Alan W. Brown

Alan W. Brown is Professor in Digital Economy at the University of Exeter Business School where he co-leads the Initiative in Digital Economy at Exeter (INDEX). Alan’s research is focused on agile approaches to business transformation, and the relationship between technology innovation and business innovation in today’s rapidly-evolving digital economy. After receiving a PhD in Computational Science at the University of Newcastle-upon-Tyne, Alan spent over 2 decades in the USA and Europe in commercial high-tech companies leading R&D teams, building leading-edge solutions, and driving innovation in software product delivery.

His work in the USA started at the Software Engineering Institute at Carnegie Mellon University where Alan spent 5 years engaged in federally funded research within several US military programs. He then led research teams at Texas Instruments in Dallas, Texas before joining Sterling Software where he led development of advanced software products and services. Alan then joined a new Silicon Valley startup, Catapulse, in a business development role. After guiding Catapulse through its early growth, the company was acquired by Rational Software Corporation. Following 2 years at Rational, it too was acquired by IBM where he worked in product strategy and delivery. He then spent 5 years in Madrid leading enterprise strategy as European CTO for IBM’s Software group. In 2012 Alan co-founded the Surrey Centre for the Digital Economy (CoDE) at the University of Surrey where he led research initiatives in 4 EPSRC-funded research projects.

The impact of Alan’s research is seen in his research-based consulting activities where he has been advising several startups and engaging with large corporate clients in the public and private sectors including Scrum.org, the UK National Audit Office, Centrica, SAP, Resonate, McLaren, and several UK Government agencies. Additionally, he has published 6 books and numerous papers on software engineering, systems design, and digital business transformation. He was also recently named in the apolitical.co 2018 list of the world’s 100 most influential people in digital government. In March 2019 Alan received a Fellowship from the Alan Turing Institute, the UK national institute for AI and data science.