Paul Allen served as a Senior Consultant in Cutter Consortium's Business & Enterprise Architecture practice. Prior to retiring, Mr. Allen worked for more than 35 years in most areas of IT. He earned international recognition for his pioneering work in the application of component-based development (CBD) and service-oriented architecture (SOA) to achieve practical business value. Mr. Allen focused on the cultural aspects of enterprise SOA practices, including the business case, requirements specification, governance, process improvement, adoption planning, and integration with enterprise architecture, business process management (BPM), and organization change management.

Mr. Allen retired from Everware-CBDI, where he architected CBDI's Service Architecture and Engineering methodology, focusing on the practical application of SOA research. As a Principal Consultant, he worked with client organizations primarily in the methodologist role to develop an SOA business case and adoption roadmap plan for a leading UK insurer and lead an SOA governance assignment for a major US government department. In addition, Mr. Allen conducted public and inhouse education classes in SOA planning and design and spoke at industry conferences on the real-world application of SOA.

Before joining CBDI, Mr. Allen was Principal Business-IT Strategist at CA, where he became widely recognized for his innovative work in business-IT alignment, BPM, and SOA, working with a wide range of organizations to ensure their software practices are aligned with business plans through programs of change management. Previously, Mr. Allen headed up the CBD practice at Sterling Software, which was renown for its work on component definition models. This followed a period as VP, Methods for Select Software Tools, where he co-originated the SELECT Perspective, an approach to CBD that he pioneered working with several blue chip organizations. Prior to joining Select, Mr. Allen worked in various IT leadership and advisory positions for numerous organizations ranging from finance to government sectors, including Senior Methodology Advisor to a major telecom provider. He also worked with Yourdon Inc., training several hundred developers worldwide in structured analysis and design techniques following his early career as IT practitioner and manager.

Mr. Allen is a widely published author whose books include the critically acclaimed Realizing E-Business with Components and Service Orientation: Winning Strategies and Best Practices. He has written numerous articles, published detailed SOA research in the CBDI Journal, and is the former Editor of Cutter's Component Development Strategies. Mr. Allen has also presented keynotes, tutorials, and seminars at conferences worldwide.

Mr. Allen describes his personal philosophy as follows: "A software solution is only as good as the business knowledge that it encapsulates and only as useful as the measurable results it achieves. Successful methodologies must therefore be pragmatic in encouraging business involvement, yet precise in specification — you can't measure what you don't specify." He can be reached at consulting@cutter.com.