Vice President, BPM Products / IBM Corporation / Austin, Texas

Lombardi Software was acquired by IBM in January 2010. I serve as head of its Next-Gen BPM group. IBM is pretty cool about blogging by its employees, which was refreshing. They do ask that I say the following: "The opinions on this blog are mine, or the commenters. I don't get pre-approval for any of this, and so don't infer anything in this represents the official position of IBM." Fair enough. I also want to say this: it's a corporate policy for employees engaging in the social media to fully identify ourselves at all times and, when appropriate, to identify that we work for IBM. I think that's a pretty enlightened policy. So there you have it. Maybe IBM is cool after all. Now all you Googlers, don't flood me with your CV's all at once.

I joined Lombardi Software in 2002 and served as its President and Chief Technology Officer. I started my first start-up in 1982, before they were called start-ups. I didn't know what I was doing other than "these crazy machines are going to turn things upside down." My first machine sometime around that time was an Apple IIe but followed the normal path in those years, except at one point I did lease a Lisa from ComputerLand for awhile. That was just plain odd in Oklahoma City, so I went out to Los Angeles where things really got going. That was the beginning, really, when I reckoned there was a better way to reach real business people. I'd never really thought about it before but I guess back then GUI was just a poor man's BPM. Normal people could get to their stuff easier... isn't that the point of BPM, too, really?

So that was 28 years ago (as I write this update, in 2010). I remember meeting Don Estridge of IBM, the guy who led the effort down in Boca Raton to build the IBM PC, when he was passing through Oklahoma City for some reason. He died much too young. I also got to know Mike Maples, another former IBMer who did pretty well for himself at Microsoft. I drop these names simply to say that while it's friggin' weird I am at IBM after 30 years of start-ups, I did know (and respect) some people from there in my past.

I've gathered a few stories along the way, but the most relevant ones that also conform to IBM's requested blog decorum are the following: I've been awarded four patents in the area of distributed transaction management and business process design; I've served on numerous industry committees and panels; I was a founding Board member of RosettaNet, serving until 2001.  I graduated as a Pe-et (top ten) senior from the University of Oklahoma in 1978.  I live in Austin, Texas. (And yes, just to stir up the ageless Austin controversy: I think The Saxon Pub has better sound than The Cactus Cafe).