John Dickson is the founder, managing director, head cook and bottle washer, of Caversham Computer Services Ltd, a company dedicated to research and development in Systems Engineering.

Since joining the nascent computing industry in 1967, he has always been at the leading edge of systems research and development, but with an emphasis on the practicalities of transferring the results into the "real" world.

Throughout his career in IT he has been involved in many attempts to find tools and methodologies to address the ever apparent problems of the failure of large scale systems design, development and deployment. In the early 1970's his introduction in a major UK systems house of programming methodologies which were the precursors of object-orientation and XP, proved to be many years ahead of their time. In his paper "Project Management: A New Agenda" which was one of the keynote papers of the 1984 conference of the International Project Management Association, he began to explore the reasons why systems implementations fail. This pointed to some of the key ideas which now form the basis of xSE (eXtreme Systems Engineering) a philosophy and methodology of systems engineering which addresses what he sees as the key reasons for failure.

Since 1995 he has been tracking the evolution and problems of the emerging world-wide web, and developing his views on a new systems architecture, a "collaborative network" as a pattern for deploying a different kind of large scale system hosted on the internet. Further analysis has lead to a model of an instance of a collaborative network - a globally scalable information distribution system GLINT (GLobal Information NeTwork).

With the completion of the development of the first public release of GLINT, in July 2004, he is now looking to work with other individuals and organisation in using xSE to deploy incarnations of GLINT - particularly the 'Global Learned Information NeTwork' and 'Global Learning Information NeTwork'.

His continuing work on the evolution of XSE has finally provided an approach to prevent any more of the large scale system implementation failures which still seem to be in the news every day. He now wishes to work with others on the new generation of large scale public sector systems which are in the pipeline.

He has always seen systems engineering as being enabling technology for organisational and social change, and is increasingly involved in working with both commercial and non-commercial groups in finding ways in which they can leverage collaborative networking (whether computer based or not) for their mutual benefit.