Technology Change Management

As a community, we have learned that software engineering need not an
unpredictable consumer of resources on an unpredictable schedule
producing products with unpredictable quality.  Process has been
demonstrated to be an effective tool for capturing and communicating
the essence of lessons from the past, dramatically improving cost,
schedule, and quality predictability without eliminating creativity.
These very favorable results, however, are not the end of the story
for those of us in highly competitive domains.  Technology continues
to develop at an ever increasing rate and yet few organizations today
are able to predict the cost, schedule, or benefits from efforts to
adopt new technologies.  This talk provides a high level survey of
available literature on previous efforts in this area as well as nine
years of personal field experience.

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Nano BIO

Dr. Lynn Robert Carter is a senior member of the technical staff at
the Software Engineering Institute (SEI) and has been with the SEI
for eleven years.  His focus is middle to executive management and
assisting them benefit from new technologies in the context of
organizational overload. For the previous seventeen years, Carter
held a range of positions in commercial firms from President and CEO
to those of development engineer, researcher, and Principal Engineer.


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Longer BIO

Bio:  Dr. Lynn Robert Carter
Senior Member of the Technical Staff
Software Engineering Institute
Carnegie Mellon University

Lynn Robert Carter is a senior member of the technical staff at the
Software Engineering Institute (SEI) and has been with the SEI for
eleven years.  The aim of his work is the study of the issues
involved in the successful and rapid adoption of new software
technologies, including process improvement.  The result has been a
collection of transition models, composition rules, and several
guiding principles, which suggest that it is possible to engineer the
adoption of a new tool, method, or process.  His current focus is
middle to executive management and how to properly educate and assist
them benefit from new technology adoption in the context of
organizational overload.  Current activities primarily consist of
field refinement, documentation, and validation of these notions.

Before joining the SEI, Carter was the Director of Systems
Engineering at EdgCore Technology, Inc., President and CEO of Network
Solutions, Inc. (NSi, a leveraged buy-out communications test
equipment manufacturing company originally owned by GenRad, Inc.), a
product line manager for GenRad, a researcher for Motorola, Inc., and
a development engineer, researcher, and Principal Engineer (one of
three out of a software engineering community of 700) at Tektronix,
Inc.

For seventeen years, Carter taught, part-time, at a number of
colleges and universities, including: Arizona State University,
University of Colorado, Portland State University, University of
Portland, and Pacific University.  His  duties included teach
graduate and undergraduate class in programming languages, compiler
construction, operating systems, served on several PhD committees,
lead a Masters thesis committee, and served on many administrative
committees.

Carter is a member and former officer of I.F.I.P. Working Group (2.4)
on System Implementation Languages.  He is the author of An Analysis
of Pascal Programs published by UMI Research Press and "Code
Generation for a Single Address Machine", published by Acta
Informatica.  He has co-authored, with W. M. Waite, a senior level
undergraduate text, An Introduction to Compiler Construction,
published by Harper Collins, and several papers published by Software
-- Practice and Experience.  Carter received his bachelor's and
master's degree in mathematics from Portland State University and his
doctorate in computer science from the University of Colorado at
Boulder.

The SEI, located in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, is a federally funded
research and development center operated by Carnegie Mellon
University under contract to the U.S. Department of Defense.  The
objective of the SEI is to provide leadership in software engineering
and in the transition of new software engineering technology into
practice.