John's career started out with a stint as an electronics technician in the Air Force during the mid '70s. During this time, he developed a patentable approach for communications link verification. He left the Air Force to pursue the patent as an entrepreneur, and with zero experience (or even education) in business management, limped along until he got bought out (for a pitiful sum) by a vulture capitalist.

John then knocked around for awhile as a computer salesman, then hard disk drive manufacturing technician until it dawned on him that the system was rigged! Without a degree these days, your options are limited. So he signed up and started taking classes. Back in the early '80s, universities just weren't structured for the person who had to work full time at a day job, so it took years to get his first degree.

While he was taking classes, John landed a job with The BDM Corporation as an Assistant Staff Member. After several years, John saw that BDM was shrinking rather than growing, so he left to found Generation Four, a software consulting firm. Generation Four developed three product lines in addition to software consulting: The G4 Shell, a code library for the 4th Dimension development environment; PowerDisk, a subscription newsletter for the same; and DevTrack, a course in relational database application analysis, design and documentation for professional developers.

Several years later, Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) hired him as a contractor. Once he had his bachelor's degree, LANL hired him as a technical staff member and he started climbing the corporate ladder. Over the course of 15 years, he held positions at LANL ranging from software developer to team leader, section leader and finally CIO for the Risk Reduction and Environmental Stewardship Division. During this period, he gained a lot of experience in establishing and managing high-rigor software development lifecycles under nuclear quality assurance requirements, the development of policies and procedures on software risk management and software quality management as well as the capabilities and needs of non-IT managers and executives.

John left LANL at the end of 2004 to pursue his Doctorate in Information Systems from Nova Southeastern University. As President of Digital Publications LLC, John publishes the Shell Method, a software engineering process repository for information systems development and provides software management, process consulting, and workshops to a variety of customers.

During 2005 and early 2006, LANL's Information Management division contracted with John to implement a customized version of Shell Method as a standard software engineering process for information systems development. Since then, John has been working a variety of projects associated with process instantiation as well as mentoring and training information systems project sponsors, managers, systems analysts and developers.

Education:

John is a Certified Computing Professional, and has a Bachelors in Business and a Masters in Computer Information Systems from the University of Phoenix.

John's full resume is available in Acrobat format here.