Richard Hopkins

Richard Hopkins is an Executive IT Architect for IBM's services business. Over the past eleven years he has delivered a wide variety of systems, including a biometric-based national identity card system, a credit card account services system, and a customer management system for a national government. Tens of thousands of users and millions of customers use his systems every day.

 

In recent years he has grown frustrated with the ability of standard methods and tools to deal with the accumulated business and IT complexity he wrestles with every day. Rather than compromise with the standard "Greenfield" approaches, which ignore this complexity and pretend the world is one of "fluffy clouds," Richard opted instead for an engineering-based "Brownfield" approach that embraced the complexity. The patented and ground-breaking innovations he and his team made as a result are now being used worldwide on a variety of complex projects. These innovations are published for the first time in Eating the IT Elephant.

 

Richard is a Fellow of the Institution of Engineering and Technology (FIET). He also chaired the technical definition of the BioAPI standard from 1998-2000. BioAPI is the de-facto programming standard of the biometrics industry.

 

Kevin Jenkins is an Executive IT Architect for IBM's services business. Over the past seventeen years he has delivered numerous systems as diverse as air traffic control systems to e-commerce engagements. This variety of scale of systems, both in size and duration, allowed him to get a real-life view of the advantages and disadvantages of large- and small-scale developments and methods.

 

When he came together with Richard on an engagement to deliver a customer management system for a government agency, he had a chance to bring his experience with these different development methods to improve the success rate of this large project. In order to meet timescales, he utilized a model-driven solution to complete a large part of the delivered system, which offered a fast means to deliver the solution. This started Kevin thinking of extending this to the generation of the complete solution--and the idea of "Brownfield" was born. Over the following years he collaborated with Richard in developing the Brownfield.