Paul Harmon (born 1942) is an American management consultant, author and analyst, known for his work in the field of Expert systems in the 1980s, [1] [2] and more recently on Business process management (BPM). [3] [4]
Harmon got his HS degree from Shortridge High School in 1960, and received a BA in biology from Earlham College in 1965. In 1968-69 he studied Psychology and Education at the Columbia University in the City of New York.
He began his career working for Geary Rummler at Praxis Corp. in New York City. Throughout the seventies he owned his own consulting company and did major process redesign projects with clients like Bank of America, Wells Fargo, Security Pacific, Prudential, and Citibank.
In the Eighties and Nineties Harmon was a senior consultant and head of Cutter Consortium's Distributed Architecture practice. From 1985 to 2000 he wrote Cutter newsletters, including expert systems strategies, CASE strategies, and component development strategies.
Currently Harmon is the Executive Editor of www.BPTrends.com—a monthly webizine that publishes articles and reports on Business Process topics. (BPTrends was founded in 2003 by Celia Wolf and Paul Harmon) He serves as the senior BPM market analyst at BPTrends. He is also the Senior Methodologist of BPTrends Associates a consulting group that offers training and consulting services, based on the BPTrends BPM Methodology. Harmon is also the author of Business Process Change (3rd Ed) a popular business guide and school textbook for those interested in BPM. [5]
Harmon recently rejoined Cutter Consortium as a Senior Consultant. He writes reports on current developments in Cognitive Computing and consults with Cutter Clients on integrating cognitive techniques into their existing business processes.
Paul Harmon published several books and articles. A selection:
The Object Management Group (OMG) is a computer industry standards consortium. OMG Task Forces develop enterprise integration standards for a range of technologies.
The unified modeling language (UML) is a general-purpose visual modeling language that is intended to provide a standard way to visualize the design of a system.
The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to software engineering:
A consultant is a professional who provides advice or services in an area of specialization. Consulting services generally fall under the domain of professional services, as contingent work.
Computer-aided software engineering (CASE) is a domain of software tools used to design and implement applications. CASE tools are similar to and are partly inspired by computer-aided design (CAD) tools used for designing hardware products. CASE tools are intended to help develop high-quality, defect-free, and maintainable software. CASE software was often associated with methods for the development of information systems together with automated tools that could be used in the software development process.
Craig Larman is a Canadian computer scientist, author, and organizational development consultant. With Bas Vodde, he is best known for formulating LeSS, and for several books on product and software development.
Business process modeling (BPM), mainly used in business process management; software development, or systems engineering, is the action of capturing and representing processes of an enterprise, so that the current business processes may be analyzed, applied securely and consistently, improved, and automated. BPM is typically orchestrated by business analysts, leveraging their expertise in modeling practices. Subject matter experts, equipped with specialized knowledge of the processes being modeled, often collaborate within these teams. Alternatively, process models can be directly derived from digital traces within IT systems, such as event logs, utilizing process mining tools.
Edward Nash Yourdon was an American software engineer, computer consultant, author and lecturer, and software engineering methodology pioneer. He was one of the lead developers of the structured analysis techniques of the 1970s and a co-developer of both the Yourdon/Whitehead method for object-oriented analysis/design in the late 1980s and the Coad/Yourdon methodology for object-oriented analysis/design in the 1990s.
A functional software architecture (FSA) is an architectural model that identifies enterprise functions, interactions and corresponding IT needs. These functions can be used as a reference by different domain experts to develop IT-systems as part of a co-operative information-driven enterprise. In this way, both software engineers and enterprise architects can create an information-driven, integrated organizational environment.
Object-oriented analysis and design (OOAD) is a technical approach for analyzing and designing an application, system, or business by applying object-oriented programming, as well as using visual modeling throughout the software development process to guide stakeholder communication and product quality.
Oracle Fusion Middleware consists of several software products from Oracle Corporation. FMW spans multiple services, including Java EE and developer tools, integration services, business intelligence, collaboration, and content management. FMW depends on open standards such as BPEL, SOAP, XML and JMS.
David McGoveran is an American computer scientist and physicist, software industry analyst, and inventor. In computer science, he is recognized as one of the pioneers of relational database theory.
Business Process Modeling Language (BPML) is an XML-based language for business process modeling. It was maintained by the Business Process Management Initiative (BPMI) until June 2005 when BPMI and Object Management Group announced the merger of their respective business process management activities to form the Business Modeling and Integration Domain Task Force. It is deprecated since 2008. BPML was useful to OMG in order to enrich UML with process notation.
Scott W. Ambler is a Canadian software engineer, consultant and author. He is an author of books about the Disciplined Agile Delivery toolkit, the Unified process, Agile software development, the Unified Modeling Language, and Capability Maturity Model (CMM) development.
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