Apprentice Systems

Who We Are

Pragmatic practitioners

We judge our success based on real world results

Abstract thinkers

We're always searching for patterns underlying apparent diversity

Renaissance people

Our breadth of experience is essential to our unique perspective

Our Team Leaders

Debra Walker

Debra comes from a business background. She spent 15 years in marketing and general management positions before becoming CIO for a $15 billion global company. She cofounded Apprentice Systems in 2001, and has been building custom solutions for a variety of clients for over a decade. She wrote "The Shape of Knowledge: A Practical Guide to Transforming Information into Dynamic Solutions", an ebook that describes ASI's philosophy and techniques.

Steve Strong

Steve's education is in engineering and operations research but his work experience has focused on building innovative software solutions for real world problems. He cofounded Apprentice Systems with Debra in 2001. He has led ASI's core technology through several transitions, including the conversion to HTML5 and Javascript. His many clients include several government agencies, with whom he has top level security clearances.

A Few Words About Us

Apprentice Systems was founded with the mission to create Intelligent Systems that solve complex configuration problems. Our first applications were product design and quotation systems, created using our own proprietary authoring tool that captured expert knowledge graphically and generated code automatically. As we created the authoring tool we thought about the general patterns that lay beneath the different product configuration solutions we were building.

One day we realized that the patterns we had seen for product configuration worked just as well for process configuration, only the building blocks were tasks instead of system components or machine parts. To be successful, we built some new relationships, like time dependencies between tasks, but the essentials were the same.

About the same time we started working on process configuration, a law professor asked us is we could help him build models of how the Law worked. We said 'yes' because we could see that building legal arguments had a lot in common with configuring products and processes. In fact, legal reasoning is just one type of decision model that can be constructed using our general principles and easy to use knowledge capture tools.

Over the past ten years we've built custom solutions for clients big and small, for manufacturers, consultants, retailers and academics, and in industries as diverse as automotive, electronics, telecommunications and financial services. Increasingly, we are building general purpose apps available for download and use on computers, tablets and mobile devices. Technology has changed dramatically since our inception, but our mission remains the same: to build intelligent tools that help people solve problems.

Our Clients