Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States
The ideal writer, modeler, and consultant for businesses seeking to leverage their data and people to full advantage. Over 90% of clients offer repeat contracts or FTE status. I have data-modeled thousands of entities for dozens of clients. These models undergird business initiatives and technology deliverables, including commercial software products, custom applications; strategy roadmaps; data architectures; mission-critical transactional systems; programs in data quality, data governance, and master data management; business process initiatives; and data warehouses and other analytics efforts. As an industry influencer, my contributions reach far. While an industry analyst at Gartner and elsewhere, I have advised companies in dozens of industries on data strategy and best practices in information management, and have scrutinized and critiqued roadmaps, data architectures, and data governance programs. I co-wrote the textbook on the Carlis-Maguire technique for gathering data requirements from users and business stakeholders. I have created best practices in agile data modeling and an industry-neutral taxonomy of master-data-management problems and solutions. I lead with my sleeves rolled up. For one client I was the sole external consultant on a process reengineering initiative. I served on the three-person team coordinating the activities of over 100 contributors AND I was the only person on each of the individual process-design teams, delivering process models, traning strategies, SOPs, etc I deliver, publishing over 1,000,000 words (financially compensated, not just blogging) of textbooks, book-length essays, documentation, software specifications, data-strategy documents, standard operating procedures, testing plans, RFPs for custom software, marketing collateral, and voice-over scripts for promotional videos. I have shipped dozens of products. I communicate with anyone, individual contributors to C-level executives.
I have always been and will always be a writer. I have published dozens of technical manuals about DBMS software, query-design tools, spreadsheets, data modeling tools, database-design tools, metadata repositories, transaction monitors, non-relational database tools, Big-Data analytics tools, and 3D-visualization tools. Covered audiences from beginners to graduate-degreed engineering experts. My publicly available books have received favorable notices from a wide variety of publications including The Boston Sunday Globe, The Data Access Newsletter, and National Public Radio. .
Continued the work begun at Burton Group and Gartner. During this time, the balance of attention has shifted to big-data analytics, working closely with vendors trying to deliver tools that can perform complex analytics at big-data scale.
Describes the Carlis-Maguire technique and notation for data modeling. The approach encourages lavish scrutiny on business data requirements without the encumbrances of technological solutions. With this approach, analysts can "deep-dive" into problems first, then make informed decisions about solution approaches and technologies. The approach properly serves the needs of business's devoted to agility, by properly distinguishing business requirements from system requirements, and by properly distinguishing transient requirements (which are best treated with agile approaches) from stable requirements (which are best modeled as soon as they can be understood). Mastering Data Modeling has been praised for attribution by Mitch Kapor (founder of Lotus Development Corporation) and David Hay (author of "Data Model Patterns, Conventions of Thought"). Writing in TDAN.com, Hay wrote the following: "I confess to greeting books on data modeling with suspicion. Invariably they take a slightly or greatly different approach than I do. I have worked hard over the years to come up with a particular way of going about this art, and I don’t take to people telling me how to do it differently. After all, if other people do it differently, they’re probably wrong, eh? Well, Mastering Data Modeling: A User Driven Approach, by John Carlis and Joseph Maguire, indeed approaches some aspects of data modeling differently than I do, but unfortunately, in most cases they are right. Now that’s really irritating!" It's nice to be able to cite praise from industry luminaries. But when the praise comes from other gurus who admit to learning something from my work, that is most gratifying indeed.