Dave McComb
President of Semantic Arts, Dave has been successfully leading software development, planning, and review projects for nearly 30 years. He has worked with dozens of clients and dozens of technical environments, including those during his time with Andersen Consulting, that have led to a much broader understanding of what is needed to grow a productive environment. Dave is our application and project management specialist.
dave@semanticarts.com Click here for expanded resume.

 

Lois Greenfield is our “Chaos Mitigator.” She books our travel, edits and produces our newsletter, proofs and edits our articles and presentations, and generally tries to keep us organized. She has worked for the Massachusetts Parole Board, Eastman Kodak, Transamerica Life Companies, and Southern California Gas. She holds a BA from Boston University and an MBA from Boston College. lfgreen@semanticarts.com

Janice Lawrence, the author of SELL RESULTS: What Every Technology Salesperson Needs to Know, has advised technology companies such as Oracle, Cisco, Apple, Sun, GE, Sybase, Unisys and many more, for the past two decades. Janice is an expert in the fields of sales methodology, market messaging, content development and instructional design. She is an award-winning web designer, video producer and instructional designer. Janice’s responsibilities at Semantic Arts will include sales, marketing, and education. janice@semanticarts.com

Alumni

Many people have helped make Semantic Arts what it is today. They are all intelligent, committed, accomplished and fun to work with.

They remind us of the characters in “Little Big Man.” If you recall, characters introduced in the first reel inevitably showed up again in the second or third reel. In a similar way, we know we haven’t seen the last of these fine people. Many are just one opportunity away from signing back on for another project.

On this page they are listed in approximately the order of their Semantic Arts experience.

Background

The company that is now Semantic Arts, Inc. was originally incorporated as ‘First Principles’ in Denver, Colorado in 1989. Through the early 90’s First Principles specialized in providing enterprise-level application and architectural consulting. In 1996 First Principles, which moved to Fort Collins as part of a joint venture project, was acquired by Velocity.com and operated as a wholly owned subsidiary performing the R&D function for an ASP-based software development environment.

The principals of First Principles re-incorporated in June 2000, also in Colorado, as Semantic Arts, Inc. Semantic Arts is a “S” corporation, wholly owned by the principals. It is incorporated in and registered to do business in Colorado.

Semantic Arts assists clients who have allowed their software systems to deteriorate to the point that improving business systems has become an exercise in frustration. We don’t sell hardware or software, and we don’t represent vendors. As a result, we are free to start with two inputs: your existing situation and your aspirations.

We are well-informed, completely objective, and have our clients’ needs absolutely foremost in our minds.

Our objectivity is one of our key values. We do not represent any software or hardware products or companies, nor are we a front for software developers or implementers. What we do is strategic consulting, helping people determine their requirements, planning architectural options, making selections and guiding their execution.

What it is like working with us

We think you’ll like working with us. You’ll find us to be highly engaged in your situation and at the same time we will respectfully challenge current thinking. We have a reputation for speaking straight without being offensive.

There are a few things you won’t get from us that you might get from others:

No Bait and Switch – We’re not recruiting new consultants for this project, nor pitching senior consultants with impressive resumes, then delivering junior staff to do the work.

No Hidden Agendas – While we have in our collective past designed and built ERP systems and many client/server, n-Tier and web-based applications and architectures, we are not angling for an implementation project. What Semantic Arts does is help enterprises define and migrate to their ideal software architecture.

No Ponderous Reports – We don’t find long final reports to be terribly productive, if that is defined as helping a client transform their infrastructure. We prefer to have worked toward broad agreement and consensus before the final report is delivered.

Guiding Principles

These are the four guiding principles that we use in our architectural design work:

Human Scale – Monolithic applications are disproportionately hard to change and very hard to replace. Small apps can consume many times their weight in interfaces. One of the cornerstones of our practice is helping clients reallocate functionality appropriately to human-scale applications.

Loose Coupling – A tightly coupled system is one in which changes in one area affect many other areas. Modern technology can help a great deal, but achieving loose coupling is primarily a matter of design discipline that starts at the architectural level.

Reuse Through Shared Services – In most mature organizations, we’ve found that over 50% of the functionality implemented in the traditional siloed systems consists of capabilities that could be implemented once and then shared, for a great saving in cost and increase in consistency.

Incremental Deployment – We’ve found that most successful projects migrate to the future through a series of measured steps. Avoiding “big bang” implementations and “bet the farm” conversions is one of the best ways to move forward without undue risk.

What Are We About?

Semantic Arts, Inc. specializes in helping mid-to-large organizations renovate their software systems. The focus is on companies whose existing systems are becoming hard to maintain or are threatened with technical obsolescence. We help these companies craft an architecture that allows new systems to co-exist with their legacy systems in a way that allows the legacy systems to be gradually retired.

We offer a range of complexity reducing services, from consulting workshops and hands-on projects to seminars, where we help you assess your current situation and plan an orderly migration to a rational future.

Our solutions are driven by a core set of guiding principles that have our clients’ long-range interest in the forefront. We show you how to revitalize your application architecture so that when your strategy changes, you can respond; when the market changes, you can adapt; and when technology changes, you can advance.

Software Architecture

All software has architecture. When you put several systems together in one enterprise, the result is often accidental and expensive. A software architecture is a long-term design of the major building blocks of your systems and how they interrelate.

The role of the architect

The architect is an advocate of the client, not an agent of the software or hardware vendor, and is not myopically focused on the completion of a development project at hand. The architect is committed to ensuring that a long term succession of projects actually adds up to a more livable environment; where new functionality and new technology can be added easily; where change is welcomed, not resisted, and where system maintainers can confidently practice their craft.

How are software architects different from …

… technologists? Technology experts typically know a lot about a single architecture. They tend to see that one architecture as the solution to all problems. They can be quite helpful once the architectural planning is done.

 … requirements analysts? A part of the architectural process looks something like requirements. The difference is that a requirements analyst tends to try to reduce needs to a checklist of features, a simplified approach that can be detrimental to the architecture.

… quality assurance personnel? If you employ an architect to oversee a project and ensure architectural integrity, you may wonder if this isn’t somewhat like the QA function. The difference is, QA is about doing things right. Architecture is about doing the right things.

How is Semantic Arts different from other software architects?

We bridge the gap between firms that understand only the high level processes and concepts of Architecture–who therefore implement only in the abstract, and those who have expertise in a particular technology and only implement what they know.

We dig deep into a client’s existing situation, as well as their needs and aspirations, and build a detailed, coherent road map of a future, architecturally inspired environment.

Fort Collins

We are based in beautiful Fort Collins, Colorado. Some local trivia:

Most Desirable Place to Live in the US — In 2006, Money magazine named Fort Collins as the most desirable place to live in the United States. Details here.

(In 2008, we came in second.)

Fort Collins was also ranked 1st of the Best Places to Live and Work for Young Professionals (pop. 100,000-200,000) by Next Generation Consulting in March 2009. Details here. Click here for more “bests.”

Old Town Fort Collins as Inspiration for Disney’s Main Street USA — There’s truth to our local urban legend that Disney’s Main Street USA was based on our own Old Town (visible from our offices high atop Old Town Square). The engineer for Main Street USA was Harper Goff, who grew up in Fort Collins. For more details and some great turn of the century photos of Fort Collins, click here.

Home of the Atomic Clock — If you set your watch to the “atomic clock” you are synching up with the Cesium clock in Fort Collins. Apparently the second has been redefined as 9,192,631,770 vibratory periods of the caesium-133 atom. They tell me this clock in Fort Collins will lose one second every 15 million years.

Swetsville Zoo — On the south end of town, just off the interstate, is a must-see roadside attraction. Over the last two decades Bill Swets has turned discarded farm equipment into life sized works of art.

Semantic Arts World HQ — This is a picture of the building we work in (the Miller Block, aka 11 Old Town Square) when it was built in 1888.

Here’s what it looks like now (shot from the opposite angle. The corner below is the right hand corner above). Trees (and color photography) were introduced in the 20th century.