Short Professional Bio:








                                                     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 (pTr,
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.
There are currently three separate streams of work that pTr in involved
in. The first is the design, development & utilization of healthcare
information systems including health information exchange systems. As
part of this work, David is the (part-time) Director of Technology
Research for the RCHN Community Health Foundation, a non-profit that
is focused on various forms of assistance to community health centers
(CHCs). David’s role here is the development of material on software and
information technology for CHCs, & the presentation of this material as
columns (on the Foundation’s website), presentations at conferences &
through personal interaction with people from CHCs. He acted as (part-
time) CTO for Chorus, a healthcare information software company that
develops practice management & electronic medical records software for
CHCs while it was owned by the Foundation. Chorus was sold in
September 2009. Second, he is a Lecturer in the Engineering Systems
Division at MIT where he does research on the relationship of technology
& organizations & on productivity in healthcare organizations. He is also
doing research in several technical areas including: development of
concepts for the use of ontology-based 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. In the past several years, he has
developed & taught courses on large scale software systems. Finally, he
consults to early stage companies regarding technology & product
strategy & has also done due diligence for several New England & West
Coast based venture capital firms. In this mode, he recently joined
Resilient Network Systems as (part-time) CTO & VP Products. Resilient is
an angel-funded start-up working on a new model for access to
healthcare information.

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 &
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, now owned by Oracle) 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.

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).
Home

Description & Mission

Healthcare & Technology Writing

Current Technology Work

Work at MIT

PostTechnical Blog - not active

Contact
Visual Resume - what
I've done, where
the fight against entropy is
not only difficult, it is non-linear