Dai Clegg

Senior Associate and director of open-source software projects

Dai is a specialist in big data, database and data modelling. He has spent all the 30-plus years of his working life in the computer industry, in public and private sector companies including many years’ experience consulting, teaching and developing software products at Oracle and IBM, and as part of management teams shaping the direction of highly successful and innovative UK and US data start-ups.

Over the years, Dai has garnered wide experience in a range of technical and management roles in software product development, marketing and service delivery. In product development, he has performed all the major roles (from developer to director) for a number of globally distributed products. In service delivery, he has worked with clients in a variety of industries (e.g. CSFB, Astra Zeneca, CERN, Kellogg’s, and British Gas). In marketing, he has built global brands from start-up to multi-million dollar revenue streams.

Dai has been working with databases since the early 1980s. He has been an innovator in CASE tooling for database application design and code generation, a member of the team that designed the Universal Modeling Language (UML) and went on to pioneer SOA and business process automation based on executable UML models, and an evangelist for the value of managing and analysing all kinds of big data.

Dai is a published author of texts on software project management, an international speaker at technology conferences and a guest lecturer at British universities. He has a BSc in Mathematics from the University of Birmingham and an MSc in Computer Science from Birkbeck, University of London.

Pursuing his long-held concern for under-developed economies, Dai directs Evidence for Development’s open-source software projects. He won the inaugural IBM Netezza IDEA award for his vision of a long-term, pan-southern Africa analytic database capable of measuring and predicting the effects of climate change on vulnerable populations, and hopes that Evidence for Development will one day deliver this vision.