Stephen F. Heffner — Curriculum Vitæ

Stephen F. Heffner entered the computer field in 1963 as a Customer Engineer for IBM.  He has been involved in enterprise and systems architecture, systems analysis, systems design, and software development since 1964, having held positions with Applied Data Research and Dun & Bradstreet among others.  He became an independent systems consultant in 1972; his clients have included large and small firms, governments, and universities, in North America, Europe, Asia, Africa, and Australia.

Mr. Heffner has been an Enterprise Architect since before it was called that. He is a member of the Association of Enterprise Architects, and a co-founder of their Arizona Chapter.  He has written a number of articles about EA:

Consulting activities have included IT audits, competitive evaluation of computer software and hardware, and enterprise data base design.  Mr. Heffner has been designated an Architecture Expert in iCMG's Architect Pavilion™.

Mr. Heffner has served as an Expert Witness in legal cases involving computer software, with report, deposition, and court testimony experience. He has been designated an EliteXpert™ by IMS Expert Services™.

Systems programming activities have included design and implementation of real-time systems, operating systems, data base management systems, computer simulation systems, compilers and interpreters, computer networking, and laboratory and industrial automation.  Mr. Heffner is proficient in over 40 computer languages, including over 17 different assemblers, running on over 20 different operating systems.

In 1977, Mr. Heffner founded Pennington SYSTEMS INCORPORATED to develop and market systems software products and services.  (In 2013, Pennington's name changed to XTRAN, LLC; Mr. Heffner is its President and owner.) He has designed, implemented, and documented a number of XTRAN, LLC's software products, most notably including XTRAN, a software engineering meta-tool that marries compiler and expert system technologies to provide rule-driven automation of analysis, re-engineering, and translation of assemblers, 3GLs, 4GLs, XML, HTML, and proprietary, scripting, Web, data base, and special-purpose languages, as well as data and text.

Mr. Heffner was on the faculty of the Wharton Business School (University of Pennsylvania) in Philadelphia from 1981 as Lecturer to 1994 as Adjunct Associate Professor of Decision Sciences.  He taught a wide variety of courses at Wharton, at both undergraduate and graduate levels.  These included honors courses and advanced seminars in programming and software engineering, data base design and implementation, and information systems.  Mr. Heffner originated and designed a number of the courses he taught at Wharton.  He has also presented, by invitation, plenary guest lectures at Wharton.

Mr. Heffner has assisted Arizona State University and the Arizona Department of Education with program validation criteria for Arizona's Engineering Sciences Program, and with both program validation criteria and testing instrumentation for their Automation and Robotics Program.

A member of the Association of Computing Machinery and the IEEE Computer Section since 1975, Mr. Heffner is Past Chairman of the Princeton, New Jersey joint ACM/IEEE chapter and of that chapter's Special Interest Group for Programming Languages (SIGPLAN).

Mr. Heffner has published magazine and journal articles in the professional media.  He has also participated in international, national, and regional conferences, workshops, seminars, and Webinars, including presentations in North America, Europe, Asia, and Africa.

Mr. Heffner owns and manages the following professional groups:

He also is a manager of numerous other groups, and blogs extensively on the many groups to which he belongs.  His profile is .

Mr. Heffner's résumé is .