User:David Howard

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David Howard graduated in civil engineering, specializing in water supply. He was a member of early multi-disciplinary teams working in Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Sudan and Nigeria on regional and urban development plans. He later led an innovative approach to the management of capital construction projects for a major US corporate client investing in the UK. This resulted in him studying under W. Edwards Deming, Myron Tribus and Homer Sarasohn and developing a systemic approach to business management and the pursuit of economic-quality. In the late 1980s he applied these principles to leading a four year project to transform the operating ethos of a group of privately owned food manufacturing companies supplying the UK's leading supermarket chains.

Experience gained in these various multidisciplinary projects led him to set up his own niche process management practice, Management-NewStyle, in 1990. Working with two major US telecomm companies – AT&T and Global Crossing – resulted in his approach to process management – called 'First Metre Working’ [1]– becoming more widely known and eventually being applied to the resolution of socio-technical problems traditionally associated the business/IT interface.

Together with Trevor Hilder, a database expert, he is now working on innovative ways in which web-enabled process workflow applications can be created using the Windows .NET Framework technologies together with a 'viable' database model that will enable process changes at the business level to drive real time code changes at the machine level without specialist intermediary involvement.