Howard Smith

Summary

The majority of my working life was at Logica (now CGI) for eleven years and CSC (now DXC) for nineteen years. In a diverse career spanning over thirty-eight years, I was fortunate to have worked on several first-of-a-kind projects. Career progression 1988 to 2017 Programmer, Programmer Analyst, Software Team Leader, Technical Director, Integration Manager, Research Project Leader, Principal Consultant, Director of E-Strategy (E-Commerce), Global Business Process Manager, Chief Technology Officer (CTO), Research Associate (Leading Edge Forum), Global Ideas Manager and Director of Strategic Innovation. Expertise spans early-stage technology, computer science, software and systems engineering, applications, business process, notation, services innovation, creative process, idea management and horizon scanning. Publications and related: Author of two business-technology books: "Business Process Management: The Third Wave" and "IT Doesn’t Matter - Business Processes Do." The former became a business best-seller following positive reviews by the Harvard Business Review (HBR) and generated over three hundred articles in the IT media. Co-founder of two non-profit organisations: Ontology.Org and BPMI.org (creators of BPMS and BPMN). Later, co-author (with Mark Burnett) of the triz-based Southbeach Notation, subsequently implemented as a general-purpose modelling, problem-solving and innovation management methodology: Southbeach Modeller by Southbeach Solutions Ltd. Education: Physics and Computer Science. As a child, led my first software development project at the age of fourteen, mentor to a team of six classmates. As a teenager, built a NASCOM computer in 1978 and ported various languages to it, including a Z80-based Forth interpreter. Also, implemented and extended the Unix ML general-purpose macro processing language in Pascal, creating Mace, a unique macro language. Mace was used later in my career to maintain portable versions of other software, including its own code! The language is sufficiently powerful to solve the Towers of Hanoi problem in three short lines of declarative functional code. Entered the world of work at Marconi Avionics (two years) and later at Ganymede (now SIA) (two years), as a software developer of embedded systems, real-time kernels, initially for bit-slice processors and subsequently for industry-standard microprocessors.