David M. Carlson, Ph.D.

Dave Carlson recently retired as Chairman of the Orange County Audit Oversight Committee (OCAOC) and was its longest serving member; having served more than 20 years. On September 26, 2017 the State of California presented him with a Senate Resolution honoring his services. He was also a member of the Board of Directors, Electronic Resources Limited, a public Singapore company, a member of the Board of Trustees of Adrian College, Adrian, Michigan and a Guest Lecturer at the London School of Economics. In 1990 and 1991 he made presentations in Moscow to encourage them to adopt proposed technical standards. His visits were sponsored by the Central Committee on Publishing of the Soviet Union during General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev’s “Glasnost” and “Perestroika” initiatives. In April of 2012 he was a guest of the Chinese government as a member of a delegation of US business people that attended conferences in several Chinese cities. In Suzhou, China he gave a speech on Customer-focused Cloud Computing with a short introduction in Mandarin. Other travel includes more than 75 trips to Europe and several trips to the Middle East and Asia.

He holds a BS in Mathematics (1964), an MS in Industrial Administration (1966) and a Ph.D. in Engineering (1975); all from the University of Michigan where he also did post-doctoral work in Financial Policy and taught Experimental Psychology and Computer Systems Analysis & Design. He recently took additional academic work in dispute resolution at the Pepperdine Law School and attended the Directors College at the Stanford University Law School Rock Center for Corporate Governance. He is now a first-year law student at Northwestern California University School of Law.

He recently retired from the position of Senior Vice President and Chief Technology Officer of IHS (now IHS-Markit). His responsibilities included all product development, internal business applications, content management systems, worldwide infrastructure and technology architecture and strategies including mobile devices and cloud computing. IHS made 38 acquisitions during this time.

He has also served in senior technology positions in several other companies including Ingram Micro which grew from about $8 billion in annual sales to about $28 billion in the three years he was there. He led Kmart’s technology revolution between 1985 and 1995 and installed more than 20,000 remote computer systems and 50,000 lanes of UPC scanning during that time. While he was at Kmart the company was profitable. As a senior retail executive at Kmart, he was instrumental in moving the industry toward technical standards for product barcoding, electronic data interchange and logistical standards.

Over his career he has managed technology investments, licenses and total spending of more than $4 billion and more than 4,000 professional employees involved with software and infrastructure development and support. He also has managed sales forces for both direct and indirect channels. He has also served as an executive and board member of several start-up companies. He co-founded and had his first successful exit from Information Control Systems, Inc. (Ann Arbor) in 1969.

He has always been interested in business ethics and first taught a class on the subject at Graceland College in Lamoni, Iowa in 1966. 

His industry awards include the Carnegie-Mellon/American Management Systems’ "Award for Achievements in Managing Information Technology;" the Society for Information Management "Partners in Leadership" Award and the Smithsonian Institution "In Search of New Heroes" Award. His contributions to developing and implementing technology standards include serving on the Board of Governors of the Uniform Code Council (Now GS1, administrators of the UPC and its symbol) and Chairing the Voluntary Inter-Industry Communications Standards Committee (now also part of GS1.)

He served in the US Army twice and is a veteran of the Vietnam era.

His book, “Death by Ego, What We Can Learn from Entrepreneurs Who Kill Their Companies with Hubris” was published in April 2018 and is available in both book and electronic forms at Amazon.com. It is now being used in two college level management courses on entrepreneurial studies.

He is a very active member of the Orange Coast Unitarian Universalist Church in Costa Mesa California.