He makes his findings available via private consulting, published research, public speaking, webcasts and blogging. His blogs include the ZDNet Software as Services blog and the Loosely Coupled blog, he is a member of the Enterprise Irregulars network and a contributor to the FASTForward Blog.

CONTRIBUTORS FROM FAST/MICROSOFT

Yuri Alkin leads the Enterprise Social Computing team at Microsoft, responsible for creation and adoption of systems that help people across the company achieve more by connecting and collaborating with each other. His team’s projects include Microsoft’s internal shared development system (CodeBox) and the company’s internal social computing system (currently in development). Prior to his current role, Yuri was the Director of Windows International Testing group, in charge of the quality assurance of all international versions of Microsoft Windows and the development of related technologies. Over the last few years Yuri has been spearheading Microsoft’s major internal efforts in the enterprise social computing space, working with many product, research and field organizations. A published fiction author, Yuri writes about social computing at his blog Connections.

Ryan Jones is the Director of Telecom and Media Product Marketing for FAST Search and Transfer, where he is responsible for accelerating FAST’s ability to serve wireline, wireless and rich media markets. Ryan joined FAST from the Boston Consulting Group. Prior to BCG Ryan was an associate at Commonwealth Capital Ventures, a technology-focused venture capital fund.  At Commonwealth he managed investments in telecommunications infrastructure, enterprise software and mobile applications. Before Commonwealth, Ryan was a senior analyst at the Yankee Group where he was responsible for telecom and media research. Ryan was referenced as a leading authority on digital media in publications including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and The Economist. Ryan was also named Yankee Group Analyst of the Year.  Ryan holds an A.B. from Dartmouth College and an MBA from Berkeley’s Haas School of Business.

Leslie Kues: At FAST, Ms. Kues works with customers in media and publishing to drive business value through search solutions.  She joined FAST with ten years of experience with Gartner and PricewaterhouseCoopers where she delivered consulting engagements in the areas of business and go-to-market strategies, marketing, and technology implementation.  She also held an internal strategy position in the CEO’s office at PricewaterhouseCoopers and worked for an analytic software startup focused on online media and content.  Ms. Kues received an MBA from Columbia Business School and a BS in Systems Engineering from the University of Virginia.

Joe Lichtman is a Senior director of Product Marketing at FAST Search & Transfer. He is responsible for product strategy within FAST’s Monetization Solutions group, focusing on Local Media and Newspapers. In his tenure at FAST, he has launched a number of products from inception, including FAST ImPulse™ and FAST AdMomentum™. He has over 10 years of experience developing solutions for Fortune 500 customers and has held positions at leading technology companies, including Northernlight and Zefer.

Hadley Reynolds is a vice president and Director of the Centre for Search Innovation at FAST. He has been an industry thought leader in search, content, and knowledge management for over a decade, researching, speaking, and writing on new trends in search technology and business practice. Prior to FAST, he was Director of Research at Delphi Group for over a decade, where he led the analyst firm’s coverage of the business impacts of search and other technologies for managing unstructured information.

Erik Schwartz is Director, Product Management for FAST.  Schwartz plays a lead role in the product strategy and development activities for Global Government markets and the recently acquired RetrievalWare product line from Convera. These activities include driving product positioning and pricing; internal and external training; and gathering and validating market requirements.  Schwartz also creates and facilitates the next generation product and service roadmaps, working closely with R&D, partners, services, development, and Convera senior executives.Mr. Schwartz began his career in 1994 at Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) in Washington, DC as junior systems analyst after earning a degree in Electrical Engineering at Trinity College, Hartford, CT.  At NRL he lead the onsite development activities on TORPEDO, The Optical Recognition Project: Electronic Documents Online, a massive digitization and digital document search and retrieval solution based on RetrievalWare.In addition to his work with NRL, he also held a variety of development, analyst and technical management positions including a position as Manager of Technical Resources for Progressive Technology Federal Systems (PTFS), Bethesda, MD, from 1998-2004, and Director, Product Management, Enterprise at Convera, Vienna, VA, from 2004-2007.He is the recipient of the TORPEDO Ultra Design Partner, awarded by NRL in 2000 for Digital Document Delivery System architecture and design based on Convera’s RetrievalWare and well as the Theodore R. Blakeslee II Award, Trinity College as Outstanding Engineering Teaching Assistant.

Perry Solomon is Senior Vice President, Product Marketing at FAST, leading product and go-to-market strategies for FAST’s Monetization solutions. Previously, Perry was Vice President, Business Development and General Manager, Media Solutions at FAST, leading media, entertainment and communications business development activities, and working with FAST’s customers to develop innovative consumer-facing search-driven solutions. Perry has nearly 15 years of experience in the media & entertainment, technology and Internet industries, helping companies develop and implement growth strategies. Most recently, Perry was a founder and Vice President of Strategy and Products at Peppercoin, an electronic payments software company. Previously, Perry served as a director in the Content Bridge business unit at Inktomi Corporation and was also a Strategic Change consultant in the Entertainment, Media & Communications practice at PricewaterhouseCoopers. Perry received a bachelor’s degree in foreign service from Georgetown University and an MBA from the MIT Sloan School of Management.