Meet the experts

Rational software expert: Tim Bohn

Rational expert: Tim Bohn

- Worldwide IBM Community of Practice leader for Systems Development.

- Key leader behind the Model-Driven Systems Development (MDSD) practice.

- Promotes the practice of model-driven techniques for systems and software engineering.

- Author and leader of the Systems Engineering Special Interest Group.

- Creator/producer of the new MDSD poster.

Biography

Tim Bohn is currently the Worldwide IBM Community of Practice Leader for Systems Development. This group is comprised of a diverse worldwide community of practitioners within IBM and its partners. The group helps build expertise and shares a common goal to enable others to achieve real results with Rational tools and solutions. In particular, the systems development community focuses on enabling its members in the areas of:

  • Designing IBM Rational software cross product/discipline solutions to meet client needs
  • Presenting and tailoring the IBM Rational software solution offerings to specific client situations
  • Assessing client development projects and organizations to understand where Rational software solutions or capabilities can help improve business results
  • Mentoring clients through process adoption (including process tailoring and presentation)

Tim also leads the Systems Engineering Special Interest Group. This group is a cross-community group of practitioners who work with clients whose main focus is on systems and not just software. Tim has been active in the systems community for many years, helping customers adopt Model-Driven Systems Development in their practice. Tim has been with IBM Rational Software for 12 years, in both technical and management roles. Prior to joining IBM Rational software, Tim worked as a software engineer and systems engineer for 16 years. Tim holds a BS and MS degree in Computer Engineering from the University of Southern California, where he also guest lectures.

Recent articles

Designing a component-based architecture for the modeling and simulation of nuclear fuels and reactors
Concerns over the environment and energy security have recently prompted renewed interest in the U. S. in nuclear energy. Recognizing this, the U. S. Dept. of Energy has launched an initiative to revamp and modernize the role that modeling and simulation plays in the development and operation of nuclear facilities. This Nuclear Energy Advanced Modeling and Simulation (NEAMS) program represents a major investment in the development of new software, with one or more large multi-scale multi-physics capabilities in each of four technical areas associated with the nuclear fuel cycle, as well as additional supporting developments. In conjunction with this, we are designing a software architecture, computational environment, and component framework to integrate the NEAMS technical capabilities and make them more accessible to users. In this report of work very much in progress, we lay out the "problem" we are addressing, describe the model-driven system design approach we are using, and compare them with several large-scale technical software initiatives from the past. We discuss how component technology may be uniquely positioned to address the software integration challenges of the NEAMS program, outline the capabilities planned for the NEAMS computational environment and framework, and describe some initial prototyping activities.

A successful model for large-scale virtual training
Time and money are two stumbling blocks to conventional classroom training. Leveraging its Communities of Practice expertise, IBM Rational developed a successful online training model that incorporates hands-on collaboration. This article describes this new approach.

An engineering paradigm for Service Oriented Architecture
This article presents an approach for using the IBM Rational Unified Process (RUP) framework in combination with Model Driven Systems Development (MDSD) to reduce risk in the development of Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) components. It also touches on some of the pitfalls associated with SOA development.

Presentations

Products

RUP for Model-Driven Systems Development (MDSD) Plug-in V4.0 for Rational Method Composer
The plug-in library to extend RUP to support systems development projects. In addition to pure systems development projects, this plug-in is applicable to projects that have concurrent software and hardware development requiring more than one development team. It also provides content for handling architecturally significant deployment issues.

A complementary poster to the RUP Poster to hang on the wall and have a handy process reference for the activities of systems modeling.

Books

Model Driven Systems Development with Rational Products Redbook
This IBM Redbooks publication describes the basic principles of the Rational Unified Process for Systems Engineering, which is IBM Rational's instantiation of model-driven systems development (MDSD)

Academic Initiative Contributions

USC: University of Southern California
Computer Science Department

  • Tim has been a key contributor for introducing IBM Rational software solutions which are now used regularly in the Center for Systems and Software Engineering.
  • Tim provides systems and software engineering leadership to USC by contributing the following:
  • Guest lectures, leads workshops, and coordinates with faculty to recommend appropriate technologies and courseware needed to assist required instructional materials.
  • As an IBM Worldwide University Ambassador, Tim helps coordinate other IBM thought leaders and colleagues, such as Dr. Murray Cantor to visit USC.
  • Tim received the very first IBM Worldwide University Ambassador award in 2005 for his work at USC. This award is given to one of the 3,000 plus IBMers worldwide who volunteer their time to work with academia.

USC - Marshall School of Business
Information and Operations Management Department

  • As an IBM Worldwide University Ambassador, Tim has guest lectured for many years as well as helping to introduce other IBM technologies into their curriculum, such as IBM Rational RequisitePro, IBM Rational Software Modeler and IBM WebSphere Business Modeler.

SDSU: San Diego State University
Computer Science Department

  • Collaborating with professor on Systems-of-Systems research.

UCLA: University of California - Los Angeles
Computer Science Department

  • Guest lectures on systems engineering.

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