I began this as a dissertation journal when I was a doctoral candidate in the Information Technology program at George Mason University. Now that I have completed that endeavor, I have evolved it to sue as a forum to record my musings on a variety of subjects, mostly related to data integration and enterprise architecture.

Some personal notes:

• Graduated from the US Naval Academy in 1989 with a BS in General Engineering
• Served on active duty with the US Marine Corps for 11 years as a CH-53E pilot.  I did tours as a Forward Air Controller with an infantry battalion (3rd Battalion, 8th Marines), an instructor pilot, and a Staff Platoon Commander at The Basic School, among other assignments. I made several contingency deployments to war zones
• Graduated from Boston University with an MS in Computer Information Systems through BU’s program at Camp Lejeune
• Married to my high school sweetheart Michele, who somehow manages to put up with me and my educational pursuits. We have two wonderful daughters
• Currently employed as an enterprise architect for a defense contractor, but I am something of a jack-of-all-trades, having been a data architect, test team lead, program manager, and enterprise data management subject matter expert
• I was never a Boy Scout, but I was a Girl Scout for over 10 years
• I earned my Ph.D. from George Mason University (finally!)

My dissertation research was on the automated composition of executable workflows from available services. I expanded the concept of “service” beyond web services and REST services to include services of all types, both electronic and physical services (e.g., plumbers, shipping services, doctors, etc.). I also developed ways to select individual services that may fulfill an individual task in a workflow model such as BPMN, with the ultimate goal of selecting services for each task and assembling a collection of services that can be chained together to meet the goals of the original business process model. All of this information was fed into a constraint programming model that selected the optimal service composition based on the Quality of Service metrics of the individual services and the overall workflow.

The title of this blog comes from a quote by Albert Einstein: “If we knew what it was we were doing, it would not be called research, would it?” I take heart in that quote every time I find myself wondering, “Now what do I do?”