Author, Consultant, Guru, Novelist

Refreshments: 4 p.m. - 5 p.m.

As we begin a new decade and a new millennium, business leaders, industry pundits, academics, and technology experts are asking themselves "What will be the key issues, problems and opportunities in the new millennium?" The IT industry will surely be caught up in the process of strategic planning, introspection, re-evaluation of the past, re-prioritizing of current activities, and forecasting of what’s likely to be important over the next decade. In some cases, they’ll be looking for incremental improvements in familiar areas such as software quality and programming productivity. In other cases, they’ll be looking for "quantum leap" improvements, or they’ll be looking for ways to implement concepts like e-business to make their business substantially more competitive.

But perhaps the most exciting possibility of this kind of strategic planning is looking for "new dimensions" — new opportunities that simply didn’t exist before various "enabling" technologies became cheap enough, robust enough and pervasive enough that we could take advantage of them. During this talk, Ed Yourdon, will bring this kind of important perspective to light.

EDWARD YOURDON is chairman and co-founder of the Cutter Consortium, as well as a software management consultant, and author/coauthor of more than 200 articles and two dozen books, including The Rise and Resurrection of the American Programmer, Decline and Fall of the American Programmer, and Time Bomb 2000. Ed was named in Crosstalk: The Journal of Defense Software Engineering as one of the ten most influential men and women in the software field.

Ed was the lead developer of the structured analysis/design methods and co-developer of the Yourdon/Whitehead method of object-oriented analysis/design and the popular Coad/Yourdon OO methodology. Ed has worked in the computer industry for 35 years, beginning when Digital Equipment Corporation and General Electric. Ed founded his own consulting firm, YOURDON Inc., in 1974 to provide educational, publishing, and consulting services in state-of-the-art software engineering technology. Over the next 12 years, the company grew to over 150 people; he oversaw an operation that trained over 250,000 people around the world. YOURDON Inc. was eventually sold in 1986 and after several mergers and acquisitions eventually became part of IBM. The publishing division, YOURDON Press (now part of Prentice Hall), has produced over 150 technical computer books on a wide range of software engineering topics. In addition to serving on Boards of Mastech and Omni-Vista and on the Defense Department's Airlie Council, an advisory group that focuses on finding "best practice" guidelines and techniques for large, complex projects. He is also the editor of the Cutter IT Journal.

Ed Yourdon received a B.S. in Applied Mathematics from MIT. He has been appointed an Honorary Professor of Information Technology at Universidad CAECE in Buenos Aires, Argentina, and has lectured at MIT, Harvard, UCLA, Berkeley, Iona College, New Mexico Highlands University, and Georgia Tech.