Haim Kilov has been involved in all stages of business system specification, design, and development, especially and most recently in business system modeling. His approach to business architecture including business and information modeling has brought demonstrable clarity and understandability (by all stakeholders, especially business ones!) to all kinds of specifications. In particular, it has led to substantial improvements in data quality. The approach requires starting from the basics of the business domain rather than somewhere in the middle, and being as precise and explicit as possible. It strives for simplicity and elegance in modeling and is based on systems thinking (for example, Adam Smith and F.A. Hayek), on exact philosophy (for example, Mario Bunge), and on mathematics understood as the art and science of effective reasoning (E.W. Dijkstra). Haim describes it in six books on modeling and specifications he has written and edited and in more than 100 papers, including an article for an encyclopedia (2009). These publications include many appropriately generalized examples from customer engagements. Haim has been the co-chair and proceedings editor of all OOPSLA and ECOOP workshops on behavioral semantics, and has been a speaker, tutorial presenter, and program committee member of many international conferences. He substantially contributed to several international standards on open distributed processing (applicable to any kinds of business systems) and to the work of various Object Management Group (OMG) working groups and task forces.
Haim has been successfully using and extending his approach to modeling in close cooperation with stakeholders, including senior ones, for large financial, insurance, telecommunications, and other institutions, and does research and consulting in the areas of business and information modeling. He has prepared an innovative curriculum based on his contributions, and has been teaching data and knowledge management at Stevens Institute of Technology, within the framework of the Master of Science in Information Systems program, for numerous groups of students in executive information management programs on and off campus at financial, telecommunications, and pharmaceutical firms such as Citi, UBS, Verizon, Merck, and others in the New York metropolitan area. He has been affiliated with Bellcore, IBM, Merrill Lynch, and Genesis/IONA Technologies.
His current interests are in the areas of modeling complex evolving systems (such as enterprises), especially in deep conceptual commonalities in the modeling of business and IT artifacts. In addition to Computing Reviews, he also reviews for Zentralblatt f¿r Mathematik. His favorite authors include, among others, Lewis Carroll, Adam Smith, Friedrich August von Hayek, Mario Bunge, and Edsger Wybe Dijkstra.