About
Love helping exceptional software engineering departments to release reliable high quality enterprise software. Want to mentor and inspire architects and developers to achieve their best on the leading edge of technical possibilities. Very experienced in managing teams to develop enterprise software including roles as programmer, development director, chief architect, vice president, and evangelist. Experience includes the areas of software architecture, agile, coding, research and thought leadership.
Received certification in Enterprise Architecture (TOGAF) at the foundation level (Spring 2022)
My blog on agile software development: https://agiletribe.wordpress.com/
I play role as technical evangelist. I have been involved in defining the field of Adaptive Case Management. This is information technology support for knowledge workers who figure out what to do while they do it! I have written two books on this topic: "Mastering the Unpredictable" and "When Thinking Matters in the Workplace" which is designed to help managers and leaders understand how to use case management technology to their benefit.
My blog supporting knowledge workers: https://social-biz.org/
In 2009 I started the Cloud BPM offering from Fujitsu, an early Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) BPM platform, based on the earlier J2EE three tier architecture SOA BPM offering developed between 2002 and 2009.
Please see a more complete profile at: http://social-biz.org/about/
Helpful Links for Keith Swenson
A set of links to external places with detailed information about me on those external services.
Social-Biz: Technical Horizons Blog
Empowering knowledge workers to be more efficient, adaptive, and effective. This blog covers emerging topics in the BPM, case management, and other technologies in the personal and group productivity spaces.
Agile Tribe: Development Tips Blog
https://agiletribe.wordpress.com/
This blog contains all the software development guidelines that I have used in leading software development teams in the past. Everytime we run into a problem that could be prevented, I write up the guideline to avoid hitting in the future. Over time this has become a very valuable resource for development teams.
Keith Swenson LinkedIn Profile
Twitter Profile @swensonkeith
GitHub Profile AgilePro
Keith Swenson Author's Page at Amazon
https://www.amazon.com/Keith-D-Swenson/e/B003DDR4KU
One of the easiest ways to track and to access the books that I have participated in is on the Amazon.com author's page. Here is a (partial) listing of the books along with links to the pages for the books themselves which have reviews of the books, etc.
Keith Swenson Résumé
http://kswenson.com/HomePageFiles/KeithSwenson_Detail.pdf
PDFThis résumé or CV gives a brief overview of my career in two pages.
Letter of Recommendation from Jeff Hudson
http://kswenson.com/HomePageFiles/Ref_JeffHudson.pdf
PDFJeff Hudson was the CEO of MS2, the last place I worked before returning to Fujitsu.
Letter of Recommendation from Nathaniel Palmer
http://kswenson.com/HomePageFiles/Ref_NPalmer.pdf
PDFNathaniel Palmer is a leading analyst in the BPM and Case Management field who I have worked with for 15 years within the Workflow Management Coalition.
Letter of Recommendation from Omur Tasar
http://kswenson.com/HomePageFiles/Ref_OmurTasar.pdf
PDFOmur Tasar was Vice President of Engineering at MS2.
Experience
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Title Technology Evangelist, VP of R&D
Dates Employed Jun 2008 – Present
Employment Duration 14 years
Location Sunnyvale, California
- 2022: Advised TimkenSteel on formation of their Enterprise Architecture capability.
- 2021: Restructured Circle Weaver application to use No-SQL database Mongo.
- 2020: Released three open source initiatives to use Gradle and Maven dependency libraries: SSOSI (an identity server), PostHoc (an email testing platform) and Purple (a library of utility functions).
- 2019: supervised development of React Native mobile app with Firebase backend for Muva a consumer friendly moving and shipping aggregator. ( http://www.themuva.com/ )
- 2019: Restructured Circle Weaver application as microservices to make use of Docker / CRI-O containers and Kubernetes orchestration as well adopting a CI/CD release model.
- 2017: Started DMN-TCK working group to make a standard test suite for Decision Modeling Notation to achieve better vendor compliance and interoperability (XML, Java, JavaScript)
- 2016-2019: Create and deploy new Digital Transformation Platform product to Canadian Ministry based on Interstage BPM using Angular, Elastic Search, Drools, Kibana, & JSON/Rest API.On-site consulting help to set up a Digital Transform Center of Excellence.
- 2015: Launched Circle Weaver ( http://circleweaver.com/ ) as cloud based collaboration system for self-managed teams aimed at co-ops and community groups. Java, JSON, Angular.
- 2014-2019: provisioned BPM product in Fujitsu Cloud for New Jersey based legal firm and led server administration team for all DevOps with 7/24 response (50% America, 50% India)
- 2013: Recognized as top influencer in the field of Case Management after 2010 book “Mastering the Unpredictable” defined the term “Adaptive Case Management”.
- 2012: developed and launched Xwand Cloud - a cloud based financial information processing tool supporting XBRL the dominant financial reporting format.
- 2011: Founded and led an International Workshop on Case Management, now 7th incarnation.
- 2009: created and launched Cloud BPM - a fully multi-tenant web-based PaaS environment for design and then execution of business processes. Java, J2EE, JavaScript, XML
- 2008: brought a new Automated Process Discovery to market. Cooperated in development of the International Process Mining Manifesto.
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Title VP of Engineering
Dates Employed Jun 2002 – Jun 2008
Employment Duration 6 years
Location Sunnyvale, California
Technical leadership of i-Flow (later Interstage BPM) based on TeamWARE Flow, managed the development, QA, and support teams.
- 2005: released a re-architected Java/J2EE high-availability version of Interstage BPM to realize a 20x increase in performance on a symmetric cluster architecture. This process engine became the standard at several large banks and insurance companies. Products like Infor, Baan, Interwoven, OpenPages, and many others embedded the engine inside them to provide visual, programmable processes for end users.
- 2002-2008: Built a mature software development team that took pride in making every release on time. Retained entire team through 13 different on-time releases.Achieved 50% / year revenue growth over that period.
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Director of Engineering
Company Name MS2
Dates Employed Aug 1998 – Apr 2002
Employment Duration 3 yrs 9 mos
Location Mountain View, California
MS2 made a product called "Accelerate" which was a system for helping to coordinate work of professional, distributed to all their laptop computers, and synchronized centrally. It was brilliantly conceived and executed, but unfortunately launched just as the dot.com boom was imploding.
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Collaboration Software Architect
Netscape
Location Mountain View, California
The first year developed "Visual JavaScript" an integrated development environment for server-side and browser-side JavaScript.
The second year developed a workflow process engine in server-side JavaScript that was acquired by Sun Microsystems when AOL bought Netscape. -
Director of Engineering
Fujitsu Open Systems Solutions
Location San Jose, California
I was hired in 1991 to start a team for "groupware". We ended up developing one of the very first workflow engines that had a graphical editor for visually depicting the process. It was certainly the first process engine that allowed any change to any process at any time ... even while running. Launched as a product in 1994 called "TeamWARE Flow" it had significant sales in Europe
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Project Manager
Ashton Tate
Location San Jose, California
Framework was a very successful product that allowed office workers to combine spreadsheets, databases, word process, and graphics, into a single compound document. It has an early windowing system (called frames) before Microsoft had come out with Windows. For the three years I played the role of Project Manager of the development team based in San Jose.
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Chief Architect
Company Name Software Products International
Software Product International was an early PC startup which produced several notable products: Open Access, Logiquest, Logicalc, and Access 4. These were early PC DOS office productivity suites. Founded in San Diego, my 7 year tenure here included two years in Munich Germany, the European headquarters.
Education
Volunteer Experience
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President
Company Name Santa Teresa Music and Arts Association
Dates volunteered Apr 2006 – Mar 2011
Volunteer duration 5 yrs
Cause Education
This is the booster organization that supports the high school music program.
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Chairman
Company Name Workflow Management Coalition
Dates volunteered 1994 – Present
Volunteer duration 25 yrs
Cause Science and Technology
I have been associated with WfMC since 1994 playing these roles:
• standards project team leader
• fellow
• technical committee chairman
• chairman
In all of these positions I work to increase the technical standards that drive the business process management field. My company does support this activity and sometimes pays for my travel to attend, so it is not entirely volunteer, however I don't get paid for the work here.
Interests
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Organizer
Company Name South Bay Philosophy & Critical Thinking
Dates volunteered 2016 – Present
Volunteer duration 3 yrs
This is a monthly MeetUp group that I run to explore the problems with critical thinking, and to discuss weighty topics in order to gain an appreciation of how we can encourage the public discussion of more weighty topics.