Get To Know Alvin
I am a senior analyst in Forrester’s enterprise architecture (EA) priority, providing guidance to technology architects worldwide on evolving a relevant, modern, and valuable architecture practice. Helping organizations transform their IT operating model — in particular, service management, infrastructure and operations, DevOps, migrations, and process automation — has been a focus of mine.
I have spent over 30 years working in high tech, with the last 20 years focused on assisting organizations with their digital transformations through changes in their technology, governance, processes, and organizational structure.
My corporate career started with ASIC verification before transitioning to storage architecture, where I focused on standards (Fibre Channel, SMI-S), interoperability (former SNIA ICTP subcommittee chair), and development (US patent US6742020).
My 20-year consulting career began at EMC Consulting Group, where I focused on infrastructure and process optimization. At Accenture, I served as a technical lead, helping clients integrate acquisitions into their IT organization and infrastructure. And as an architect at Datalink, I developed consulting offerings centered on IT modernization efforts, such as data center transformations and cloud strategy.
How products and standards are designed is not always how they are understood and used by customers. I have had the privilege of collaborating on products and standards and then seeing how they are actually used. Watching how customers are able to innovate and repurpose products and services to meet their specific needs has been a source of both education and inspiration for me.
Alvin’s Research Focus
As part of the Forrester Decisions for Technology Architecture & Delivery service, my primary responsibility will be serving the roles of platform, infrastructure, and technology architects. I will be researching methods, practices, and emerging concerns for those roles, as well as topics such as platform engineering, technical debt, and technology lifecycle management.
The two core questions I aim to address are:
- How does the technology architect choose the combination of current and emerging IT-focused technologies that will provide the optimal results for their organization? And how do they effectively communicate this to their leadership?
- How do these technology choices impact organizations in terms of cost, personnel, time, agility, customer experience, and innovation? This includes using and extending technical debt as a framework for evaluating the impact of IT decisions beyond the scope of just software development.
Because this covers a very broad range of topics, I will be working with several colleagues to ensure that all of Forrester’s subject matter expertise is incorporated into this analysis. Specifically, I will be working closely with analysts Tracy Woo (cloud), Lee Sustar (IT infrastructure and operations), Brent Ellis (mainframe and SRE), Naveen Chhabra (IT automation), Andre Kindness and Octavio Garcia (network), and Bill Martorelli (service sourcing and management) to help create an approach to comprehensively assess the IT options of an organization. And I will be working to show how this framework applies across Forrester’s coverage areas, so I will be engaging with many others to ensure that their coverage and subject matter expertise is incorporated into this approach. You should expect not just reports and blogs but also tools to help demonstrate these concepts and how they apply to your specific needs.
