David McGoveran (born 1952) is an American computer scientist and physicist, software industry analyst, and inventor.
After graduation from University of Chicago, he founded the consulting firm of Alternative Technologies[1](Menlo Park, CA 1976) under the mentoring of H. Dean Brown and Cuthbert Hurd.
[2] Between 1979 and 1981, he taught electronics engineering in the Professional Engineering Institute at Menlo College (Redwood City, CA) and was Chairman of the Computer Science and Business Departments at Condie College (San Jose, CA), developing the schools bachelor program in computer science.
[3] Alternative Technologies has provided consulting on the design and development of numerous software systems, specializing in mission critical and distributed applications.
Clients have included AT&T, Blue Cross, Digital Equipment, Goldman Sachs, HP, IBM, Microsoft, MCI-Worldcom, Oracle, and many others.
[4] McGoveran's software engineering contributions include a collaborative conferencing system (1978); multi-tier relational CIM (computer integrated manufacturing) system (Fasttrack, 1982); relational access manager (1984–89); international electronic funds transfer (1984); trading systems databases (1986–91); OLCP requirements (1986); an object-relational portfolio management (1986–89); first Sybase SQL Server PC client (1987); client-server API requirements (1988); object-relational API requirements (1990); query optimizer requirements (1990); first middleware market analysis and forecast (1991); Database Connectivity Benchmark (1993);[5] numerous high availability and scalable systems (1994–96); and designed BPMS products and established the BPM[6] category (1998-2000) with HP and IBM.
Date has credited McGoveran with originally suggesting the basic idea for the view updating approach,[33] and which Hugh Darwen[34] says represented a major shift in thinking on the issue.
The result was a set of requirements and a canonical architecture for the then largely unknown business process management system (BPMS).