Doug McDavid

Doug McDavid is an Executive Research Consultant with IBM's Almaden Research Lab. He specializes in bridging the gap between business people and technologists. Mr. McDavid has over 30 years of experience in information management, information systems and application development. He has many successful projects and has directed line organizations and consulting practices. He has in-depth knowledge of communications, manufacturing, insurance, brokerage, banking, travel, and public sector. In 2000 he was elected to the prestigious IBM Academy of Technology.

Since joining IBM he has taken leadership roles and performed hands-on modeling and requirements definition on numerous successful customer engagements in such diverse areas as insurance, public utilities, cellular, manufacturing, CPG, and travel. He led the creation of an online business and IT architecture for IBM's CIO. He wrote much of IBM's standard methodology in the business domain, and is an expert in the adaptive enterprise approach, as well as the Theory of Constraints. As a manager in the IBM Global Services (IGS) he led knowledge deployment efforts, including a peer-to-peer practitioner support network. He is currently helping to lead the formation of the Almaden Services Research (ASR) functional group whose goal is to improve the involvement of IBM Research with IGS by focusing on the areas of human systems, customer knowledge, and operations technologies.

Before joining IBM Mr. McDavid led development of an enterprise database for the world’s largest value-added data communications carrier that supports network management, fixed asset tracking, internal and external order processing, usage-sensitive and fixed monthly billing, and telco bill reconciliation, from a single, integrated database. This system replaced numerous disconnected data sources, reduced the cost of data management, and increased the quality of data used to manage the network and the business.

Mr. McDavid developed an innovative style of business process modeling in one of the Regional Bell Operating Companies. This technique stimulated a major reengineering of the Centrex provisioning process in conjunction with information system replacement. This technique was taught to over 200 people within the company and was used as a system planning technique by several business units, and to reduce time to market of new telecommunications products. He also introduced reverse engineering of legacy information systems into a large property and casualty insurance carrier, a premier discount brokerage firm, and a specialized personal banking institution. In all cases the business semantics found in legacy systems proved extremely valuable to ongoing maintenance of existing systems and to efforts to evolve them towards more modern technology bases.

Prior to moving into IT, Mr. McDavid had an extensive career in the library field. He managed reference and circulation, a branch library, and the central library in Palo Alto, CA. He headed up an automated circulation project, which included the first competitive bid in the U.S. for a computerized library system.

Mr. McDavid has been an innovator in the use of modeling to align business and information technology strategies, and has published an article on this topic, "Business and Systems Planning: Building a New Alliance" in Database Programming & Design. He has had two articles in IBM Systems Journal: “Business Language Analysis for Object-Oriented Information Systems” (v. 35, no. 2, 1996) and "A Standard for Business Architecture Description,” (vol. 38, no. 1, 1999). He has led and participated in IBM Academy of Technology studies on the Business/IT Gap and Adaptive Enterprise techniques. He has made numerous presentations to industry groups on such topics as “Large-scale Modeling in a Commercial Environment” (American Association for Artificial Intelligence - AAAI), “Business Language Analysis” (Data Administration Management Association (DAMA), Miller Freeman’s Business Rules Summit, IBM’s OT Conference), and “Enterprise Cognition” (DAMA International, OOPSLA, Indiana Labor & Management Council). He was on the editorial board for the Handbook of Object Technology from CRC Press and authored a chapter on "Systems Envisioning".

B.A. with honors in sociology from UC, Santa Cruz; M.A. library science from San Jose State University.