E. Douglas Jensen is a Director level Consulting Engineer in the Information and Computing Division, of the Innovation and Technology Directorate, of the Command and Control Center, in the DoD FFRDC, at the MITRE Corporation's Bedford, MA, headquarters.

MITRE is a non-profit, public service, corporation charted to work in the public interest on problems of strategic national importance. MITRE currently operates three federally funded research and development centers ("FFRDC's"). Since 1959 it has been an international leader in the systems engineering of large, complex information enterprises, especially (but not exclusively) for:  military BM/C2 and defense intelligence; air traffic control; and modernization of federal government agencies. MITRE has over 6000 employees at approximately 70 locations in the U.S. and seven foreign countries.

Doug is widely recognized as one of the original pioneers and leading visionaries of distributed real-time computer systems. For example, he performed and led the research (the Honeywell eXperimental Distributed Processor (HXDP) [Jensen 74, 75, 78]) and technology transition leading to what is generally believed to have been the world's first deployed commercial distributed real-time computer control system product – Honeywell's H930 combat data system on Taiwan's Yang (Wu Chin III) (ex-U.S. Gearing FRAM I) Class Frigates in 1976. He was also a contributor to the world's first distributed computer control system product for industrial automation, the Honeywell TDC-2000. For his seminal contributions to the field of real-time computing systems, he was honored with Honeywell's highest technical award by judges inside and outside Honeywell. Subsequently while on the CMU CS faculty, he contributed as a consultant to the second distributed computer control system product, the Westinghouse DCS.

His principal interest is conducting applied research, advanced technology development, and technology transfer -- especially (but not limited to) in the field of dynamic, adaptive, time-critical distributed systems for control applications at all levels of an enterprise. He has been conducting MITRE-sponsored research projects for 10 years. From 2006 through 2008 he and his academic collaborating co-authors have published over a hundred research papers in professional society conference proceedings and journals. Currently, he is also examining how civilian and DoD contractor corporations perform research and transition it to their business units. His activities include:

Doug came to MITRE in 1998 from senior research and technology leadership positions at Hewlett Packard and Digital Equipment Corp. where he led development of commercial distributed real-time products.

Prior to that, he was on the faculty of the Computer Science Department at Carnegie Mellon University. There he created and led the largest real-time research group of its time, one of whose achievements was the uniquely innovative Alpha distributed real-time operating system kernel. Keystone concepts and technologies from Alpha –  notably time/utility function time constraints, utility accrual scheduling optimality criteria, and distributed threads – have subsequently been incorporated in the OMG Real-Time CORBA 1.2 specification and Sun's Distributed Real-Time Specification for Java, and in MITRE experimental BM/C2 projects, and in several COTS operating systems, and in research projects at various universities.

Before being invited to join the CMU CS faculty, he was employed in the real-time computer industry, where he engaged in research and advanced technology development of distributed real-time computer systems, hardware, and software for the defense and industrial automation domains.

Kudos

Managers are people who do things right,
and leaders are people who do the right thing

"The literature has been clear and consistent about the attributes, roles, and contributions of leaders. In this formulation, relevant business and technical background and expertise is necessary but not sufficient—the price of admission, so to speak. It is leadership ability that is the differentiator of who will make significant, lasting, and transformational contributions to enterprises and communities. While this does not mean that managers don’t make important contributions, the sort of leadership that we’re talking about is more an orientation and a way of being than it is a set of skills or techniques. During his professional career, Doug has consistently exhibited the key attributes, roles, and contributions of transformational leaders:

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