Professor Ken Orr

An internationally recognized expert on business process reengineering, technology transfer, software engineering, data warehousing, and knowledge management, he is the founder and Principal Researcher of The Ken Orr Institute, a business technology research organization. Previously, he was an Affiliate Professor and Director of the Center for the Innovative Application of Technology with the School of Technology and Information Management at Washington University (St. Louis). He has a B.A. from Wichita State University, has done graduate work in Philosophy at the University of Chicago, and has more than 35 years of experience in research, analysis, design, project management, technology planning, and management consulting. He has written three books (Structured Systems Development, Structured Requirements Definition, and The One Minute Methodology) and is the author of dozens of articles on advanced software development, data warehousing, technology management, and human communication. He was also one of the principal developers of the DSSD (Warnier/Orr) Methodology, and a leading researcher in the development of automated tools for business requirements, database design, and advanced client/server prototyping. His database design strategies have been incorporated into the GeneXus Database and Systems Generator. His systems, database, and programming techniques as well as Warnier/Orr diagrams are used by thousands of programmers and developers everywhere. Currently, he is working with organizations around the world in the areas of business process reengineering, accelerated systems development, data warehousing, advanced methodologies, and knowledge management. This work has led to a number of new seminars and conferences including Business Process Reengineering, Technology Management, Accelerated Application Development, Reusable Application Models and Templates, Workflow Management, Data Warehousing Architectures, and Knowledge Management. Based on his work on automated DB and program design, a South American company, ARTech, has developed an automated tool that automatically designs database and generates programs for most of the major databases and most client/server programming languages. He continues to do research in this important area.