Cogitant owner and principal consultant Mike Boyle has been working in engineering, technology and innovation since joining industrial gases business BOC as an engineering undergraduate in 1982. His early career focussed on the intersection of engineering with information technology, taking a path from analysis and programming (mostly FORTRAN, assembler and C) through project and business process management into running IT services for an engineering procurement and construction office. Following a McKinsey-led business globalisation and transformation project, Mike took a series of influential roles in a new global IT services organisation with responsibilities that included IT strategy, enterprise architecture, innovation and information security. Following Linde's acquisition of BOC Group in 2007 and a great many trips to Munich, MIke decided to step out on his own, setting up Cogitant and offering his skills and experience to an audience drawn initially from his personal network and the BOC diaspora.
Cogitant has provided Mike with some great opportunities to learn as well as to contribute. Technology keeps moving at pace, and staying up-to-date with developments is an essential part of remaining useful to clients. Mike's learning-through-doing projects have included this website (Joomla now running under Docker on GCP, if you're curious), an environmental montioring network for home with multiple nodes reporting over MQTT to a time-series database (InfluxDB) and visualisation (Grafana) server. And of course an annual pilgrimage to SANS Holiday Hack fest.
If you have a LinkedIn account you can see his public profile details at http://www.linkedin.com/in/mhboyle. For a more detailed and interactive view, take a look at the timeline below. The lower bands summarise roles and employers, with more details displayed in the expanded upper band. Just grab and drag the timeline to move around it, scroll your mousewheel, hover and click for more information.
If you're interested, Mike built the timeline using the open source Simile Timeline JavaScript library developed originally by staff at MIT and updated by kusog for touch-screen devices. Every project brings new insight - in this case why you should never write anything complicated in JavaScript. Look what's happened to Twitter.