Peter O'Farrell Senior Consultant

Peter O'Farrell is a Senior Consultant with Cutter Consortium's Business-IT Strategies practice Business Technology Trends & Impacts and Enterprise Risk Management & Governance practices. He is also President of Oakhurst Associates, Ltd., a business research and consulting firm specializing in the assessment of commercial and industrial markets. He is an expert on the diffusion of innovation and the impact of new technology in various industries, with a specific focus on the incorporation of technology considerations into business strategies. Mr. O'Farrell also has extensive experience in business continuity planning with an emphasis on facilities. His work requires a blending of market, financial, and technology issues usually within a heavily competitive environment.

In his 30 years of consulting practice, Mr. O'Farrell has advised clients on strategies for accommodating change in their technological, regulatory, and competitive environments. He has conducted survey/interview-based market research studies on the adoption and deployment of new IT technologies, such as expert systems, in diverse industries. These IT impacts also required interviews with corporate personnel and with critical suppliers and customers in order to develop the information needed to assess the likely impacts, both positive and negative, on the firm and its environment. Mr. O'Farrell has served as a board member, officer, and President of the Boston Security Analysts Society and headed up their education program for many years. He holds a bachelor's degree in mathematics from St. Vincent College and bachelor's and master's degrees in mechanical engineering and an MBA in finance from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Peter O'Farrell can be reached at consulting@cutter.com.

For more by Peter O'Farrell, visit the Cutter Consortium Bookstore:

• Architecture and Ambiguity in the Aligned Enterprise
• Building a Safe Information-Sharing Culture

Peter O'Farrell -- In Memoriam

by Ken Orr, Fellow, Cutter Business Technology Council

Grief spreads on the wings of communication. When George Washington died on 14 December 1799, news of his death was carried by word of mouth and newspapers on horseback and on boats across America, and took weeks (months) to reach all parts of that very sparsely populated country. Only 65 years later, word of Lincoln's death took just minutes to cross the continent, carried by the first electronic communication, the telegraph. A hundred years later, word of John Kennedy's assassination came to me from a television monitor seconds after it was announced in Dallas as I walked across a restaurant lounge in Chicago. On 14 December 2005, news of the passing of Peter O'Farrell came to me via a cellphone call from my friend Lou Mazzucchelli. The time for tragic information to move from source to destination has shortened dramatically over the last two centuries but the effect is still the same.

Peter O'Farrell was an engineer, a thinker, a writer, a citizen, a husband, and a father. Peter was truly a 21st-century Renaissance man. Peter was not as famous as he deserved to be, but he was enormously important to all of us who knew him personally and to the thousands who knew of Peter only through his contributions to the Cutter Consortium. While many people in the Cutter world had read his articles and opinions, not everyone knew that Peter was also the husband of Cutter founder and CEO Karen Coburn and father of Nathan and Leah.

Peter was perhaps the nicest, kindest person I know. I don't think I ever remember Peter saying an unkind word about anyone, except an occasional politician or wrong-headed business or technology guru. And he was funny. Peter had a dry, self-deprecating wit that would break up a room of world-famous experts or a family gathering. In an increasingly in-your-face world, Peter was an old-school gentleman. He was gracious to a fault but not in the least wishy-washy or confused. Peter knew what he knew, and God, he knew a lot.

Peter was a member of the Cutter Business Technology Council that I've been fortunate to be a member of for the last half-dozen years. The Council, as most of you know, is made up of some pretty bright and accomplished people (present company excepted). If you attended the Trends Council meetings, Peter would seem to blend into the background -- until he had something to say! And when Peter talked, he always had something to say. And for me, what he had to say was always informed by a mind that had among the broadest range of knowledge of anyone I have ever known. Peter was an engineer and manager by training, but he read everything. He understood economics, he understood politics, he understood history -- but most of all, Peter understood people.

Peter understood that the true impact of technology depended upon how people utilized that technology. He understood the transition from a national economy, in which most of us grew up, to a truly global economy -- for all the good and bad that that observation implies. Peter was always pushing the limits of our assumptions. "What does this mean?" he would say, "What does this imply? What are the consequences?" He was interested in the really big trends.

True knowledge, I have come to believe, only exists in the minds of people. What is written down or captured on audio or video tape are only knowledge artifacts. The knowledge in the minds of living, breathing people is not static or finished. So when great minds are gone, there is a tear in the fabric of the world. Peter's loss leaves such a tear, not only in the fabric of the world, but in the lives of all those who knew and loved him. Our grief and love goes out to Karen and Nathan and Leah and all the people at Cutter. Peter, we will sorely miss you.

-- Ken Orr, Fellow, Cutter Business Technology Council