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Biography |
I work for CSC. I am the CTO for the CSC European Group. Other roles held at CSC include Director of E-Business Strategy for Europe, leader of CSC's global business process center of excellence and senior research associate of The Leading Edge Forum. I report to CSC's global President of Innovation within our Office of Innovation. Today, I am running programs for CSC in the area of idea management, collaborative problem solving and idea development acceleration under the brand: CSC Collective Intelligence.
My latest report concerns the nature of corporate innovation and is entitled What Innovation Is – How Companies Develop Operating Systems for Innovation. Recently, I gave advice on the relationship between IT and business process change to the UK Department of Trade and Industry in respect of UK productivity and effectiveness.
Howard is the Chief Technology Officer, CSC, European Group, and a senior leader of CSC’s corporate office of innovation. With more than 25 years in the IT industry, he is a widely respected, sought after keynote speaker and advisor. A technologist, consultant and author of two books, his work in predicting and shaping technology at the intersection with business led him to take an active role in the development of business process management (BPM) in the post-reengineering era.
The innovation of BPM is described in his book, Business Process Management: The Third Wave, co-authored with Peter Fingar. The book has become the bible for those who seek to obliterate the traditional divide between business intent and IT realisation. A featured recommendation of the Harvard Business School, the book was reviewed by the editor of Manyworlds.com, a thought-leadership network, as “rich in big ideas… defies adequate reviewing. Yet the sceptical eye of this reviewer cannot help count the large number of nuggets of wisdom, and the seeming inevitability of this vision.”
Howard has provided thought leadership to the BPM community since 2000, the year in which he co-founded the Business Process Management Initiative (BPMI.org) with Intalio Inc. Elected as co-chair of the BPMI.org for three consecutive years, the initiative grew to over 200 members under his leadership. During this period the group successfully created the first industrial strength, concurrent, distributed, transactional, persistent programming language, Business Process Modeling Language (BPML), the basis for commercial Business Process Management Systems (BPMS). These technologies are now being applied in business, and major companies such as IBM, Microsoft, BEA, Oracle and SAP are now also developing BPM systems.
Howard is currently researching the application of business process management to corporate sustainability, innovation and growth, for which he has global research and development responsibility at CSC. He is a leader of CSC’s Global BPM and Enterprise Architecture Centre of Excellence. Howard regularly consults for Global 2000 firms and has written over 100 articles on BPM for publications and communities such as CSC World, CSC’s Leading Edge Forum Journal, BPTrends, Computing, Darwin Magazine, Developer.com, EAI Journal, eBizQ.net, Finance Magazine, Forbes, Intelligent Enterprise, Internet World, Loosely Coupled, MIS Magazine, Optimize Magazine, The Pitch, Transform Magazine and the Web Services Journal.
Howard is an advisor to BPTrends.com, the leading information portal and research source for business process improvement. He has been a keynote speaker at the conferences of many organisations, including, the Black Forest Group, BPMG, Delphi Group, Butler Group, Cranfield, DCI/Shared Insights, Information Age, IRM, IQPC, IT Director’s Forum and Process World, as well as speaking at global CSC events such as Innoventure, Leading Edge Forum conferences.
Howard’s latest book, also co-authored with Peter Fingar, is IT Doesn’t Matter? Business Processes Do. The book debunks the “IT Doesn’t Matter” myth and shows how "IT of the right kind" is a source of breakthrough competitive advantage.
Technically oriented biography
A computer scientist and knowledge representation expert, Howard co-founded Ontology.Org in 1998 and became an invited expert to CommerceNet's eCo Framework Project. eCo's seminal ideas for Internet commerce led to today's Web services. However, recognizing that eCo failed to provide an ontology for distributed computational processes, Howard was drawn to work with the influential open source software development group ecolab.org and helped establish a non-profit association with the objective of developing a complete, open and royalty free XML schema for the expression of directly executable, concurrent, distributed, transactional, persistent, computational processes. A co-founder of the Business Process Management Initiative (BPMI) in 2000 and elected co-chair for three successful periods, the group grew to over 200 members under his leadership and successfully completed the first industrial strength implementation of such a language: Business Process Modeling Language (BPML). Inspired by Robin Milner's pi calculus, BPML and its industrial copycat BPEL is the basis for commercial Business Process Management Systems (BPMS). Howard's latest work focuses on the application of process management and process technologies to corporate innovation.
Howard is a very part time advisor to DigitalSpace Corporation
Last Modified 5/29/08 4:46 PM