Jamie Z Fox is a composer/musician and photographer living on Maui in the Hawaiian Islands.
Jamie's central professional expertise is managing software engineering as demonstrated at such companies as Google, HP Labs, Netscape, and Apple. He has managed companies, organizations, departments, teams, products, grants, and projects for nearly 30 years. He has also taught at the university graduate school level for more than a decade.
He recently served as Director of Engineering for Google's Niantic Labs for new product development in areas at the intersection of geo/local, social, and mobile applications and mobile games such as Ingress (Niantic's technical precursor for Pokemon Go) and FieldTrip, managing engineering teams in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Mountain View, California. He was previously engineering manager for Google Maps, Google's Launch Team, and Google's Enterprise Group.
Jamie is also a co-chair of the Maui Software Initiative, a private enterprise group focused on evolving Maui into a software technology center for the Pacific Rim, and he is a member of the University of Hawaii Maui College Advisory Board for their Applied Business and Information Technology program.
His interests, activities, and research focus on the essence of how organizations can effectively produce software of value for users, and thus involves management, leadership, software engineering, innovation, technology trends, communities of practice, collaboration and organizational performance. These interests encompass the realms of "lean" development, open source, software services, and reflect the intricate balance between product management and project management when constrained by real market economics. Jamie's occassional blog is located here.
Background: Jamie worked in Silicon Valley for more than two decades as a senior technical management positions at Google, HP Labs, Netscape, and Apple's Advanced Technology Group. Prior to Google, throughout 2005 and 2006, Jamie was a Consulting Professor of Software Engineering Management at Carnegie Mellon University's West Coast Campus.
From 2000 through 2004 Jamie managed the Global Collaboration Environments Group at Hewlett-Packard Laboratories in Palo Alto, California, where he oversaw the Lab's worldwide external and internal web sites and services, streaming media services, and collaboration tools, and content management systems. Prior to that he was the manager of technology transfer for software at HP Labs, scaled from the desktop to the enterprise.
Jamie had the wild ride of working as a senior technical manager at Netscape for 5 years managing software development of e-commerce software, and creating developer training programs. Earlier, he managed development in Apple's Advanced Technology Group in the User Experience Laboratory. His work has covered the spectrum from senior scientist to senior product management, from software development manager to software training, from performance support systems to international ecommerce installations. He had tours of duty as a product manager at both AOL (America Online) for calendars and iPlanet (the Netscape/Sun venture) in ecommerce.
He also held an appointment as a Research Fellow at California State University, Monterey Bay in the School of Information Technology and Communication Design for 2004-2005. He was formerly Vice-Chair of the Environmental Committee of the Los Altos, California City Council.
Dr. Fox taught at Michigan State for 10 years, and also founded and ran two start-up companies focused on advanced analytic software for the media industries, especially television news operations. He has a background in radio (former president of WRPI-FM) and live musical performance (click here for some of his tunes and music videos.). He has published in both the academic and trade press, and holds two active patents on web technologies.
Student of Organizations: Since college, Jamie's been intrigued by thinking of organizations as organic entities in their own right as complex adaptive systems, many aspects of which are evident with the Internet and the web-enabled world that is emerging. The rising tide of open source software and its myriad implications for business, entrepreneurship, and social activities heralds fresh economic opportunities and research vistas for software development and delivery, the role of game theory in product/service creation, the evolving practices of lean/agile software development, and poses far-reaching challenges for leadership as the ways of the new undermine the ways of the obsolete. Lean development, in particular, recognizes that software is best developed with a fresh mindset of delivering value, removing muda, and continuous learning -- hence, moving beyond the sordid history of failed attempts of applying the mass production mindset to software development. Jamie has the good fortune to work with, and often lead, incredibly productive and innovative technical teams with several of Silicon Valley's most signature companies.
Sunarcher: For years Jamie had a private consultancy, The Sunarcher Organization, that advised senior executives about effective approaches for sustainable software development with a focus on building successful and product technical teams, working with managers to bring out the best of their staff, and helping them achieve the disciplined focus necessary to achieve success in the rapidly changing economic environment of high technology software development. Jamie has been described as an expert technical meeting facilitator and has led numerous technical discussions and strategy offsites for Sunarcher clients.
Expertise: Jamie's expertise reflects the integration of software development, technical management, communication, teaching, and leadership. He stays current with the state of the art of lean and agile methods, design patterns, distributed systems, cloud computing, mobile devices, web technologies, computing at massive scale, and software services.
Education: Jamie received his B.S. in Management Science from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) in Troy N.Y. with a specialization in operations research and minor in economics, his M.S. in communications research also from RPI with an emphasis on statistical modeling, and his Ph.D. in communications research from Michigan State University with studies in system science, organizations, and media.
Personal: Dr. Fox is an avid musician, artist, and cyclist -- and loves playing ball and frisbee with his whippets. He and his lovely wife live in the Launiupoko area of Lahaina, on the island of Maui, Hawaii. Thank you for reading.
Jamie is known to regularly pull glowing rabbits out of invisible hats when dealing with tough technical issues and dysfunctional teams.
Jamie legally adopted the stage name used throughout his youth. If you require the original name, contact the email address above.