About
Currently ...
Dr. Stephen J. Andriole the Thomas G. Labrecque Professor of Business at Villanova University where he teaches undergraduate and graduate students about the role technology plays in business strategy and execution. He also teaches business strategy and strategic alliances.
He conducts applied research in business modeling, business technology trends, enabling technologies, technology management and corporate strategy. The Villanova educational and research program seeks to develop and apply business best practices: his work is horizontal and vertical – but always practical. Dr. Andriole’s work at Villanova builds upon his career as a government and corporate R&D manager, consultant, venture capitalist and Chief Technology Officer and Senior Vice President (of CIGNA & Safeguard Scientifics, Inc.). He also consults through TechVestCo, Inc., where, among other things, he helps clients optimize investments in information technology. He founded TechVestCo to provide objective information about technology requirements and capabilities: the services range from corporate technology health-checks to due diligence for technology investors. He also conducts “boot camps” for business technology managers and executives. All of this is based on the monitoring and projection of business technology trends. He is also a Managing Director of The Musser Group in Wayne, PA.
Dr. Andriole is also a director of a number of companies, and serves on a number of advisory boards in the private and public sectors.
Recently ...
Dr. Andriole was Professor of Electrical & Computer Engineering at Drexel University from 1990 to 1995 holding a joint appointment in two academic colleges. The real fun at Drexel was in founding the Center for Multidisciplinary Information Systems Engineering – the MISE Center – which conducted applied research for government and industry in a variety of areas including user-interface design, prototyping and evaluation, requirements modeling and prototyping, software engineering and asynchronous learning. The MISE Center was funded by Ben Franklin Technology Partners of Southeastern Pennsylvania, Merck & Co., Air Products & Chemicals, Computer Sciences Corporation (CSC), the federal government and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, among others. During this time Dr. Andriole also consulted with the Software Productivity Consortium (SPC), CIGNA, the Naval Air Development Center, and the National Academy of Sciences.
He joined CIGNA in 1993 as a consultant and as its Chief Technology Officer (CTO) and Senior Vice President for Technology Strategy in 1995. At CIGNA, he was responsible for the enterprise information architecture, setting computing standards, the research & development program, security and process improvement initiatives. This position was fast-paced and challenging – especially given the size of the CIGNA computing infrastructure at the time (3,000+ professionals, 40,000+ workstations, 3 data centers, 2,000+ servers and a total annual technology budget of nearly $1B), the pace of technology change, and the clash among mainframe, client-server and Internet computing platforms.
Dr. Andriole became a Principal at TL Ventures and Safeguard Scientifics’ Chief Technology Officer and Senior Vice President in 1997. At Safeguard, Dr. Andriole managed the trends analysis process, help set the investment strategy and leveraged trends knowledge onto the operations and strategies of the companies in which Safeguard invested. He also spent a lot of time communicating with Safeguard investors and the investment banking analysts that covered Safeguard. He learned about raising money for public and private companies and participated in several major fund raising efforts for Safeguard: all together, he helped raise nearly $1 billion. He also made nearly forty investments in new companies, as well as some additional investments in companies already in the Safeguard partner network. During his time at Safeguard, seven companies went public. At one point, the value of the companies in which Safeguard had a stake exceeded $100 billion.
Historically ...
Dr. Andriole did his undergraduate work at LaSalle University in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania (from 1967 – 1971) where he majored in liberal arts and business. He received a National Defense Education Act (NDEA) Fellowship to the University of Maryland (in College Park, Maryland). The UM experience was a major one as much because of the location as the content of the curriculum: the Washington, DC area introduced him to all sorts of opportunities. In fact, Dr. Andriole’s Ph.D. dissertation was supported by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the Defense Department think tank that created – among many, many other things – the enabling technology of the Internet. He received his Masters degree in 1973 and Ph.D. in 1974 at the age of 24.
After graduate school, he went to work at a small consulting company in McLean, Virginia – Decisions & Designs, Inc. (DDI). His early work at DDI focused on the design and development of computer-based systems for early warning and forecasting events and conditions in the international environment. He designed and developed one of the first real-time computer-based systems for monitoring and forecasting international events and crises in the 1970s. This system incorporated quantitative indicators, production rules for inferring crisis likelihoods, and an interactive graphic interface. Version 1.0 of the system was developed on Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) PDP 11/40s; subsequent versions were implemented on PDP 11/45s and 11/70s. A microcomputer-based version was developed on a Tektronix 4054; the first working prototype was fielded in 1976. Output from the system was included in President Reagan's daily briefing book.
While at DDI, he also participated in the design and development of a variety of interactive decision aids and larger support systems. Many of these systems were based upon decision theoretic principles, especially Bayes' Theorem, rational choice modeling and utility theory. Some of these early tools included simple decision trees, influence diagrams, Bayesian hierarchical inference structures, and multi-attribute utility assessment models. These and other models and tools were incarnated in computer software that linked directly with analysts faced with complex evaluation and inference-making problems. These early systems represent one of the first attempts to field computer-based decision support systems. The target machines were IBM 5100 and 5110 "desk top" minicomputers; the first systems were fielded in the mid-1970s. They were developed in APL.
Dr. Andriole joined the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) in 1977 as a Program Manager. In 1978 he became the Director of the Cybernetics Technology Office (CTO). As Director of CTO, he managed a research and development program that led to a number of scientific and technological advances and inventions. CTO supported the MIT Architectural Machine Group- (now the MIT Media Lab) developed Spatial Data Base Management System (SDMS), one of the earliest applications of the desk-top metaphor and iconic navigational aids. He also supported the design and development of video disk-based surrogate travel systems, training simulators, and direct manipulation interface devices. He supported the development of Yale's SAM and FRUMP natural language understanding systems, and a variety of decision support systems for option generation, resource allocation, and forecasting. These were fun days – that time at DARPA was about as heady as it gets: next door was Craig Fields – one of the brightest thinkers of our time; upstairs were Bob Kahn and Vint Cerf working on TCP/IP and the ARPANET (now what we know as the Internet); and the DARPA stable of contractors included Nick Negroponte and Roger Schank, among a whole host of other very smart people.
Dr. Andriole founded International Information Systems (IIS), Inc. in 1980. IIS performed research and designed interactive systems for a variety of clients including the Army Research Institute (ARI), the Army's Communications and Electronics Command (CECOM), what was then the Air Force's Rome Air Development Center (RADC; now Rome Laboratory), General Electric, Magnavox and Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC), among other government and industry clients. IIS specialized in requirements analysis and rapid prototyping, and perfected several techniques for modeling, validating and prototyping user requirements. The company also specialized in multidisciplinary systems engineering solutions to complex analytical and computational problems. Most of the systems that IIS designed and developed were microcomputer-based, and nearly all featured multimedia interfaces. IIS was sold in 1986.
Also in 1986, Andy Sage – a systems engineer well known to thousands – invited Dr. Andriole to become one of the founding professors of a new School of Information Technology & Engineering (SITE) at George Mason University (GMU). Andy's vision as founding Dean was that information technology (IT) would drive many older and a lot of new disciplines: SITE was founded on the premise that IT would define new scientific and business models and processes. He was right.
Andy Sage put the School on the map very quickly. Dr. Andriole joined the faculty at SITE/GMU as Professor of Information Technology in September of 1986. Soon Andy persuaded him to take on the Chairperson's job in the Department of Information Systems & Systems Engineering. He was also awarded an endowed chair – the George Mason Institute Chair of Information Technology. The ISSE Department was big: over 800 students, over 30 (full- and part-time) faculty members and over $3M in annual R&D activities. The department offered undergraduate and graduate degrees in systems engineering, information systems, software engineering, and urban systems engineering. The years spent at SITE/GMU were productive: Al Davis, Peter Freeman, Ed Sibley, Larry Kerschberg, Len Adelman, Andy Sage, and Dick Fairley – among others – were all members of the ISSE Department while Dr. Andriole was Chair. He also worked with a number of consulting and technology companies during this period, especially SAIC, TRW, Magnavox and PRC.
Selected Coverage, Press Releases & Speeches
· InfoWorld: CTO Plays Key Role in Investment Strategy
· Insurance & Technology: Former CTO Forms TechVestCo, Inc.
· PhillyTech.com: A Visionary for the Tech Sector
· CIO Insight: The Uncertainty Principle
· Honorary Doctorate from LaSalle University
· http://citrs.villanova.edu:8080/ramgen/sandriol/foxschool.rm
· http://citrs.villanova.edu:8080/ramgen/sandriol/thinkagain1.rm
· http://citrs.villanova.edu:8080/ramgen/sandriol/thinkagain2.rm