Dan Davis, Senior Software Engineer

Dan is a Senior Software Engineer at ThreeWill with over 20 years experience in enterprise systems architecture, software architecture, IT management, software development, and program and project management. Dan is a strong strategic thinker and innovator. As a consultant, he has helped numerous clients achieve success with their software development, systems integration, and other large-scale efforts. As an IT director and architect, Dan has overseen creation of new software products, managed product integration and organizational change efforts, and created new processes and practices. His diverse expertise in cross-platform enterprise and solutions architecture, product development, process engineering, and mentoring give him the background and flexibility to respond quickly and appropriately to align information technology efforts with broader organizational goals. He is also a published technical author.

Experience

Architecture Consultant - Independent Consulting
  • Independent enterprise, solutions, and systems architecture consulting and mentoring.
  • As an independent consultant,  provided experienced consulting in enterprise, solutions, and systems architecture, specializing in alignment of technology with business strategy to facilitate efficient and cost-effective execution.
Chief Architect - Management Consulting Corporation
  • Responsible for technical leadership and enterprise architecture consulting direction as architecture representative on the company’s executive team.
  • As chief architect, worked as part of the company’s executive leadership to define service offerings, including the trademarked Business Strategy RealizationTM process for assessing an organization’s level of technology alignment with core tenets and goals.
  • Presentation of technical papers at industry conferences such as the International Association of Software Architects (IASA) architecture summits
  • Consulting with large corporations to assess level of business / IT alignment and develop technology roadmaps and enterprise-wide architecture strategies for increasing efficiency and reducing overall cost
  • Architecting technology solutions on multiple platforms, assuming leadership positions on client project teams to manage resources, set technical direction, provide design and process governance, and mentor technology leaders and team members
Principal Systems Architect - Leading Business Services Company
  • Responsible for oversight, governance, and enterprise architecture development across the company’s product offerings.
  • As principal architect, worked to establish consistent standards and practices across the company’s development organizations, and, as part of a strategy team, worked to develop a long-term enterprise architecture roadmap.
  • Served in a consulting role as an embedded architect to provide technical and strategic oversight across payroll and HR outsourcing product teams.
  • Reviewed existing applications, providing redesign guidance to establish consistent technology direction and integration strategy across the company.
  • Designed and developed prototypes and new production services as needed.
  • Provided process guidance to project teams using implementation of the Rational Unified Process (RUP).
  • Evaluated new products and technologies (portals, development frameworks, integration technologies) for inclusion in the company’s architecture landscape.
Software Architect - Computer Software Company
  • Responsible for spearheading new product development and migration of existing check image processing product suite from Borland Delphi to the Microsoft .NET platform.
  • Primary thrust was on creating a distributed infrastructure based on the Microsoft Web Service Extensions (WSE) as a foundation for future product development and migration.
  • The infrastructure used a combination of concepts gleaned from utility computing and group oriented middleware, enterprise service bus / event channel architectures, and service oriented architectures. It heavily leveraged System.ComponentModel internally to complement the service orientation externally, creating a consistent service locator / inversion of control paradigm from top to bottom.
  • The architecture was developed with an eye towards ease of migration to Indigo (now the Windows Communication Foundation).
Solution Architect – Major Services, Consulting & Integration Company
  • Architected enterprise solutions, delivered solution concept proposals, refined architecture and design process for clients of global delivery organization.
  • Architected and supervised development of enterprise solutions
  • Process-centric Business Process Management (BPM) solutions
  • Secure Web service solutions using Service-Oriented Architectures (SOAs)
  • Platform-independent enterprise group-oriented middleware frameworks using Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) and grid architectures

Championed refinement and adoption of a cutting-edge agile architecture and design process in use by the Enterprise Application Services group for global solution delivery.

Atlanta Delivery Organization – Principal Consultant

Led architecture team delivering successful solutions, and created the company’s architecture and design process.

Worked with team of five architects to design a process-centric BPM solution for the call center of one of the world’s largest credit card processors

  • Architecture consisted of design, deployment, and runtime environments for the definition, deployment, and implementation of call center workflows designed by SMEs
  • One of the first solutions developed on Microsoft’s .NET Framework – later spotlighted by Microsoft in a case study video presentation
  • Served as primary architect for full lifecycle development of the product’s initial release — team of twenty-four designed, developed, and deployed the initial release in six months
  • Designed and led development of a second-generation extensible Integrated Development Environment (IDE) that allowed non-developers to define and deploy runnable business processes

Worked with Director of Field Readiness to develop and deploy a practical but comprehensive design process for the company’s delivery organization

  • Held initial meetings to establish baseline concepts with other company architects
  • Developed white paper and managed review cycles
  • Developed presentation overviews and training materials
  • Conducted training sessions
Senior Consultant – Atlanta Delivery Organization
  • Led development of a design-time compiler for an Integrated Development Environment; led team developing .NET solution set.
  • Designed and developed a metadata-based XML compiler for a client development environment that allowed developers to define and deploy sequential processes within a process-centric custom framework.
  • Led a team investigating new .NET technologies, specifically the use of Web services as a design pattern element in distributed architectures. This effort was part of an internal company initiative to develop specific solution sets as IP for use in delivering Microsoft .NET solutions
VP and Chief Architect – Product Development – Fortune 500 Information Management Systems Company
  • Led development of the architecture for the company’s integrated product suite framework.
  • As the company’s chief architect, drove the continuing development of a new extensible architecture framework for IPS-Sendero’s next-generation financial measurement products.
  • Proofed candidate technologies, and built a low-fidelity architectural skeleton
  • Designed and implemented proofs-of-concept for key design elements
  • Evaluated SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol) as a loose coupling mechanism for clients, selected and refined architectural design patterns, and developed the final architecture blueprint for the overall product integration framework
VP and Software Development Director – Integration Services Group
  • Developed concept for integration of product set, created and led new development group, analyzed organizational impact, drove organizational change
  • Worked with domain experts and company executives to create and lead a design and development group devoted solely to product integration.
  • Developed business plan and hired managers for Interaction Design, Business Services, and Data Services teams supported by global Architecture and Quality Assurance teams. Each focused team was led by an SME with both domain and product development expertise The group totaled 22 members spread across 3 offices (Atlanta, Dallas, TX, and Scottsdale, AZ), with an annual budget of $2.3 million
  • Developed specific design and development methodologies to support distributed design and development of the product integration solution
  • Completed a risk assessment and management plan, project plan, and high-level design documents
  • Initiated and led a series of Organizational Impact meetings to assess the impact of this new solution on the organization, and to provide guidance in the development of action plans
  • Led company-wide consolidation of testing and defect tracking systems in preparation for development of the integrated product solution
Business Insurance Company – Senior Developer – Commercial Insurance Division
  • Led development of systems for generation and maintenance of contractor’s insurance policies.
Furniture Supply Company - Systems Manager – Operations Group
  • Managed company’s internal IT systems; designed and developed online ordering system.
Non-Profit Linguistics Company – Computational Linguist – Field Linguistics
  • Analyzed unwritten languages, developed and managed literacy programs, designed and developed linguistic software.
  • Performed a multitude of linguistic research and program management activities:
  • During a two-year field assignment in Cameroon, West Africa, conducted linguistic analysis; developed and managed an adult literacy program for speakers of the Karang language.
  • Member of the team developing an object-oriented computing environment for linguistic analysis. This environment exists today as LinguaLinks.
  • Designed and programmed numerous utility applications for tagged text conversion and to aid in dialect adaptation and machine translation.
  • Designed and co-authored user manual for The Linguist’s Shoebox, a text processing and database management application (see Publications below).

Education

Furman University, Greenville, SC. –  Bachelor of Arts, Art and Education. (1976-1980)

University of Oklahoma, Norman, OK; University of Texas, Arlington, TX. - Graduate Courses in Linguistics. (1983-1985)

Summer Institute of Linguistics, Yaoundé, Cameroon - Linguistic Field Research. (1988-1990)

Publications

Davis, Dan. Agile Architecture: A Practical Approach for Combining Holistic Design with Process Agility. Presentation submitted for the 2009 IASA ITARC Conference, Atlanta, GA. To be presented February, 2009.

Davis, Dan. Architecture and Software Development: The Power of Simple Sophistication. Cogentes Webcast; presentation to the IASA ITARC Conference, New York, NY. May 2008

Davis, Dan and Ty Yoshimura. A Business Process Management System using .NET: Organizing Simple Patterns to Create Complex Functionality. Hewlett Packard Internal White Paper. May, 2004.

Davis, Dan. Design Path: The Success Path Design Process. White Paper, Extreme Logic, Inc. February, 2003.

Davis, Dan and Michele Welch. Real-World BI: A Report from the Trenches. Enterprise Development magazine. Fawcette Technical Publications. Vol. 1, no. 10, September, 1999. Pages 28-33.

Davis, Dan. Internationalized Apps Travel Light (and Smart). Enterprise Development magazine. Fawcette Technical Publications. Vol. 1, no. 3, February, 1999. Pages 62-65.

Davis, Dan and Michele Welch. Elegant Architecture. Enterprise Development magazine. Fawcette Technical Publications. Vol. 1, no. 2, December, 1998. Pages 48-50.

Davis, Dan and Michele Welch. OLAP: Who’s Got The Right Stuff? Enterprise Development magazine. Fawcette Technical Publications. Vol. 1, no. 1, Fall, 1998. Pages 68-73.

Davis, Daniel W. and John S. Wimbish. The Linguist’s Shoebox: An Integrated Data Management andAnalysis Tool. Version 2.0. Waxhaw, NC: The Summer Institute of Linguistics, 1993.

Davis, Dan. The Use of Pictures in Literacy Materials: An Investigation into the Processing of Visual Information in Preliterate Societies. Notes On Literacy. The Summer Institute of Linguistics. Vol. 17.4, 1991. Pages 39-54.