Home Page of Al Davis
Who is Al Davis?
Al Davis is an entrepreneur, business strategist, consultant, teacher, avid world traveler, author, volunteer, and lifelong student, in no particular priority or chronological order.
Corporate Experience
- Co-Founder and CEO of Offtoa, Inc., an internet company that helps entrepreneurs determine if their new business idea has financial merit, and if so, helps them hone their business strategy to attain optimal financial returns for their investors and themselves.
- President and CEO of an internet company that enabled consumers to donate a percentage of their online purchases to their favorite charity – at no cost to them.
- Co-Founder, Chairman and CEO of Omni-Vista, Inc., a software company in Colorado Springs. Omni-Vista’s assets were sold in 2002.
- Founding member of the board of directors of Requisite, Inc. Founded in 1996, Requisite was acquired by Rational Software Corporation in February 1997 and IBM in 2003.
- Non-managing general partner and limited partner of Catalyst InfoTech Development Fund, a small venture capital fund in Colorado in the 1990’s.
- Vice president of engineering services at BTG, Inc., a Virginia-based company that had an IPO in 1995, and was acquired by Titan in 2001 and L-3 Communications in 2003.
- A director of R&D at GTE Communication Systems in Phoenix, Arizona. GTE merged with Bell Atlantic in 2000 to become Verizon.
- Director of the Software Technology Center at GTE Laboratories in Waltham, Mass.
- Consultant for many corporations over the past thirty-two years, including Boeing, Cigna Insurance, Dr. Ed, Federal Express, FrontRange Solutions, IBM, Loral, MCI, Rational Software, Rockwell, Samsung Electronics, Schlumberger, Sharp, Software Productivity Consortium, Storage Tek, Sumitomo, and XAware.
- Former member of the selection committee for High Altitude Investors (HAI), an angel club in Colorado Springs.
- Mentor for many dozens of aspiring entrepreneurs.
Academic Experience
- University of Colorado Executive MBA program, Denver (Professor of Entrepreneurship; formerly Academic Chair and Professor of Business Strategy)
- University of Colorado at Colorado Springs (Professor of Business Strategy and Entrepreneurship; formerly Professor of Information Systems and Project Management; formerly El Pomar Professor of Software Engineering)
- George Mason University (Professor of Information Systems; Chair & Professor of Computer Science)
- University of Tennessee (Assistant Professor of Computer Science)
- Atma Jaya University in Yogyakarta, Indonesia (Fulbright Scholar)
- University of Jos, Nigeria (Fulbright Scholar)
- Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, Spain (Visiting Professor and Erasmus Mundus Professor)
- University of Technology, Sydney, Australia (Visiting Professor)
- University of the Western Cape, Cape Town, South Africa (Volunteer Professor)
Other Details
He earned his Ph.D. and masters in computer science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and bachelors in mathematics from the State University of New York at Albany. He has been a fellow of the IEEE since 1994 and a life fellow since 2014. He was Editor-in-Chief of IEEE Software
from 1994 to 1998. He was a member of the editorial boards of IEEE Software
(1984-1986 and 1991-1994), Journal of Systems and Software
(1987-2010), the Requirements Engineering Journal
(2005-2011), and Communications of the ACM
(1981-1991). Dr. Davis has published 100+ articles in journals, conferences and trade press, and lectured 2,000+ times in 28 countries. He is the author of 9 books:
- Software Requirements: Analysis and Specification
(Prentice Hall, 1990),
- Software Requirements: Objects, Functions and States
(Prentice Hall, 1993),
- the best-selling 201 Principles of Software Development
(McGraw Hill, 1995),
- Great Software Debates
(Wiley and IEEE CS Press, 2004),
- Just Enough Requirements Management
(Dorset House, 2005),
- Will Your New Start Up Make Money
(WYNSUMM) (Scrub Oak Press, 2014),
- Unusual Africa: Traveling on the Edge
(Scrub Oak Press, 2016),
- Unusual Asia: Traveling on the Edge
(Scrub Oak Press, 2017), and
- Unusual Latin America: Traveling on the Edge (Scrub Oak Press, 2017).
