Thought Leader Bios
Ivar Jacobson
Dr. Ivar Jacobson is a father of components and component architecture, use cases, aspect-oriented software development, modern business engineering, the Unified Modeling Language and the Rational Unified Process.
He is the principal author of six influential and best-selling books. He is a keynote speaker at several large conferences around the world.
Kurt Bittner
Kurt is chief technology officer for Ivar Jacobson International, Americas and has worked in the software industry for over 25 years in a variety of roles including developer, team leader, architect, project manager, and business leader. He has led agile projects, run a large division of a software development company, survived and thrived in several start-ups, run an acquisition, and worked with clients in a variety of industries including aerospace, finance, energy, and electronics. He was a key contributor to the early development of the Rational Unified Process as well as, more recently, IBM's Jazz project. His experience includes significant work in Banking and Finance, relational database system design and architecting, and consulting and mentoring a wide variety of clients on software development improvement strategies and approaches.
He is the co-author of "Use Case Modeling" and "Managing Iterative Software Development Projects".
Ian Spence
Ian is chief scientist at Ivar Jacobson International where he specializes in the agile application of the Unified Process. He is a certified RUP practitioner, ScrumMaster and an experienced coach having worked with 100’s of projects to introduce iterative and agile techniques.
Ian has over 20 years experience in the software industry, covering the complete development lifecycle, including requirements capture, architecture, analysis, design, implementation and project management. His specialist subjects are iterative project management, agile team working and requirements management with use cases.
In his role as Chief Scientist Ian contributes to the technical direction of Ivar Jacobson International (IJI) and works with the IJI Technology Office to define the next generation of smart, active, software development practices. He is the project lead and process architect for the development of the Essential Unified Process and the practices that it contains.
When he is not working on researching, capturing and defining practices he spends his time assisting companies in the creation and execution of change programs to improve their software development capability.
He is the co-author of the Addison Wesley books "Use Case Modeling" and "Managing Iterative Software Development Projects".
Pan-Wei Ng
Dr. Pan-Wei Ng, plays multiple roles in Ivar Jacobson International. As a member of the Technology Office, Pan-Wei defines best practices in architecture, use cases, iterative development, business modeling, active software, and aspects. He develops materials for some of these best practices and conducts research in other best practice areas. Pan-Wei also actively works on customer accounts to enable companies and project teams to adopt these best practices quickly and safely. Pan-Wei works alongside practitioners and ensures that the best practices developed are both relevant and practical.
Robert Maksimchuk
Bob is Vice President of Professional Services, Americas East and brings an abundance of systems engineering and integration, modeling, and object-oriented analysis and design expertise to this mission.
Bob has worked in systems and software development in a wide variety of industries such as finance, telecommunication, aerospace, industrial process control and ISV. His activities have reached from tactical to strategic, holding a variety of roles ranging from Software and Hardware Engineer, System Integrator, System Architect, Project Manager, Market Manager, and Director of Research among others. The projects he has worked on spanned from brokerage systems, to distributed data dissemination, to real-time command and control sytems. He specializes in systems modeling and object-oriented analysis and design. Bob is also a Certified ScrumMaster.
As well as being an active practitioner, Bob has co-authored the books Object-Oriented Analysis and Design with Applications (Third Edition), UML for Mere Mortals, UML for Database Design, and also has written various articles.
Dave West
David is managing director for North America and has worked in the software development industry for over 15 years holding a variety of posts ranging from developer, team leader and architect. He managed the development of the Rational Unified Process for two years releasing four new versions of the product which including the re-architecting to conform to SPEMM, inclusion of CMMI and Agile content and a revised business modeling discipline.
Prior to that role David worked, in the UK as a consultant in many organizations introducing process and tools. Customers included, Barclays, Merrill Lynch, American Express and the Royal Bank of Scotland. After running the RUP team David took over responsibility of the solutions group at IBM Rational developing content, process and tool solutions in the area of enterprise architecture, CMMI, compliance, and geographically distributed development and outsourcing. This work took David into the area of industry solutions with his final role at IBM Rational as the executive responsible for the Financial Services Sector where he worked with large Finance customers such as Citicorp, ABN Amro, Fortis, Rabo Bank, LTSB and Credit Suisse.
David is co-author of “Head First Object Oriented Analysis and Design”.
Eric Naiburg
Eric is vice president of sales and marketing and has worked in the software development industry for over 15 years with several roles ranging from sales and marketing to product management. Prior to joining Ivar Jacobson International, he was worldwide director of product marketing for Cast Software where he was responsible for all aspects of product marketing.
Prior to joining Cast, he was program director for business, industry and technical solutions in IBM Rational Software. He has held other roles including group market manager of desktop product responsible for Rational’s desktop products including Requirements, Analysis, Design, Construction and Software Quality solutions. Eric also held the role of manager of product management, focusing on the IBM Rational Rose and IBM Rational XDE product lines. Eric also spent several years with Logic Works Inc., which is now a part of CA where he held various roles including product manager, sales manager and system engineer for the market leading data modeling tools ERwin and ModelMart.
Eric has co-authored “UML for Mere Mortals” and “UML for Database Design”.