Tom is your best partner

Tom offers a uniquely broad perspective, great instincts, values and integrity, and old-fashioned excellence in what he does.

Tom is among the first to recognize the benefits of using web technology to enhance, rather than replace, the human elements that support and sustain every successful business, community, and relationship.

Yes, Tom has a great resume. Lots of consultants have a great resume. Yes, Tom understands web technology. Lots of technical consultants understand web technology. Yes, Tom has deep business expertise. Lots of consultants have deep business expertise (though wisdom generally requires both age and first-hand experience — quantities that are somewhat less common among web strategy providers).

Tom works passionately to keep your human enterprise human.

What makes Tom different?

Broad perspective

Tom's holistic perspective separates him from your many other choices. Tom offers a uniquely balanced approach of analysis, planning and execution, relationships, and vision. Tom walks you through these four aspects of your business or organization. He helps you analyze your situation, in order to plan and execute your solution. He helps you connect your plan to your vision, while ensuring that it strengthens the relationships that create and sustain your prosperity. Strong analysis is necessary, but not enough. Tom helps you synthesize your direction, so that your technical solutions remain rooted in their human context.

Tom relates your technical issues to your human enterprise.

Great instincts

Tom gets what technology means as well as how it works and how to use it. You can rely on Tom to separate what matters from what doesn't. While your competitors discover — the hard way — that a blog often brings out the worst in even their best customers, Tom gently guides you away from the traps. Why? Because Tom has been there before. Tom is your experienced guide in the wilderness of the emerging web. While the media, competitors, associates, friends and family lurch from fad to fad, Tom helps you calmly pass by the ones that don't matter and jump on the ones that do.

Tom has a long track record of recogizing significant advances, relating them to their human implications, and understanding their deep (as well as superficial) impacts. As a fledgling engineer at Digital Equipment Corporation, Tom was building local area network hardware while the rest of the world was connecting terminals. Years before the Macintosh, Tom was inventing graphical user interface software used by Apple, Sun and Microsoft while the rest of the world was typing green characters onto black screens. Tom was building hypertext systems for scholars ten years before the first web browser was invented. Tom was deploying the first wiki at Millennium Pharmaceuticals, using code shared with him by its inventor (Ward Cunningham), years before Wikipedia was conceived.

Tom understands technology, so you don't have to.

Values and integrity

Tom's core values of relationships, integrity, and excellence mean that he is passionately committed to your success. Tom is a "people" person, who thrives on the success of the people around him. Tom is a scientist and musician who is turned on by ideas, concepts, and their realization. He relies on a descriptive and participatory style, while too many others are prescriptive and authoritative.

Tom is disciplined and rigorous, an engineer who understands that, at the end of the day, even the most exciting new technology has to work.

"Hands-On" excellence

Tom is a "hands-on" guy. His wisdom about technology, business, and people is rooted in 35 years of practical, get-it-done experience. He understands that sweeping abstract principles work best when they emerge from the successes and failures of concrete day-to-day execution.

Tom handles many of your day-to-day technical issues himself. When your situation requires harvesting (and often debugging) third-party code or creating custom technology, Tom does it himself — often drawing on his extensive personal portfolio of solutions. When your situation demands more extensive software development, ZeeForge (Tom's development company) can often provide it.

Like a good doctor, Tom knows when to call in a specialist. When you really need specialized expertise, Tom knows what you need, why you need it, and who to bring in. Tom has been living and working in the Boston area more than three decades — he knows who to call, usually personally.