Over a twenty-year engineering career, Steve has been  involved in the design and construction of embedded real-time software, distributed systems, and information systems for manufacturing, telecommunications, and financial services. As an architect, his practice focuses on information systems and software components that are central to his clients’ product-line architecture or customer-value proposition. Frequently, clients are including software components in their products or expanding their value proposition to include capabilities based on information systems for customer relationship management, supply-chain integration, billing and account services, customer service, field support, and mass customization of products and services.

Broadly, software and systems architecture is about partitioning systems into components and then understanding, analyzing, and allocating requirements to those components. The components, an IT architect’s building blocks, include functions, connectors, and coordination mechanisms. An architect guides the choice of components, ensuring those selected are appropriate for the types of services being implemented and the business results to be achieved. In particular, the architect recommends patterns or combinations of components supporting important types of architectural qualities such as flexibility, performance, capacity, reliability, security, maintainability, availability, and serviceability. Often, the architect’s recommendations must include middleware solutions capable of integrating architecturally incompatible components.

A properly designed architecture can be an important lever in meeting customer and market place commitments. A sound approach to architecture can allow a team to address its greatest technical risks early in the development process. It can also provide the flexibility needed to manage release content, technical risks and time-to-market commitments. Finally, a solid architecture can provide a common platform for a large family of products or services, better meeting a wide range of evolving customer requirements.

Steve has been involved in the design of distributed systems since the early 1980s when he developed a simple application server for an experimental distributed operating system and several design patterns for fault-tolerant software. His contributions to the field of IT architecture include several influential papers on reconstructing, evaluating, and reengineering architectures for legacy systems, on managing product-line architectures, and on defining architectures for shared services and program families. Recent collaborations include work with the Software Engineering Institute on documenting and evaluating Enterprise IT architectures.

Steve’s consulting work centers on aligning the architecture of and information or software system with clients’ business needs and capabilities. When appropriate, he will help clients define their overall product-line architecture or customer-value proposition. In the service of our clients, Steve can apply a number of analytical tools including

Some of the architectures that Steve has designed or evaluated include