Tom Love
Member of the Board of Visitors

Summary

Tom Love is a hands-on leader with on-site experience leading rapid application  development projects to achieve something that neither the customer nor the  development team thought was possible at the outset. He has led eight  successful 100 day projects at ShouldersCorp and has had indirect responsibility  for 11 others. His current mega-project involves guidance and planning  support for the reengineering of VistA, the electronic medical records system in use at all Veterans Health Administration Medical Centers.

Professional Experience

Tom Love got his start in the software business at General Electric Company  during the days of structured programming, software complexity metrics and  early Unix systems. His first assignment at GE was to participate in  the user interface design for a rapid search machine being evaluated by various  intelligence agencies. He also created GE’s Software Psychology  research group funded by the Office of Naval Research, RADC, and the Army Research  Institute. He even acquired the first UNIX license in General Electric Company in 1978.

Love expanded his knowledge of global, real time systems at ITT Corporation  where he directed all worldwide software research projects. In the early  1980s, his group built the first object-oriented extension to C language, groupware  to support programming teams, and interactive development environments for  massively distributed telecom systems.

Based upon their work at ITT and later Schlumberger, Love and Brad Cox founded  the first object oriented products company – Stepstone. There they  promoted object technology, originated the Software-IC concept and marketed  the first standalone set of reusable classes, IC-pak 201. Among other  accomplishments, they convinced Steve Jobs to use Objective-C as a basis for  the NeXT Computer and later Apple’s OS X.  Tom was also instrumental  in creating ACM’s OOPSLA Conference.

After spending five years consulting with either huge companies or startups,  Love joined IBM Consulting and founded the Object Technology Group – a  high visibility application development organization that did major projects  for companies such as Ralston, USAA, AT&T, American Express and Chubb Insurance. Based  upon this success, he was attracted to Morgan Stanley to lead a consolidation  of IT resources into a single corporate group.  There he learned how  to develop applications in 24 hours and do round the clock development (London,  New York, and Tokyo).   He was even fortunate enough to deliver  a redesigned corporate risk management system two days before the Barings disaster.

In 1997 Love teamed up with Dr. John Wooten to do their first 100 day development  project for Infinity Financial (later acquired by SunGard) and found ShouldersCorp  one year later.  The company is a professional services firm with customers  such as Lockheed Martin, ADP, Sungard, ABB, CSC, World Travel Partners, PortalVision,  Sun Chemical, Intertech, Hologix, Saqqara, NetBlender and PriceWaterhouseCoopers. Federal  clients include departments of Veterans Affairs, Defense/CITPO, Agriculture,  Interior, Homeland Security, and Energy.

ShouldersCorp now specializes in Agile Legacy Reengineering – helping  organizations plan and manage the complete replacement of enterprise systems. The  largest completed project involved the replacement of 11 million lines of code  in three years – on time, spec and budget! 

Education

PhD in Cognitive Science from the University of Washington

Publications

Love's dissertation was a study of the characteristics of successful computer  programmers in the mid-1970’s. Many project experiences are recorded  in his 1993 book, Object Lessons, published by Cambridge University Press.  Two other books are underway:

• Software Pilots: lessons for the software industry from 100 years   of aviation
• Agile Legacy Reengineering: replacing enterprise systems without   substantial increases in IT expenditures