Ed Yourdon was cofounder, with Karen Coburn, of Cutter Consortium. Ed served as Fellow of the Cutter Business Technology Council, and Founding Editor and Editor Emeritus of the Cutter IT Journal. He chaired Cutter's Summit for many years. Mr. Yourdon is widely known as the lead developer of the structured analysis/design methods of the 1970s. He was a codeveloper of the Yourdon/Whitehead method of object-oriented (OO) analysis/design and the popular Coad/Yourdon OO methodology.

Mr. Yourdon had extensive experience in identifying and providing business continuity planning (BCP) solutions for clients throughout the world. His clients included major organizations in the financial services, hospitality, and food and beverage industries, as well as the government sector. With Y2K now behind us, Mr. Yourdon continues to focus on BCP as well as issues of business/IT alignment; mitigating risks of large outsourcing initiatives; auditing of large, risky projects; development and implementation of e-business initiatives; as well as forecasting and tracking critical business/IT "megatrends".

Mr. Yourdon began his career in the computer industry at Digital Equipment Company more than 35 years ago. During his career, he has been involved in a number of pioneering computer technologies, such as time-sharing operating systems and virtual memory systems. In 1974, Mr. Yourdon founded YOURDON, Inc. to provide educational, publishing, and consulting services in state-of-the-art software engineering technology. The company grew to a staff of more than 150, with offices throughout North America and Europe. As CEO, he oversaw an operation that trained more than 250,000 people around the world. YOURDON, Inc. was sold in 1986 and eventually became part of CGI, the French software company that is now part of IBM. The publishing division, YOURDON Press (now part of Prentice Hall), has produced more than 150 technical computer books on a wide range of software engineering topics.

Mr. Yourdon was an advisor to Technology Transfer's research project on software industry opportunities in the former Soviet Union and was a member of the expert advisory panel on I-CASE acquisition for the US Department of Defense. He was also a member of the Airlie Software Council.

Mr. Yourdon authored/coauthored more that 25 computer books, including The Rise and Fall of the American Programmer, Death March, and Byte Wars: The Impact of September 11 on Information Technology and Managing High-Intensity Internet Projects, as well as more than 525 technical articles since 1967.