Susan Bockhoff

Susan Bockhoff is President and CEO of Kiva Consulting.

Susan's educational background is in the social sciences.. She received a B.A. in Anthropology from Oberlin College and a Master of Arts in Sociology from the University of Denver. After working for several years in the public sector as a Criminal Justice Researcher, Susan redirected her focus to the information technology sector. At Coors Brewing Susan worked as a Systems Analyst, a Management Analyst, a Programmer Analyst and a Project Manager. At Coors Susan developed and deployed several process monitoring applications that are still in use today and led the introduction of document management technologies into Coors.

At Gambro BCT Susan had an opportunity to lead the IT group, growing the group from 4 employees to over 40 full time employees and consultants. In this role Susan oversaw a yearly budget of over $3mm and directed BCT's IT strategy and operation. Over a period of five years this group managed or developed over 200 applications for a user population of 1500 users spread over several facilities and two continents. Susan was a thought leader in BCT's adoption of Internet technologies and successfully oversaw BCT's Y2K conversion activities.

Susan enjoys blending her knowledge of technology and social systems to help customers develop new and innovative ways of managing their IT resources.

George Florentine

George is Chief Technology Officer of Kiva Consulting.

George's educational background is in plasma physics and nuclear fusion engineering. Matters of conscience intervened, and in the early 1980s, George had a chance to participate in the heady growth days of software development companies in the Boston area. In the early stages of his career, George worked in the development group at Progress Software Corporation. This worked involved system administration, software porting, and the development of client/server messaging protocols. At Digital Equipment Corporation, George led a team of engineers that built a distributed file cabinet server and framework that is still in use today.

After having spent much of the '80s building relational database and file system components, the '90s provided a chance for George to turn his attention towards document databases, document architectures, object technologies, and information retrieval problems. At Information Dimensions and Interleaf, George held a variety of positions doing work in product management, product planning, software architecture, and software development. George was also chairman of AIIM's Document Management Architecture Technical Committee during the development and release of the DMA 1.0 specification.

As a principal at Fastwater, George has acted in the role of software designer and architect for several projects for companies including ActionPoint, Rational, DiseaseRef and MarineProvider.

George's interest is in helping companies build software products that change the way people interact with information and each other. Understanding the impact of technologies on society and the synergy between marketing and engineering in product development are other areas of current interest.

George has a BS in Nuclear Engineering from MIT, and has done graduate work in nuclear power engineering.

Eric Robbins

Eric's educational background is in industrial engineering at the undergraduate level, where he received a B.S. from Northwestern University. At the graduate level, Eric received an MBA from the Kellogg Graduate School of Management. Eric has 16 years of experience in management consulting including more than 7 years at Deloitte & Touche where Eric was a Manager performing projects in strategy, operations, finance and technology. Eric performed or managed over 20 major engagements for a wide spectrum of companies including Sears, Amoco, the State of Illinois, several health services companies, manufacturers, insurance companies and a variety of other industry segments.

After his tenure in the Big 5, Eric focused on utilizing technology to improve business performance. Eric's initial work was in building the services practice at a document management company, Interleaf, which at the time was one of the 20 largest software companies in the world. While at Interleaf, Eric was Silicon Valley based as the Director of Consulting for the West region. Ultimately, Eric headed the consulting practice at Interleaf as VP of Services. As part of the senior management team, Eric assisted with the transformation of Interleaf into the e-content company, which resulted in Interleaf being acquired by BroadVision. At BroadVision, Eric was the VP of Marketing and Strategy for the services group.

Post BroadVision, Eric has consulted in the areas of strategy, marketing and outsourcing primarily for technology and services companies. Eric maintains a global outsourcing network and in addition to direct oversees experience working in London and Kenya has strong connections in South Africa and Southeast Asia.

Allan Lippman

Allen J. Lippman is founder of Integrated Sales and Management and a resource that Kiva uses in training engagements. He has over twenty-five years of experience in sales and sales management, training and development, and management consulting. Allen's clients include IBM, Digital Equipment Corp. (now Compaq), Actuate Corporation, The Extraprise Group, BroadVision, Wachovia Bank & Trust, and Bank of America. He has delivered training workshops throughout North America and in Canada, the U.K., and France.

Allen is the former National Sales Manager of an industrial products firm and the Vice President of Sales and Marketing for the human resources division of Goodwins, Booke, and Dickenson now a division of Aon Consulting an international consulting firm.

Colin Gerety

Colin is a senior software architect at Kiva.

Colin has over 15 years of experience in the computer industry, having worked for such companies as Hewlett-Packard, OpenDisc Systems, and Caere. He has worked as a project manager, software architect, and engineer as well as in the areas of product marketing and systems consulting. Products he has helped bring to market are as diverse as software engineering environments, CD recording software, forms processing software, workflow management, medical information services and B2B marine procurement systems. He holds several software patents and has published a number of papers in the area of Object Oriented Systems and Inter-process Communications.

Colin enjoys software engineering because it is a complex technical and social challenge. All large-scale software development involves a team creating artifacts that are among the most complex ever created by humankind. To be successful, the problem must be understood, the solution designed, the design codified, and the product delivered to users. At each step of the way, there are choices to be made about tools, techniques, and processes. These must be chosen not only with the problem in mind, but also with an eye to the talents of the team members, the exigencies of the product market, and rapidly evolving technology.

Colin has a B.U.S. from the University of New Mexico, where he studied music, and a Masters degree in Computer Science from Oregon State University, where he concentrated on machine learning, truth maintenance systems, and mathematics.

Mike Williams

Mike is a principal and founder of WD30 and is a resource that Kiva brings into software development engagements. Mike has over 14 years of experience in a variety of software development roles, having acted in the roles of individual contributor, build engineer, software designer and project lead. Mike has worked on a wide variety of projects in the areas of tape storage, removable media management, web based marketing automation, B2B procurement systems and a RAD framework. Mike's detailed resume is available here.

Stephen Davies

Stephen is a principal and founder of WD30 and is a resource that Kiva brings into software development engagements. Stephen has over 10 years of experience in software development and is well versed in object oriented design techniques and spiral development methodologies. Stephen has worked as an individual contributor, project lead and software architect on a wide variety of projects including a marketing automation system, a resource manager component for a high end storage system, a monitoring system for a production database environment and components for a marine procurement system. Stephen's detailed resume is available here.