Jeff Sutherland

Current

• Senior Advisor at OpenView Venture Partners
• CEO at Scrum, Inc. powered by OpenView Labs
• CTO & Worldwide Scrum Consulting Practice Manager at PatientKeeper, Inc.

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Past

• CTO & SVP Engineering and Product Development at IDX Systems
• VP Engineering at Individual Inc.
• VP Object Technology at VMARK Corp.

• VP Object Technology at Easel Corporation
• President at Object Databases
• VP Engineering at Graphael, Inc.
• VP Engineering at Saddlebrook Corp.
• VP Advanced Systems at Mid-Continent Computer Services
• Asst. Prof. Radiology, Biometrics, Preventive Medicine at University of Colorado School of Medicine

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6 more...

Education

• University of Colorado School of Medicine
• Stanford University
• West Point

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Recommended

5 people have recommended Jeff

Connections

353 connections

Industry

Computer Software

Websites

• My Website
• My Company
• My Portfolio

Jeff Sutherland’s Summary

Jeff Sutherland started his career as a fighter pilot in the U.S. Air Force where he achieved Top Gun status in 1967 and flew 100 combat missions over North Vietnam. His last two tours of duty were at Stanford University where he received a M.S. in Statistics and the United States Air Force Academy where he taught Mathematics, Statistics, and Probability. After 11 years as a pilot, he joined the faculty of the University of Colorado Medical School where he received his Doctoral degree. As Asst. Prof.of Radiology, Biometrics, and Preventive Medicine he co-founded the Center for Vitamins and Cancer Research under the sponsorship of Nobel Laureate Linus Pauling and for eight years was the Principle Investigator of a multimillion dollar National Cancer Center research grant that ran all IT programs for the Colorado Regional Cancer Center. This included data collection on all cancer patients in Colorado and integration with a national registry, clinical trials,epidemiological studies, and research on super computer mathematical models of carcinogenesis.

In 1983 he joined a banking company that serviced 150 banks throughout North America where he was VP of Advanced Systems and General Manager of their ATM Business Unit. He has been VP of Engineering and CTO of nine software companies. In the first four companies he prototyped Scrum and in the fifth company created Scrum as we know it today. His last four companies have been totally Scrum where teams have consistently demonstrated hyperproductivity. In 2001 he was a Signatory of the Agile Manifesto. His current company, PatientKeeper, performs at 10 times the speed of their outsourcing partner and is the first company to use Scrum to achieve a hyperproductive revenue state, quadrupling their revenue in 2007. He has lots of war stories to share with companies all over the world after 15 years of doing nothing but Scrum.

Jeff Sutherland’s Specialties:

Jeff created the first Scrum in 1993 and worked with Scrum Co-Creator Ken Schwaber, to formalize the Scrum development process at OOPSLA’95. He innovations in software technologies include object database design, personalized news and informations services, round trip object-oriented analysis and design tools, healthcare information delivery platforms, mobile security infrastructures, distributed internet workflow management systems, in addition to being the inventor of Scrum.

Jeff Sutherland’s Experience

• Senior Advisor

  OpenView Venture Partners

  (Privately Held; 11-50 employees; Computer Software industry)

  August 2007 — Present (10 months)

  Dr. Sutherland has trained the OpenView Venture Partners team in Agile processes and they will be the first venture group to run all operations with Scrum. The group has a $200M portfolio of funded companies and all of them use Agile processes. Jeff is working with each of the companies training and consulting on the Scrum development process and using Scrum as an agent of organizational transformation driving the Scrum process up through senior management and into the Board room.

• CEO

  Scrum, Inc. powered by OpenView Labs

  (Privately Held; 1-10 employees; Computer Software industry)

  June 2006 — Present (2 years)

  Scrum, Inc. is hosted by OpenView Labs to help provide best practices in software development to porfolio companies funded by Openview Venture Partners. Training, coaching, mentoring, and consulting on Agile development is provided by Jeff Sutherland, Ph.D., Co-Creator of Scrum, and partners worldiwide. Scrum, Inc. is a founding member of the Scrum Training Institute helping large and small organizations in Europe, Asia, and the Americas rollout Agile processes to radically improve productivity and quality for software development in a similar way to Toyota improving automobile production. Many companies working with Scrum, Inc. have tripled both both productivity and revenue in the first year of Agile deployment. This requires aggressive commitment to performance improvement by management and software development teams. We have many choices of who to work with and enjoy working most with companies that want to go from good to great.

• CTO & Worldwide Scrum Consulting Practice Manager

  PatientKeeper, Inc.

  (Privately Held; 51-200 employees; Computer Software industry)

  January 2000 — Present (8 years 5 months)

  New venture in healthcare mobile/wireless computing. Design and deploy platform architecture to support financial and clinical applications on all major mobile device types and the web with backend integration to all heathcare vendor systems and homegrown clinical data repositories via web services, HL7, or direct SQL binding. Used the Scrum Agile Development Process (Type C Scrum) to achieve industry leadership for the PatientKeeper Platform (GartnerGroup, 2002).

• CTO & SVP Engineering and Product Development

  IDX Systems

  (Public Company; 1001-5000 employees; GE; Computer Software industry)

  September 1996 — December 2000 (4 years 4 months)

  Introduced Scrum to a nationwide team of over 500 developers with a $47M budget. Launched the first web-enabled patient information system (Outreach) and the first physician's practice management system on the web (IDXSite); a high-volume transaction processing application. OutReach provides physicians with web-browser Internet access to important patient financial and clinical information. IDXsite provides complete billing, accounts receivable, scheduling, and manage care claims processing for physician groups.
  
  IDX was acquired by General Electric in 2005.

• VP Engineering

  Individual Inc.

  (Public Company; 201-500 employees; TOC; Computer Software industry)

  June 1996 — August 1996 (3 months)

  Co-founded Individual in 1988 to bring out the first personalized newspage. In 1996, I was asked to return by co-founder and CEO, Yosi Amram, when the company went public to take the technology the next step forward and introduce Scrum.
  
  Agile development using the Scrum process was introduced at Individual resulting in rapidly deploying several iterations of Personal Newspage and an entirely new product in less than three months.
  
  IDX Systems had been trying to recruit me for a year. When Yosi Amram, the CEO, left Individual in June of 1996, I left to accept a position at IDX.
  
  The Individual experience demonstrated that Scrum is extremely well suited to internet development, even when using older technologies (no Java). A highly productive Scrum implementation can be bootstraped to deliver two new products in three months.
  
  Individual was acquired by NewsEdge which is now owned by Thompson Corporation.

• VP Object Technology

  VMARK Corp.

  (Public Company; 1001-5000 employees; IBM; Computer Software industry)

  May 1995 — May 1996 (1 year 1 month)

  In 1995, VMARK acquired Easel Corporation. Introduced Ken Schwaber to the first Scrum development team and we agreed that he would roll out the Scrum process industrywide. Helped Ken write the first paper on Scrum which was published at OOPSLA'95.
  
  Worked worldwide with VMARK subsidiaries in the U.S., Europe, and Australia to evangelize object-oriented development and Scrum. Ran the first senior management team Scrum to roll out new internet products at VMARK.
  
  VMARK changed its name to Ascential Software and was acquired by IBM in 1995.

• VP Object Technology

  Easel Corporation

  (Public Company; 501-1000 employees; Computer Software industry)

  May 1993 — May 1995 (2 years 1 month)

  Hired into Easel Corporation as Chief Engineer for developing a new product, Object Studio, the first object-oriented analysis and design tool to implement round trip engineering.
  
  Invented Scrum at Easel Corporation in 1993 and used it to deliver two major releases of Object Studio in 1994. In 1995, provided Kent Beck background information on Scrum which helped him with the invention of eXtreme Programming. In 1995, Easel Corporation was acquired by VMARK.

• President

  Object Databases

  (Privately Held; 11-50 employees; Computer Software industry)

  October 1989 — May 1993 (3 years 8 months)

  Developed and deployed the Matisse Object Database, still considered the fastest and most reliable database in existence in $10B nuclear reprocessing plants all over the world. Captures all sensor readings in real-time in these plants, runs lights out without downtime for years at a time, and is 15 times faster than the Sun native file system.
  
  Helped bring in venture funding for Object Databases which created the Matisse Corporation, now located in Mountain View, CA.

• VP Engineering

  Graphael, Inc.

  (Privately Held; 11-50 employees; Computer Software industry)

  January 1988 — October 1989 (1 year 10 months)

  Brought the french GBASE Lisp Object Database to the U.S. and deployed it in advanced technology groups at Boeing, Titan, TASC, American Airlines, etc. As a Graphael consultant, responsible for developing next generation architecture for Boeing Computer Services based on object technology.
  
  This company was restructured as Object Databases and is now Matisse Corporation, a venture backed firm in Mountain View, CA.

• VP Engineering

  Saddlebrook Corp.

  (Privately Held; 501-1000 employees; Computer Software industry)

  June 1986 — December 1987 (1 year 7 months)

• VP Advanced Systems

  Mid-Continent Computer Services

  (Privately Held; 1001-5000 employees; Computer Software industry)

  May 1983 — May 1986 (3 years 1 month)

• Asst. Prof. Radiology, Biometrics, Preventive Medicine

  University of Colorado School of Medicine

  (Educational Institution; 5001-10,000 employees; Biotechnology industry)

  January 1980 — May 1983 (3 years 5 months)

Jeff Sutherland’s Education

• University of Colorado School of Medicine

  Ph.D., Biometrics, Radiology, Preventive Medicine, June 1975 — September 1980

• Stanford University

  M.S., Statistics, Mathematics, Computer Science, September 1970 — June 1972

• West Point

  B.S., Engineering, Mathematics, Economics, June 1960 — June 1964

Additional Information

Jeff Sutherland’s Websites:

• My Website
• My Company
• My Portfolio

Jeff Sutherland’s Interests:

My hobby is a passionate interest in electronic medicine, using electromagnetic devices to eliminate pathogens, affect cellular function, DNA, and protein creation. I am a well known, international leader in this emerging technology area with a worldwide client base. One of my future startups will be in this area as the technology matures.

Jeff Sutherland’s Groups:

Co-Chair, HL7 Orders and Observations Technical Committee, 2003-2007
Association of Medical Directors of Information Systems, 2003-Present
Founder, Agile Alliance, 2001
Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), 1988-Present
IEEE Computer, 1988-Present
Object Management Group, 1990-Present
Chair, Joint Committee ODMG/ANSI X3H2/ANSI X3H7
Secretary, ANSI X3H2 Object Information Management
Director, Smalltalk Industry Council
Secretary, ASC X3H7 Object Information Management
ANSI X3H2 SQL3 Database
MIT Enterprise Forum
Massachusetts Software Council
Chair, ACM OOPSLA Business Objects and Component Workshop, 1995-2000

•    Scrum Practitioners member

Jeff Sutherland’s Honors:

Microsoft Business Framework Advisory Council, 2003-2006
Co-Investigator, OR of the Future, University of Maryland Medical System, 2003-2005
One of the “Most Influential Forces in Healthcare IT,” Advance for Health Information Executives Journal, October, 2000
President's Council, ACCION International, Cambridge, 1992-1995
Who's Who in Finance and Industry, 26th Edition, 1989
Kellogg National Fellowship, an innovative three-year leadership training program sponsored and funded by the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, 1983-1986
USAF Academy Fellowship, Stanford University, 1970-1972
Distinguished Flying Cross, 11 Air Medals, Commendation Medal, 100 reconnaissance missions over North Vietnam, United States Air Force, 1967-1968
Top Gun, RF4C Phantom Aircraft Commander Training Squadron, Mountain Home Air Force Base, Idaho, 1967
Distinguished Graduate, US Military Academy, West Point, NY, Phi Kappa Phi, 9th in class of 600, 1964
Full Scholarship, Columbia University, 1959-1960

Jeff Sutherland’s Contact Settings

Interested In:

• consulting offers
• new ventures
• job inquiries
• expertise requests
• business deals
• reference requests
• getting back in touch