John Tibbetts' consulting career spans 35 years. He is a former Senior Consultant with Cutter's Business & Enterprise Architecture practice. For the past 21 years, through his consulting company Kinexis, he has focused on helping enterprises and their software vendors articulate and implement coherent, principled software architectures. He works with technical architecture teams as they come to strategic decisions and, at the other end of the spectrum, serves as technology coach and mentor to in-the-trenches development teams. He is especially good at making complex software issues comprehensible to senior management.

Clients have included a wide range of insurance, utility, transportation, telecommunications, software, and hardware companies. Among them are Asyst Technologies, Bank of America, BEA Systems, Ceridian, the Clinical Trials Center at the University of California at San Francisco, Compuware, Crowley Maritime, DTE Energy, Eastman Chemical, FDIC, IBM, Metropolitan Life, Netscape, New York Life, Oracle, Pacific Gas & Electric, Prudential Insurance, Puget Power and Light, Sprint, Union Pacific, USAA Insurance, and Wells Fargo Bank.

During the dot-com era, Mr. Tibbetts was CTO of the software startup ePropose, Inc., and subsequently of TreasuryX, a partnership between ePropose and the agribusiness giant Cargill.

Mr. Tibbetts' special passion is the emerging category he defines as "collaborative transactions," an approach that blends multirole workflow, business rule processing, access control, and secure collaboration into an integrated, single-metaphor development model. To this end, he has developed the new WorkThru framework, a Java-based open source platform that uses middle-tier objects to hold and manipulate individual pieces of long-running work in progress.

As cowriter of the "Tibbetts and Bernstein: Developments" column for six years, he was one of InformationWeek's featured contributors. He has also written for Software Magazine, Object Magazine, Distributed Computing, Cutter IT Journal, and other publications. Cutter Consortium has published his articles on BPM, SOA, and RIAs. He can be reached at consulting@cutter.com.