Tom dot Evans at
Abstractions dot com

Tom's first career was working as a software engineer throughout the 1980's with medical device companies.  FDA regulated, life critical system development was an excellent way to build a strong systems and customer perspective.  Each project, for example, the safety rules for systems that program pacemakers, has architecture trade-offs for hardware, software, and the user interface. Tom also routinely contributed to software process development.  In 1991 Tom followed object technology into the business world.

First with Object Technology International (now IBM), and then Fourth Generation Inc., Tom developed his interest in Smalltalk and object design into a comprehensive practice of teaching, mentoring, and development. Projects included driving a three day business process into a 15 minute call session with business authored product specifications (rules and data) guiding accurate order customization for 2000+ products.

After incorporating Abstractions inc., Tom engaged in Enterprise Architecture services for a team evolving a telecommunicaitons Operations Support Systems (OSS) in order to roll out DSL service. Growing to 500,000 customers and daily order volumns of 10,000 taught a sense of scale. Architecture issues go hand-in-hand with millions of customers, 50,000 employees, 24X7 operations, a spectrum of products, and regulated business units.  Generations of IT systems, including mainframes, Web Services on J2EE & .Net, and EAI tools such as TIBCO, are involved in product or operations changes. The interplay of competing needs from stakeholders (leadership, product, engineering, planning, operations, and regulatory) and the variety of IT teams and systems is a technical and social challenge.

Recently, Tom as been involved in Business Architecture, Business Infrastructures, and applying adaptive design patterns at an enterprise scale for product flexibility in the financial industries.  They evaluate thousands of transactions against product specifications that are subject to regular updates, negotiations, and exceptions.  A facility for product specification with externalized business rules is a good thing.  Business must become responsible for routine changes, as they can no longer wait for IT releases to address a daily need for change.

Tom has helped business stakeholders express their long term needs.  Together, they articulate a conceptual vision, and structure that vision as comprehensive models.  These UML models, following OMG's Model Driven Architecture (MDA), enable the business to articulate a concrete vision of their long term goals, vs say, only enumerating the specifications for a single iteration of a software project. 

In 1991, Tom founded theObject Technology User Group, currently meeting at the University of St. Thomas, where he later completed his Masters in Software Engineering.