Technical Advisory Board
Robert D. Austin
Robert D. Austin is a Fellow of the Cutter Business Technology Council and Cutter's Business-IT Strategies, Enterprise Risk Management & Governance, and Measurement and Benchmarking practices. He served as Editor of the Cutter Benchmark Review. He is also a regular speaker at the annual CutterSummits.
Professor Austin has been a professor at the Harvard Business School since 1997, where he has taught subjects such as economics, financial reporting, IT, and operations management to MBAs and executives. He chairs the school's executive program targeted at Chief Information Officers and teaches the IT module in the program for owner managers. Currently, he serves on the advisory boards or boards of directors of several IT industry firms, and he advises major corporations worldwide. Before joining the Harvard faculty, Dr. Austin was a technology manager at the Ford Motor Company.
Professor Austin's research deals with IT management and, more generally, on management of knowledge-intensive activities, with a particular focus on innovation. He is the author of four books: Measuring and Managing Performance in Organizations; Creating Business Advantage in the Information Age (coauthored with Lynda Applegate and Warren McFarlan); Corporate Information Strategy and Management (also coauthored with Applegate and McFarlan); and Artful Making: What Managers Need to Know About How Artists Work (coauthored with Lee Devin). His newest book, about the telecoms industry, is co-edited with Professor Stephen Bradley and titled The Broadband Explosion, published by Harvard Business School Press [2005].
During the past four years, Professor Austin and Professor Richard Nolan (University of Washington Business School) have studied the evolution of the Internet interviewing Internet pioneers and innovators. Their research is aimed at answering the question, "Why did it take nearly three decades for the Internet computing paradigm, based on collaborative networks of interconnected computers, to emerge prominently into the business world?" and "Could this happen again? Is it happening?" They are co-chairs, along with Ed Lazowska (University of Washington) of the annual Seattle Innovation Symposium. During the 2005/2006 academic year, Professor Austin is serving as a visiting scholar at Copenhagen Business School, conducting research on innovation.
Dr. Austin earned his doctorate in management and decision sciences from Carnegie Mellon University, where his dissertation received the Herbert A. Simon Award. He holds a master's degree in industrial engineering from Northwestern University and bachelor's degrees in engineering and English literature from Swarthmore College, where he was elected to Phi Beta Kappa and Tau Beta Pi.
Sam Bayer, Ph.D.
Sam Bayer is an entrepreneur with over 23 years of experience in the development and commercialization of application software and services.
Throughout the 1990's, Sam held a variety of management positions at AGFA, Amdahl, Sapiens and Haht Commerce.
Over the last several years, Sam was President of Datacraft Solutions, and General Manager of Memex, Inc a provider of Counter-Terrorism and Criminal Intelligence management systems to the Law Enforcement markets.
Dr. Bayer is a recognized authority, published author and frequent speaker on Agile Development, with a particular focus on customer and requirements management.
He sits on the Management Advisory Council for the RTP chapter of the Association of Information Technology Professionals and serves as an Adjunct Faculty member of Capella University�s Graduate School of Management specializing in eBusiness, Strategic Marketing and IT Project Management.
Dr. Bayer is the founder of MarketAcuity, LLC. MarketAcuity provides Management Consulting services to technology and services organizations that are looking to define, develop, and launch valuable products to their targeted markets and customers. MarketAcuity's clients include: First Citizen's Bank, Research Triangle Software, The Constella Group, OnSphere, iWork Software, Integrated Industrial Information, SciQuest, CoveLight, the David Consulting Group, Railinc and GXS.
Justin Gehtland
Justin is a founding partner of Relevance, LLC. Justin has been a programmer, manager, consultant and trainer in the software business since 1994. He's currently focused on Ruby, Ruby on Rails, and Ajax, as well as continuing to work on Java and .NET projects. Justin's latest book, Pragmatic Ajax, will be released in January, 2006. Justin is the co-author of Spring: A Developer's Notebook, J2EE In a Nutshell (3rd Edition), Better, Faster, Lighter Java, Effective Visual Basic (Addison-Wesley, 2001) and Windows Forms Programming in Visual Basic .NET (Addison-Wesley, 2003).
Prior to founding Relevance, Justin served as Director of Information Systems for DevelopMentor. Before that, he served as an instructor, teaching COM and COM+ programming as well as web development. He has been the lead architect, lead programmer and project manager on numerous successful projects for clients such as Shaw Systems, GE Medical Systems, Mosby Publishing, National Geographic, and Deloitte and Touche.
Philip M. Johnson
Philip is a Professor of Information and Computer Sciences at the University of Hawaii and Director of the Collaborative Software Development Laboratory. He received B.S. degrees in both Biology and Computer Science from the University of Michigan in 1980, and M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science from the University of Massachusetts in 1990. He has published over 50 papers in areas including software engineering, computer supported cooperative work, and artificial intelligence. He was a co-founder of hotU, an internet software services company, and currently or previously served on the Board of Directors of several technology companies in Hawaii.
Laurie Williams
Laurie Williams is an Associate Professor in the Computer Science Department of the College of Engineering at North Carolina State University (NCSU) where she leads the Software Engineering Realsearch Group. She is also Director of the NCSU Laboratory for Collaborative System Development. She received her undergraduate degree in Industrial Engineering from Lehigh University, an MBA from Duke University and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Utah. Prior to returning to academia to obtain her Ph.D., she worked for IBM for nine years. Her research interests include agile software development, testing, reliability, security, and software process.