Jamie Dinkelacker, Ph.D. Los Altos, California Silicon Valley USA email: jamie {AT} sunarcher {DOT} org Blog . Resume . Selected Publications . Tunes . Sunarcher

Jamie Dinkelacker serves as an Engineering Manager with Google Maps in Mountain View, California. He was previously a manager with Google's Launch Team, and earlier with Google's Enterprise Group. To learn more, go here: http://maps.google.com/. It's an amazing job at an amazing company with incredibly intelligent and creative colleagues. Google is the stuff of which dreams are made. I'm feeling lucky!

His interests, activities, and research focus on the essence of how organizations can effectively produce software of value for users, and thus involves management, leadership, software engineering, innovation, technology trends, communities, collaboration and organizational performance. These interests encompass the realms of lean and agile software development, open source communities, software services, and reflect the intricate balance between product management and project management when constrained by real market economics. Jamie's occassional blog is located here.

Background: Jamie has worked in Silicon Valley for nearly two decades. He has a broad base of experience across industry and academia, and deep expertise in software development, technical management, fostering innovation, and teaching. Prior to Google, throughout 2005 and 2006, Jamie was a Consulting Professor of Software Engineering Management at Carnegie Mellon University's West Coast Campus. He was a Director of Carnegie Mellon's Center for Open Source Investigation and Research Director of CMU's Center for Engineered Innovation.

From 2000 through 2004 Jamie managed the Global Collaboration Environments Group at Hewlett-Packard Laboratories in Palo Alto, California, where he oversaw the Lab's worldwide external and internal web sites and services, especially using open source software wherever possible for instant messaging (e.g., Jabber), streaming media services, and various collaboration tools such as WikiWebs, Forums, Bloggers, Sharepoint, Content Management Systems, and others. His earlier work at HP Labs focused on managing transfer of software technology. These implementations covered the gamut of open source and proprietary systems, scaled from the desktop to the enterprise.

Jamie has had the wild ride of working as a senior manager at Netscape for 5 years and managing development in Apple's Advanced Technology Group in the User Experience Laboratory prior to that. He has managed organizations, departments, teams, products, and projects. His work has covered the spectrum from senior scientist to senior product management, from software development manager to software training, from performance support systems to ecommerce installations. He had tours of duty at both AOL (America Online) and iPlanet (the Netscape/Sun venture) as well.

Dr. Dinkelacker taught at Michigan State for 10 years, and also founded and ran two start-up companies focused on advanced analytic software for the media industries, especially television news operations. He has a background in radio (former president of WRPI-FM) and live musical performance (click here for some recent tunes), and has published in both the academic and trade press . He holds two active patents on web technologies, and is often an invited speaker regarding lean and agile software methods, collaboration, Internet technologies, and social aspects of renewable energy. He is on the board of advisors of the Foresight Institute and served as an advisor to the Nanobusiness Alliance until Dec 04. He also held an appointment as a Research Fellow at California State University, Monterey Bay in the School of Information Technology and Communication Design for 2004-2005. He was formerly Vice-Chair of the Environmental Committee of the Los Altos, California City Council.

Student of Organizations: Since college, Jamie's been intrigued by thinking of organizations as organic entities in their own right as complex adaptive systems, many aspects of which are evident with the Internet and the web-enabled world that is emerging. The rising tide of open source software and its myriad implications for business, entrepreneurship, and social activities heralds fresh economic opportunities and research vistas for software development and delivery, the role of game theory in product/service creation, the evolving practices of lean/agile software development, and poses far-reaching challenges for leadership as the ways of the new undermine the ways of the obsolete. For example, design patterns for software development show great promise for enhancing developer communication, thus fostering improved organizational performance. Lean development, in particular, recognizes that software is best developed with a fresh mindset of delivering value, removing muda, and continuous learning -- hence, moving beyond the sordid history of failed attempts of applying the mass production mindset to software development.

Sunarcher: For years Jamie had a private consultancy, The Sunarcher Organization, that advised senior executives about effective approaches for sustainable software development. Sunarcher also worked software development teams, and their managers, to become significantly more productive by learning the essentials of lean development. Jamie is an expert technical meeting facilitator and has led numerous technical discussions and strategy offsites for Sunarcher clients.

Energy Enthusiast: As a personal hobby, the field of renewable energy, especially the intriguing notions of an anticipated hydrogen society and hydrogen economy, fuel cells, and distributed generation, are long-standing personal interests since having conducted various market research projects for the solar industries during the 1980s. Jamie is the webmaster of the Suntriz website, an educational site about residential photovoltaics targted for Silicon Valley property owners, and the H2Nexus educational website about the anticipated Hydrogen Society. He hosts recurring discussion salons at his home in Los Altos.

Education: Jamie received his B.S. in Management Science from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) in Troy N.Y. with a specialization in operations research and minor in economics, his M.S. in communications research also from RPI with an emphasis on statistical modeling, and his Ph.D. in communications research from Michigan State University with studies in system science, organizations, and media.

Personal: Dr. Dinkelacker is an avid musician, artist, and cyclist -- and loves playing ball and frisbee with his whippets. He lives with his wife in Los Altos, California. Thank you for reading.