Alan Weaver

“In 2008 I spent some months working with Alan Weaver on a project initiated by the two of us. We recognised an opportunity to improve the TCO tooling for which I am the world wide owner. In short Alan was tirelessly innovative in addressing the business and technical problems. He was additionally impressive in that the many hours he devoted to this extra-curricular project were over and above his main responsibilities. As I am world-wide owner only for the Systems Group tooling, the first issue we faced was to gain endorsement from the other main players, Strategic Outsourcing and Global Technology Services. We persuaded Distinguished Engineers, Mark Ernest and Dale Davis to adopt our cause as an Academy of Technology Study. We also obtained recommendation from the STG Europe Technical Director Paul Martynenko to get several man-days of design input from the Emerging Technology Group in IBM Hursley Labs (owned by Dr. Dave Watson). The AoT Study was finally presented to Bob Greenberg, IBM General Manager of IT Optimisation. Through all this, we played complimentary roles. I was the Subject Matter Expert (SME); Alan Weaver was the Technical Architect, proving himself easily able to lead, engage with and challenge IBM leaders in new and varied technology in many fields. These included Database Design, modern methods of development project management ("Agile" etc.), state of the art development environments (e.g. "Project Zero", "WebSphere Smash",..), the hugely beneficial and complex issue of Automated Data Cleaning, and complex integration issues such as how to flexibly combine distributed Excel modelling with centralised web-based models, in order to meet the rapid development needs of expert consultants at the same time as providing easy-to-use interfaces for casual users. Alan also produced numerous prototypes of the many components. This included data cleaning tools, animated graphic renditions of servers in their data centres; experimental and many creative uses of web-API options for the integration of Lotus Connections, Excel VBA, PHP web-apps, LDAP, and other distributed elements of our intended system. Alan exhibited energy and innovation at every stage; apart from the technical challenges, we documented high-level and detailed designs, build several detailed costed plans of execution, and provide business justification for the investment. Alan was a driving force in the envisioning and execution of all these and more. Alan is an inspiring person to work with. His infectious optimism and "can-do" competence encourages those (fortunate as I am) working with him to attempt great things, even knowing they will struggle to keep up with rate of leaning, and his sheer breadth and depth of technical and business competency.”