With years of experience in Computer Science research and development, Walter Hamscher helps organizations to exploit the cost savings and increased flexibility available to them through strategic commitments to technology standards, particularly with respect to XML-based standards for electronic commerce. His strengths are in communicating technical topics to diverse audiences and in motivating technology teams to negotiate through their differences and follow through with action to achieve mutual objectives.
Walter Hamscher is the former President and CEO of Standard Advantage, a consultancy that helped organizations to achieve the cost savings and increased flexibility available to them through strategic commitments to technology standards. He is a co-author of the XBRL® specification and several other publications of XBRL International Inc., a non-profit consortium responsible for XBRL, the Extensible Business Reporting Language, an open specification for financial reporting using XML. He is a member of the XBRL International Board of Directors and and Past Chair of the XBRL International Steering Committee. Walter has led and assisted with planning, design, and implementation of XBRL and XML systems in China, Japan, the Netherlands, Singapore, Spain, United Kingdom and the United States. He has worked with stock exchanges, bank supervisors, central banks, company registrars, government agencies, niche vendors, professional services partnerships and multinational corporations. He was a lead architect on the XBRL US GAAP taxonomy technical team. He was responsible for quality control in the COREP taxonomies project of the Committee of European Banking Supervisors and is the architect of its multidimensional structure.
Through September 2001, Walter was Chief Technology Officer of Beachfire Inc., where he was responsible for the conception, architecture, and intellectual property protection of the company's unique, human-centric online collaborative negotiation solution. In doing so he led the company through its challenging transition from a B2B marketplace (as eSprocket Corporation) into a software product company with a strong, balanced management team and world-class product and engineering staff. As a strong believer in win-win solutions and the power of standards and industry associations to deliver significant benefits to their members by supporting interoperable technologies, Walter played a pivotal role in positioning Beachfire's XML-based product as the solution endorsed by the International Swaps and Derivatives Association (ISDA) for the negotiation of ISDA master agreements by member banks and trading institutions worldwide.
Prior to joining Beachfire as its first CTO, Walter led several unprecedented technology initiatives at PricewaterhouseCoopers during eleven years of service. As co-author of the version 1.0 technical specification and member of the strategy committee of the eXtensible Business Reporting Language (XBRL) consortium, Walter acted as the consortium's primary evangelist, motivating and coordinating the efforts of representatives from KPMG, Microsoft, Morgan Stanley and other companies representing financial software vendors, users, and integrators. As a member of the team that produces the prestigious PricewaterhouseCoopers Technology Forecast, Walter founded the Technology Due Diligence practice as its first Director, developing a repeatable methodology and building the practice to a million dollar annual revenue run rate.
As Director of Global Research and Development, Walter led the efforts of ten Computer Science Ph.D.'s and M.S. researchers in creating one of the world's first intranet portals using advanced search and retrieval techniques, architecting and managing the firm's first world wide web site, and sponsoring development of the EdgarScan tool for automatic analysis and parsing of SEC Edgar filings. He also conceived of and designed the proprietary technology behind Comet, one of the most innovative tools ever used at Price Waterhouse. The technology is covered by U.S. Patent no. 6,311,166 filed in July 1996. Using Comet, auditors graphically model a company's business processes, and the tool analyzes the ways in which processes could fail and whether the failures would be detected by other processes. Comet was used as a business process design tool, to eliminate redundant check processes and to add check processes where internal controls were insufficient.
Walter earned his Ph.D. and S.M. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He received a B.A. in Computer Science, Summa Cum Laude, Phi Beta Kappa, from the University of Texas at Austin.
