About Don

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Don and Mary Costello both attended the University of Nebraska and raised their seven children in Lincoln. Six of them attended the University. In his work career Don has mixed his career by splitting his time between the University of Nebraska and the IT consulting business. Each of the children is very successful in the careers they have chosen and contribute to the environments in which they work and live. Don and Mary have 20 grandchildren.

Don is a retired Air Force Intelligence officer. He has worked for IBM and General Electric. His consulting firm has done work for over 100 firms in Lincoln, throughout the USA and throughout the world.

He helped start three Computer Science Departments and three University Information Technology facilities (University of Nebraska, University of Wisconsin – Oshkosh and Madison and Colorado State University). He has taught undergraduate and graduate courses and has done work in research areas of Statistical Computing, Performance Modeling, and Standards for Learning Objects and Managing Intellectual Property.

Don is a Fellow of the British Computing Society and has given IT lectures in England, Ireland, Austria, Germany, India and Sri Lanka. He also held a four-year Carnegie Foundation grant to investigate how Intellectual Property is managed in US Colleges and Universities.

In his business career, he has managed IT facilities, founded two IT firms and consulted with banking, hospital, government and educational entities. His recent consulting includes five years consulting on ERP systems, SAP, as well as being a Technical Consultant on Dotcom and e-Learning projects.

He has worked for the United Nations Development Program and the World Bank. In these consulting situations he has worked in Germany, India and Sri Lanka. His area of specialty here goes by the German Name “Ressortforschung” or research and praxis in improving the intersection between Governments, Industry and Higher Education.

Don currently holds a position as a Lecturer in The Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Nebraska. In 2006 he received a $500,000 grant from the US Department of Education to increase the number of domestic students getting their PhD in Computer Science.

He is working on how to better teach distance learning projects and the importance of standards in the financial and operational modeling of the large systems needed to support new Distance eLearning environments. In the past three years he has lectured in seven US Universities and in five German cities. He has also given a number of lectures to local citizen groups in Lincoln and throughout the State.

The following three paragraphs describe some of his recent activities and his thinking about these problem/solution areas and how they may affect Nebraskans.

Intellectual Property Management

Anyone working as a “knowledge worker” must develop attitudes and work habits that take into consideration the “value” of the knowledge they organize and develop as well as the systems that they build to support that knowledge. Workers in this field have to be taught to take a professional “property “attitude towards the systems they create, modify and use. In fact all the members of the firm must be looking at techniques to ensure the improvement and reuse of the data, information, knowledge and systems that they develop.

The World of ERP Systems

More and more organizations are finding themselves in the need of integrating the general systems (not just IT) that support their complete operations. Citizens find themselves ever more deeply involved in integrated systems that support their town or city. Employees in the IT world often find themselves in an organization implementing an Enterprise Wide system in a Client/Server or distributed systems environment. Universities have to turn their thoughts to the world market and to how they will deliver affordable education through the effective and efficient development of sharable distance learning material through the medium of today and tomorrow’s e-business cooperative sharing paradigms. No one University can develop all the on-line content necessary for an on-line degree.

These systems are often built and configured around a deep understanding of the business of the businesses in which they are working. This implies that the firm (be it government or industry or small business or education) has staffs that hold a complete view of the systems and sub-systems that support their environment and how these systems fit today and tomorrow’s mission of the organization.

The building of complex systems is the most challenging activity facing today’s organizations. This is not a casual or superficial activity dome either by “gee-whiz” boys or the lets get it done in two weeks by uninformed management. My experience has found knowledgeable IT management and Enterprise (University) management talking by themselves in an all too large number of the entities I work and live in.

The approach taken to approaching the solutions to these complex problems will in large part dictate the survival or non-survival of the organization.

The University of Nebraska is in the process of developing a very complex system called NUSIS which will serve as at least the Student Information System of the next 25 years. It is an enormous project because it attempts to integrate all of the Universities in the UN system as well as the State College system. No such system, that imitates what the University is undertaking, exists yet in the world.

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Research and praxis in improving the intersection between Governments, Industry and Higher Education –

Much has been written about the global nature of the challenges and problems facing governments, education and industry. By working in Sri –Lanka and India in the early 1990’s, I saw the approaches that the UNDP and the World Bank were taking in development in what is called “the lesser developed countries”. In fact I saw India take an approach that has literally made that nation a coming leader in the IT revolution. While working in Sri-Lanka I had occasion to work with Arthur C. Clarke (of 2001 and 2010 fame). He oft quoted goal for the future of the country he loved was that “it skip the 20th century”.

While working in Austria for a project with the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA), I helped develop a model where the government of Austria saw their country moving into a negative balance of payments situation because they did not have any significant component of Intellectual Property being developed in the area of software or hardware.

While working in Leipzig Germany on a grant funded by the German government, I helped contribute to solutions to the waive of un-employment that hit Leipzig – Sud ( the region South of Leipzig) because of the closing of the open pit mining that could no longer be sustained in the face of Germany’s commitment to the environment. In that project I helped to elaborate a plan for an Infobahn rather than an Autobahn to Leipzig to help attack the problem of unemployment and at the same time develop some new IP that could make that whole region more self-sustaining.

I helped develop an IT plan where the City of Papillion Nebraska became the first city in the Middle West to develop a citywide approach to networking that eventually modified the design of a then new city library and helped keep and develop firms committed to the Papillion economy.

The University of Nebraska is the Intellectual Property Engine of this State. The way it manages the development of teaching and learning and the way that it manages the development of research will go a long way towards characterizing how much the University serves the citizenry it serves.

On the façade of the State capitol it says “the safeguarding of the State is the watchfulness of the citizenry” We all need to be participating in that watching!