BRSG principals Alan Strait and Dave Muirhead are experienced business people and technologists with a passion for serving customers through technology. They have 30 years of collective experience delivering open, distributed, object-oriented enterprise business software solutions, with 21 of those years focused on Web technology.
M. Alan Strait, Principal
Alan began his professional services career with Price Waterhouse's Open Systems Initiative in 1991. Since then he has enjoyed a high-tech-ride of learning the hard won and important lessons of employing open technologies to build Enterprise Systems for business. As Principal Consultant, Alan has served in many positions of leadership on behalf of his clients, including Enterprise Architect for GV Labs at US WEST and Application Architect for J2EE vendor GemStone System. As an entrepreneur, Alan is co-founder of two successful privately funded Software-as-a-Service startups: SynXis Corporation in the hospitality Industry (now part of Sabre Holdings), and F4 Technologies (now Rally Development) in the tools industry for lean enterprise software development.
As a longtime software development practitioner, Alan particularly enjoys the process of helping clients organize for continuous and effective change necessary to benefit from Lean Software Development, a process that begins with client leadership and continues through the most junior developer.
David S. Muirhead, Principal
Dave Muirhead is a veteran software development practitioner and business technologist with 16 years of broad, multi-role experience and leadership in the full-lifecycle development of object-oriented, distributed, enterprise applications and web services in numerous business domains, including railroad, shipping container depot, enterprise software, healthcare, hospitality, telecommunications, mortgage and commercial banking and salesforce automation.
Mr. Muirhead has been deeply involved in the development of numerous business applications on the Java/JEE platform since 1997, all of which featured relational databases, distributed computing and web technology, and three of which were hosted, multi-tenant, software-as-a-service products. He also has extensive experience with software product conceptualization, development and management, and has served in leadership roles for two software-as-a-service businesses, most recently as V.P. of Development and Product Architect for on-demand application provider Rally Software Development Corp. Mr. Muirhead advocates and provides coaching on the application of lean thinking to software product management and development.
Our Approach
We approach software development with a commitment to practicing the principles of lean software development, which is directly based on the lean product development techniques invented by the tremendously successful and competitive automotive company Toyota.
The result is that we can deliver high quality software solutions at an affordable price much faster than most software development organizations.
Our Focus
Blue River Systems Group focuses its professional services on imparting knowledge to its clients. This knowledge transfer takes place in the day-to-day delivery of developing enterprise class software to meet a stated business objective, typically strategic in nature.
In short, we have done our job when our client's software development organization can operate productively without us.
Categorical areas where we focus on imparting knowledge related to building enterprise-class software for business include:
* Development of general purpose Object Oriented Analysis and Design skills
* Lean Software Development
* Component-based, Service-Oriented Software Architecture by way of Java Enterprise Edition
* Software-as-a-Service (multi-tenant, hosted deployment and operations)
* Continuous improvement in process, quality and business integration
Our Results
BRSG's approach to software development produces concrete results, including:
* Short lead time from project inception to productively delivering software features
* Highly productive software development environment
* Business-focused design decisions
* Short feedback loops for decision making by both the business and development
* Productive teams focused on business goals
* Transparency and visibility into the software development process
