Bio - Tom Harkaway
Tom Harkaway graduated from the University of Michigan in 1975 with a BSEE in Computer Engineering. He joined Xycom, a leading supplier of industrial computers, in 1978. At Xycom, Tom filled a variety of roles including programmer, customer support, custom product manager, Product Manager, and Director of Engineering & Marketing.
In 1991 Tom became the V.P. of Strategic Development for Xycom, with the task of exploring new business opportunities. While in that role, he formed and led the team that began developing a flowchart-based control software package called ControlSuite.
In 1996, Tom became a founding member of Think & Do Software. Using the ControlSuite team and base code, T&D developed a full featured product that used the newly released Microsoft Window-NT for both the development tools and the actual control system run-time.
From 1996 to 2001, Tom was the leader of the Technical Support Team. This team consisted of 7 support engineers around the country. He traveled extensively and met with many actual and potential T&D customers. He was also responsible for training and the development of customer specific extensions to Think & Do.
During the Dot-Com bust, Tom left T&D and became the V.P. Of Engineering for Keepsake Software. Keepsake was co-located with T&D and had only one customer – General Motors. GM had several assembly plants with 100s of PC-based controllers using a software product called FloPro. FloPro only ran under Microsoft DOS and GM was interested in migrating these systems to Windows. Keepsake Software developed the technology which allowed a FloPro system to be converted to T&D in just a couple of hours.
From 2010 till now Tom has worked as a contract programmer and as the IT System Analyst of a health care organization.