About Me

ZIO    

Dr. Olaf Zimmermann1 is a consulting IT architect and senior researcher at the University of St. Gallen (ICS-HSG). His areas of interest include API design, architectural decision management, collaborative modeling, domain-driven design and microservices. As a software architect and industrial researcher at ABB and IBM, Olaf provided design, implementation and application integration services to clients around the globe. He developed and taught middleware and tools for systems and network management before. He co-authored four books, most recently “Patterns for API Design” (Addison Wesley Professional, 2022). Olaf is a certified The Open Group Distinguished (Chief/Lead) IT Architect and was awarded a Best Publication Award at OST and an IEEE Software Best Presentation New Directions Award at SEI SATURN. He is a co-editor of the “Dear Researchers” column in JSS and co-edited the IEEE Software practitioner column “Insights” from 2015 to 2025. Olaf created the method collections Design Practice Repository (DPR) and Ethical Software Engineering; he is a maintainer of the open-source project Markdown Architectural Decision Records (MADR) and the website https://adr.github.io/.

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Contact Information

Please contact me if you would like to discuss any of the topics in my areas of interest and experience:

  • {consulting or mentoring or research} at ozimmer d o t ch

More Information

The Projects and Services page and my blog provide information about my focus areas, including pointers to open source projects. You can also find me on:

Selected presentation PDFs and articles for industry and academia can be found here and here. This is the RSS feed for the blog.

Other Web Presences

My researcher page at the chair of/for Software Systems Programming and Development (University of St. Gallen, ICS-HSG).

Past professional lives:

Notes

  1. Aka ZIO, which was my short name at HSR. ZIO is Italian for “uncle” (“Onkel” in German). And some uncles tend to tell stories. 😉 ↩