MAKING THE ELEPHANT DANCE: The Drive for Innovation in Largescale Software-Intensive Systems
Departmental Seminar
- When?
- Thursday 24 January 2013, 14:00 to 15:00
- Where?
- 39 BB 02
- Open to:
- Alumni, Public, Staff, Students
- Speaker:
- Prof Alan Brown, Professor of Innovation and Entrepreneurship, Surrey Business School, University of Surrey
Innovation in software and product delivery is essential to every company’s success. However, larger companies have particular challenges driving innovation into their products and practices due to their culture, size, and context. In this presentation we look at innovation challenges in largescale software development and delivery organizations. We particularly focus on agile software development methods being used in such organizations and their role in innovation. While there have been many successes in creating innovative software solutions, too often there have been disappointments delivering that software as part of a governed product delivery approach. This presentation looks at the challenges to agile product delivery, and examines the role and characteristics of an agile organization in delivering innovative solutions.
Biography
Prior to his Professorial role at Surrey Business School, Alan was a Distinguished Engineer at IBM Rational software. His most recent post was IBM Rational Chief Technology Officer (CTO) for Europe, where he worked with customers across Europe consulting on software engineering strategy relating to enterprise solutions, process improvement, and the transition to agile practices.
In this role, Alan engaged in strategic discussions in areas such as enterprise solution delivery, software delivery economics, and distributed software and systems delivery. Alan has worked in many strategic roles in the software industry in Europe and the United States, including Vice President of Research and Development at Sterling Software, Research Manager at Texas Instruments Software, and as a senior technical staff member at the Software Engineering Institute (SEI) at Carnegie Mellon University.
Alan has published more than seventy papers, and authored and edited numerous books.
He holds a BSc in Computational Science from the University of Hull and a PhD in Computing Science from the University of Newcastle-Upon-Tyne.
More about Alan can be found on his web profile.