More on the team

"Businessprocess is not a word in the English language."

Doug McDavid is one of the founding members of the Almaden Services Research team, which is focusing its efforts on the linkages found in the human, organizational and technological aspects of the changes that enterprises undertake. With over 30 years experience in various types of modeling – business process, IT system and semantic, Doug is now using modeling to align business and information technology strategies.

Businesses are complex adaptive systems, composed of people and groups interacting with each other. When considering the impact of technology implementation on an organization, there is much more to consider than hardware, middleware, application architectures and design, and operational business processes. There are many characteristics that in complex and subtle ways contribute to the overall success of the product and service delivery, as well as the brand experience of an enterprise – the social networks, linguistics, collaborative patterns and anthropology, to name a few.

Doug is working on defining this expanded view of organization and developing the tools and methods that will support the approach. For example, a resort condominium company wanted to develop an application to support condominium exchanges. Doug analyzed company and industry documents, and watched as agents worked. Using the information he gained from those experiences, he was able to develop a semantic model, which allowed him to identify priorities, and figure out how agents weighed different types of information and worked together. The semantic model was then used to create detailed object models for application development.

Doug is continuing to innovate in modeling to align business and information technology by supporting work on the Business Architecture Synthesis and Integration Solutions (BASIS) project. He is also studying the co-evolution of business/technology innovations, i.e. the reciprocal evolutionary change in both business and technology driven by accelerating change and co-dependence between organization and technology. He is leading projects for:

• Global Competencies and intellectual property for IBM Global Services (IGS), exploring the methods and tools needed to transform IGS to an on demand service provider
• U.S. Army Logistics Transformation Agency to bring IBM Research technology and commercial supply chain experience to the problem of military logistics.