About David

• curriculum vitae

David has worked for two-plus decades on exploring & integrating emerging technologies into new & existing product streams. He has developed advanced database & metadata technologies, including knowledge base, similarity-based reasoning systems & model & ontology-based systems. He has also developed products in the distributed middleware, content management & collaboration areas, as well as developing architectures for very large-scale data & information management systems. He has done considerable consulting on use of emerging technologies in conventional products & product strategies & has also consulted on both business & technology strategy for early stage & established companies.

David is currently Founder & Principal of PostTechnical Research (renamed from FutureSense Research in February, 2006). PostTechnical Research is a trend analysis & technology strategy consulting firm. In this role, he focuses on the exploration & integration of emerging technologies into both new & established software product streams. He is also currently a Visiting Scholar in the Engineering Systems Division at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where he is developing a book for MIT Press (editor assigned) with the working title Technology, Organizations & the Evolution of Work. This work has focused on the interaction between an organization’s use of technology & the evolution of work as influenced by technology. In addition, he is working on several emerging technology projects in the intelligent information & intelligent integration areas. These include: development of concepts for the use of ontology-based business models to allow non-programmers to design effective business processes & to improve the execution of such processes, the use of advanced & semantic search in early drug discovery & other research processes & the integration of clinical & administrative personal healthcare data for sharing across regional healthcare organizations.

Until late 2004, David was Technology Vice President, Collaboration in the Content Management Software Group (CMSG) of the EMC Corporation (NYSE:EMC). EMC acquired Documentum in December of 2003. Prior to the acquisition, David was Vice President, Collaboration Technology at Documentum, Inc. In his EMC position, his responsibilities included product architecture, technology & competitive strategy as well as review & evaluation of emerging technologies in the collaboration and content management space. He also served on CMSG’s architecture board. He was Chief Technology Officer at eRoom Technology, Inc. at the time of its acquisition by Documentum, Inc.

David joined eRoom Technology in July, 2002 as Chief Technology Officer. At eRoom his responsibilities included overall product architecture, technology strategy and the “technological health” of the company.

David became Chief Technology Officer at Agile Software (NASDAQ:AGIL) in November, 2002. He was responsible for planning, designing & leading a major technology evolution to make Agile’s product set available on UNIX in J2EE/EJB. He was also responsible for the technology planning for a large merger activity (with Ariba, Inc.) that was never completed, and was one of the Executive Team members responsible for strategic planning after this merger failed.

Prior to Agile, he was a Vice President and Chief Technology Officer at the strategy-consulting firm Upstream Consulting in Emeryville, California. Upstream worked with early stage companies and with companies in transition. David worked primarily on developing strategies for emerging technologies or the evolution of existing technologies to internet-based strategies. Clients included such companies as Microsoft, BEA, Iona, Agile Software and IBM as well as many much smaller businesses.

Prior to Upstream, David was Chief Technology Officer for Riverton Software, a software start-up in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Riverton produced a component-based application development environment (Microsoft & Java based) that also had a distributed deployment framework. David was responsible for a technology strategy and product architecture which took the company from its founding to 200 customers in 5 countries within 3 years. He also managed the development of several of Riverton’s product versions (HOW).

David left the Digital Equipment Corporation in order to help found Riverton. He spent fourteen years at Digital and held many different positions there. He was Database Architect for the Corporation and served as software architect for the first version of Digital’s relational database product, Rdb, now owned by Oracle. He also served as Chief Scientist for Artificial Intelligence for DEC and was responsible for several AI-based product designs for which he holds a number of software patents. In this position he managed the development of several software products. As Technical Director for CALS and Concurrent Engineering at DEC, David also worked closely with Digital’s customers and developed an Rdb-based Bill-of-Materials system for the Boeing Commercial Airplane Company that was used for both Boeing 767 and 777 manufacturing. He developed a similar system for Douglas Aircraft for the development of the MD-11 airplane. He also worked as the Technical Director for a very large paperless design & manufacturing support system for General Motors (the C4 system). As a pioneer in the architecture of distributed systems, David worked on the overall structure of the Distributed Computing Environment (DCE) and was also CORBA architect for DEC and authored or coauthored several of the core CORBA specifications including the Interface Repository and Interoperability (IIOP) specifications.

Prior to joining Digital, David was Chief Scientist and Director of Technical Data Processing for Normandeau Associates, Inc. NAI was (now no longer in business) was an environmental consulting firm that specialized in large-scale environmental monitoring and modeling of ecological and socioeconomic systems.

David is the author of numerous technical reports and journal articles in mathematics, artificial intelligence, concurrent engineering and cultural anthropology. He holds a doctoral degree in mathematics and has served as an adjunct faculty member at both Stanford University (Computer Science Department & Knowledge Systems Laboratory) and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Leaders for Manufacturing Program).