John Justice
Vice President

TRADITIONAL BIO
John has over 17 years of technology and management consulting experience spanning the financial/insurance industries, environmental services, and energy industries. Prior to working at Thought Ensemble, John was a senior manager at the Dallas office of Pariveda Solutions. He has delivered solutions in the areas of IT strategy, Business Systems Planning, technology assessments/package selection, process improvement, and Agile software development.
John’s career experience also includes consulting roles with PriceWaterhouseCoopers, Waste Management, Inc., and Cullen/Frost National Bank. He received an MBA from Vanderbilt University and a B.S. in Business Administration from Trinity University in San Antonio. John stays active in both the Trinity and Vanderbilt alumni associations. John also enjoys running, working out, and traveling with his wonderful wife in his spare time.

Achiever, Competition, Arranger, Context, Learner

Extraversion, Intuition, Thinking, Judging (ENTJ)
THOUGHTFUL BIO
I guess you could say my fascination with technology started very early in my elementary years. I don’t remember when I first became enamored with computers, but my father was an aerospace engineer so I’ve been around flight simulators and computers as long as I can remember. By the time I was in second grade, I started using the Commodore 64 (and later the 128). I was fascinated with both the fun and challenge it provided. And even today, I will spend hours assembling or fixing gadgets and technology until I figure them out.
Fast forward to today and I get to work with extremely talented IT folks whose job it is to build the technology and systems that run the business world. Thought Ensemble provides me the unique opportunity to actively work with these technology experts to “fix” issues and push to achieve the best possible result. I’m constantly amazed by my Thought Ensemble peers and their ability to think through the most complex set of problems, churn through enormous amounts of data, and suggest truly unique alternatives to our clients. Whether it’s helping to coax the best out of people and organizations, or devising an IT process or system to improve performance, I really love what I do.
John’s favorite work or projects include:
- Identifying and applying Agile development tenets in a way that fits both the business and IT’s capabilities
- Working with business executives to identify their “must have” needs and the technology improvements required to support them
- Collaborating with executives as part of workshop sessions and pushing to find that salient thought and important “a ha” moment that the client hired me for
JOHN’S THOUGHTS
New Year’s Goals
Another year came and went. Personally and professionally, I have a lot to be thankful for in 2013. Personally, our families and friends are healthy. My wife and I were also blessed to celebrate with some of our closest friends as they took the marriage plunge. We...
Dropbox as the bandwidth cOoKie monster
At Thought Ensemble, we've used Dropbox for almost 4 years so I've seen how the product can support growing businesses as well as personal users. Its functionality has continued to improve though I know it doesn't have some of the security bells and whistles that...
HTML5 is done. Let er rip.
"Stable target"--per the Worldwide Web Consortium (W3C) concerning HTML5's final rollout The HTML5 standard is complete. Isn't that fantastic??!! And with that, developers around the world just started crying about all of the mobile app dev hours they've spent working...
One size fits both, none or all
I noticed this Techcrunch article about Spotify's innovation and development processes a few weeks ago, but some of my recent discussions with clients made it even more timely. The article eloquently lays out an interesting approach to "agile" and "lean" processes....
So this is what VIP (in a smart phone inbox) looks like
I've had the same iPhone for over 3 years. I resisted the urge to upgrade from my 3Gs two times previously. Even though my iPhone had passed the coolness stage in terms of features/functions, I decided to continue upgrading just the OS. The iPhone 4 and 4s,...
First rule about Trunk Club- NO ONES GIVES UP CONTROL TO TRUNK CLUB…well, maybe they do
For those that know me, I like a fair bit of control. Whether that relates to what I'm working on, my daily schedule, what I'm going to eat tonight at dinner, etc etc etc. About the only person who can wrestle that control away from me is my wife...except for...
Mayer’s Lemonade
Now that Marissa Mayer is becoming the next CEO of Yahoo, it made me wonder if the publicity this move will generate is BIGGER than the actual ability of Yahoo to survive in the Web 2.0 world. i.e. does the hoopla outweigh the substance? Yahoo appears to be floating...