Dave McComb
Dave McComb is the President and founder of Semantic Arts, Inc. His focus is on project management and business applications, as well as bringing an overall enterprise architecture approach to the firm's engagements.
Mr. McComb has 27 years of experience, 13 with Andersen Consulting/Accenture and 14 independently and through various joint ventures. Over that period of time he has managed over a dozen multi-million dollar development projects and worked with a number of major clients including: Georgia Pacific, Boise Cascade, Norton Abrasives, Wildish Construction, US Geological Survey, Trus Joist, Far West Federal Savings and Loan, Haw Par Trading (Singapore), Bougainville Copper, US West Materiel Resources, Colorado Department of Transportation, Martin Marietta, Johns Mansville, Micro Planning International, BSW Architects, Dean Medical Center, Velocity.com, World Minerals, CommerceOne and Washington State Department of Labor and Industries.
The consistent thread in McComb's career has been the ability to craft novel architected solutions to business problems. He sometimes refers to this as the "applied research" approach to application development. While many see architecture as a nice-to-have overhead item, McComb has been successful at incorporating it into approaches, timeframes and budgets of normal systems development. At Bougainville Copper he incorporated the development of what would later be called "integrated CASE" into the development of materials management applications for the mine. The application and architecture were completed and converted for one-fourth the cost of a comparably sized conventional project running in parallel. The application and architecture ran flawlessly for nearly a decade until the mine was decommissioned. At Johns Manville he led a team that developed the "Application Software Factory" which combined Artificial Intelligence and code generation to build an integrated Process-ERP system. Of the three million lines of COBOL code, over 97% were generated by the system. The system has been in production for over a decade, survived Y2K untouched and was recently ported to a browser based interface. At Velocity he led a team to develop the first truly model-driven applications. The healthcare applications built by Velocity run directly from the model, and do not require code generation. At Labor & Industries he is involved in a consulting role to help them migrate towards the SOA architecture that Semantic Arts defined for them, within the constraints of their existing budgets.
McComb's main strength is in taking technology that has been proven to work, but that others have not yet found the most effective way to apply, and applying that to real world problems. His current key interests are in the application of Service Oriented Architectures and expression of the underlying semantics of business applications.
McComb has a Master of Business Administration from Portland State University.
