This week as Peter slaved away in the Longhaus Research Centre on a major client project I was lucky enough to be the only Asia Pacific Analyst in attendance at the IBM Rational Software Development Conference 2008 (RSDC2008). During the event held in Orlando (Florida) I had the privilege of spending time with a number of senior IBM Executives, including the head of Rational Danny Sabbah along with Scott Hebner, Martin Nally and more. I was also able to hear first hand from the father of UML, Mr Grady Booch - not once but on three occasions about his perspectives on the future of software (see http://www.booch.com/architecture/blog.jsp). The schedule was brutal, but it was worth the trip...

Attended by some 3000 enterprise developers the event gave me a sense of deja-vu with its theme of “R-Heroes”. It occurred to me today that Microsoft’s theme for their latest Server & Tools release earlier this year was “Heroes Happen Here”. So it seems 2008 is, at least in our industry, quickly becoming “The Year of the Hero” – and rightly so. More times than I would like to admit I have seen successful application development that has relied on the heroic deeds of mere mortal development staff, project managers and testers. A theme highlighted during the conference and the need to enable these heroes with the best tools available. Of course for IBM that means Rational.

During one of his sessions Grady emphasised the need for the IT industry to identify its heroes as he shared with us the IT luminaries and unsung influencers of his own highly successful career. Sitting in the audience this was a strange experience as most of us would have considered Grady himself as a hero of the industry. So to hear him talk of those he admired was unexpected, but as the self confessed “free radical” I suspect his intent was to unsettle us so that we’d step out of our comfort zones and think about our heroes.

Yet as I tried to cast my mind onto the heroes of the Australian ICT industry my mind was disturbingly blank. I could name a bunch of North American and European gurus, but it was pretty hard to identify too many people that have had a fundamental impact on our industry – and in particular the way in which we actually undertake application development. And by application development I don’t mean people who developed code on some open source project, but the guys behind the tools, the methods – the true Wizards of Oz if you will.

Then it hit me - Clive Finkelstein. If I had to name one person I would consider my industry hero it would be Clive. Clive’s work on Information Engineering - which I encountered in the first two weeks of my programming career - has never left me. Indeed, when I hit what Grady called “wicked problems” whether in software or just a management practice it is the principles from Clive’s methodologies that I often return to.

With this in mind I began to wonder if Clive had truly been recognised by our industry and so headed over to the Pearcey Awards (http://www.pearcey.org.au/index.php/Awards) to see if I could find Clive in the hall of fame. Alas, to my surprise and disappointment he has not received a Pearcey Award or any other recognition from his native country that I could find (the closest was Clive’s 1997 recognition by The Data Management Association International).

I suppose that is why the saying “unsung hero” exists. I just hope that this modest blog post encourages more Australian developers to illuminate the other missing heroes of our industry.

For me I just want to say thanks Clive.