Jim Watson Senior Consultant

Jim Watson is a Senior Consultant with Cutter Consortium's Business & Enterprise Architecture and Agile Product & Project Management practices. He is also the founder and Enterprise Architect for Panoscopix Software, Inc. Dr. Watson has more than 20 years' technical leadership experience in architecting, designing, and developing software products/applications as well as in establishing and improving software development processes. He describes himself as a "hands-on" architect, maintaining his programming, design, and application architecture skills through various product/application development efforts and client engagements. This background helps "connect the dots" between the processes, technology decisions, design pressures, and tradeoffs between development and EA teams. Such an agile EA makes for a more effective IT organization from strategy to execution.

Dr. Watson's career began in the 1990s at The Analytic Sciences Corporation (TASC), where he was Lead Architect on the US Army's first distributed modeling and simulation environment. With an interest in the emerging technologies of CORBA, Java/J2EE, and mix-mode databases (OODBMS, ORDBMS) as well as emerging modeling and development processes, he founded Aurora Technologies, a boutique consultancy for training, custom application development, and integration projects, which was later acquired by IONA Technologies, and currently under Progress Software. Dr. Watson served as Principal Consultant of Aurora working with Global 2000 clients in manufacturing, telecom, finance, and government. Engagements included training in application design (aka design patterns), architecture patterns for communications and services, interface design (aka service specification), and development processes (aka agile methods and refactoring).

In 1999, Dr. Watson led a major refactoring project for IONA's flagship product Orbix and served as IONA's first Technical Director, providing overall architectural direction for its Integration Product Suite, and was later promoted to VP Engineering, where he established platform and product family teams and led the adoption of agile methods (Scrum). In 2004, he returned to independent consultancy as the founder of Panoscopix, working with clients on EA and application/systems development. Clients include civil and defense governmental agencies; commercial companies in banking, consumer electronics, and manufacturing; and ISVs developing new products or refactoring existing ones. Engagement services include independent architecture and design review; training for architecture, design, and development; consultancy in EA, application architecture/design, development processes, technology evaluation, and enterprise innovation; and contract application/systems design and implementation.

Dr. Watson is a frequent technical speaker at various trade conferences. He has produced and delivered training for both technical and management audiences, ranging from integration to patterns to product technologies. Dr. Watson holds a PhD in electrical engineering from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, where he won the Ricketts Prize for Outstanding Research for his work on system complexity modeling, analysis, and performance estimation. He can be reached at jwatson@cutter.com.

Up Close with Jim Watson

Case Study: Create Enterprise Architecture Vision and Road Map for a student loan guarantee organization

The IT infrastructure for a student loan corporation had grown into a hodge-podge of different platforms, systems, and integration. In addition to the high cost of maintenance and unnecessary complexity, the corporation was not able to keep pace with the changes in the industry. Working with the Executive Committee and business and IT leaders, Cutter developed a business-driven Enterprise Architecture, including high-level business, information, application, and technology architectures and developed a roadmap for transitioning the technology, architecture, and organization from the current situation to the target future state. The corporation is currently in the first phases of implementation of the roadmap. more case studies...