I started work in the computer industry for two reasons. Firstly, it was a profession that allowed one to work on a wide variety of problems in many different industries. Secondly, it was possible to work in many different countries. And I think both of these reasons have been fulfilled.
I was introduced to systems thinking at a very early age. Gerd Sommerhoff taught me at school, and I went on to read Bateson and others when I was at university.
Key Ideas
editI have always tried to find new ways of connecting ideas. I have published many new ideas, but I have not always been very good at promoting them, so I find other people reinventing them later. Sigh. However, sometimes I get an acknowledgement, which is nice.
Enterprise modelling
editworked on enterprise modelling in the early 1990s - some of these ideas are now coming into fashion
Systems thinking and lenscraft
edit- contributed a key paper to the Systems Engineering for Business Process Change research programme - now available at Scribd Reasoning about systems and their properties (2000)
Component-based business
editmy book on the Component-Based Business (2001) introduced the idea of breaking a business into logical components many years before IBM discovered Business Component Modelling
Organic planning for SOA
editmy ideas on organic planning for service oriented architecture, originally published in 2004, have been acknowledged by a number of authors
- Michael Bell, SOA Modeling Patterns for Service Oriented Discovery and Analysis (Wiley 2010)
- Tony Bidgood, ArchiMate: A Standard for Enterprise System Modelling (CBDI Journal, August 2008)
- Marc Lankhorst et al, Enterprise Architecture at Work (Springer, 2005)
for a brief summary, see this slideshare presentation Organic Planning
Organizational Intelligence
editcurrently writing a book on organizational intelligence
Education
edit- 1966-1972 Sevenoaks School, where he was taught by Gerd Sommerhoff
- 1973-1976 MA Mathematics and Philosophy Merton College, Oxford
- 1976-1977 MSc Computing Science, Imperial College London
- 1986-1992 (part time) MBA Open University
Honours and associations
editWork
editCurrently the director of the Next Practice Research Initiative. Has taught courses at City University, Brunel University and the Copenhagen Business School.