Bruce F. Webster is an internationally recognized expert on information technology (IT). He has been an invited speaker at international IT conferences in Russia, Japan, Central America, and the Middle East. At the invitation of the US government, he has given private IT-related briefings to representatives of other nations. He has given presentations at private conferences of the World Bank, the US intelligence community, and U.S. Congressional staff. He has testified about information technology issues three separate times before Congress and has provided analysis and documents to Senate and House committees. Likewise, he has been an invited speaker and participant at public and private conferences at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
Webster has spoken at numerous US-based conferences, including: Mealey’s IT Systems Failure Conference (originator and co-chair); ABA Section on Litigation Winter Leadership Conference; Mealey’s Internet Law Conference; the Blue Cross/Blue Shield Millennium Solutions Conference; the National Association of Securities Dealers Conference; the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business Annual Management Conference; the MBA National Technology in Mortgage Banking Conference; and several of the Software Development and ObjectWorld Conferences.
Webster has been an invited guest on “The News Hour with Jim Lehrer” (PBS), “The Edge with Paula Zahn” (Fox News), “Newsbreak”, “Morning Blend” and “@ Issue” (MS-NBC), and other TV shows and productions. He has appeared in news reports for NBC, CNBC, and ABC, among others, as well as a panelist in a three-hour C-SPAN broadcast. He has been cited in Newsweek, Barron’s, The Wall Street Journal, National Journal, American Banker, and a wide range of radio, magazine, newspaper, and newswire stories.
Webster personally has been involved in developing, delivering, analyzing, and advising on information technology for over 30 years in a broad range of fields: e-commerce, finance, communications, commercial software, manufacturing, aerospace, and law. He has done consulting with or at a variety of companies during the past fifteen years, including Fannie Mae, Sprint, Capital One, USF&G, Northrop Grumman, ARINC, Motorola, MCI, Apple Computer, Borland, NeXT, and Sun. He also taught computer science for two years (1985-1987) at Brigham Young University.
Webster also spent more than a decade in the commercial software market, helping to start up two different software companies and to raise over $7M in venture funding for one of them. He has contributed to over a dozen commercial software products on half a dozen platforms, acting as chief architect twice. He has served as chief technical officer for two different companies.
Since 1980, Webster has written and published over 150 articles on computer industry analysis, product evaluation, and software development. Since 1989, he has authored four popular and well-received books on information technology issues while contributing to two others. In 2000, Webster authored the PricewaterhouseCooperss white paper “Patterns in IT Litigation: Systems Failure (1976-2000)” (PDF, 214KB). Webster subsequently wrote two articles based on that research, one for Mealey’s Cyber Tech Litigation Report and the other for the ABA Computer & Internet Litigation Journal. Webster is currently writing as an IT management columnist (”Surviving Complexity“) for the online version of Baseline.
Webster is Principal and Founder at at Bruce F. Webster & Associates LLC. He provides expert analysis in matters involving information technology, with a focus on system development, project failure, intellectual property, web and internet technologies, and software engineering. He has worked with several large corporations, providing advice on enterprise systems architecture, software technology, development methodology, and intellectual property practices. He has also consulted in several dozen legal cases, both in the United States and Japan. Webster has acted as both an arbitrator and as a neutral expert in IT-related litigation; he has also qualified and testified as an IT expert in federal and state court, as well as in arbitration. He is a graduate of Brigham Young University (BSCS, 1978) and did graduate work in computer science at the University of Houston/Clear Lake City. He and his wife Sandra live outside Denver, Colorado. He can be reached at bwebster@bfwa.com.
