Harvey S. Gellman
M.A., Ph.D, FCMC

Founder, H. S. Gellman And Co. and Gellman Hayward & Partners
Former Senior Vice-President, CGI Group
Executive Vice-President, Business Development, Alacrity Inc.

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Harvey Gellman is known as the "dean of computer systems consulting" in Canada. He guided many of Canada's best-known companies and institutions into the adoption of computers and information technology.

Dr. Gellman has the distinction of being involved in the purchase of the first computer in Canada, running the first software program ever run in Canada, and obtaining the first Ph.D. in Canada based upon computer use.

Born in 1924, Dr. Gellman was one of five children of Polish parents who settled in Toronto in 1928. He attended the University of Toronto, graduating with a BA in mathematics and physics in 1947. The next year, he was invited to join the staff of the university's Computation Centre, newly established under the leadership of Dr. Calvin Gotlieb to study electro-mechanical devices. One of the centre's clients, Atomic Energy of Canada, and two federal agencies sponsored the purchase of a huge Ferranti computer from England. Dr. Gellman was involved in this purchase, the first computer bought in Canada, for $250,000.

"The machine would fail every five minutes," Dr. Gellman recalls. "We would sit at the monitor and watch the diagonal array of dots, and when a dot dropped we would stop the machine, reset it and carry on. We got an awful lot of work done despite its unreliability."

Dr. Gellman wrote a small program on punch-paper tape to help users print efficiently from the computer. It was the first software program ever run in Canada, and he soon produced the first printout for a computational problem. In 1951, Dr. Gellman attained his Ph.D in applied mathematics, the first doctorate in Canada for which the theoretical calculations depended on a computer.

The same year he became the head of computing for Atomic Energy of Canada. Many aircraft companies and engineers asked him to work for them, and in 1955 he founded H. S. Gellman And Co. Ltd. in Toronto. It was one of Canada's earliest computer consulting firms. Atomic Energy was its first client, and remained a client throughout Dr. Gellman's consulting career.

H. S. Gellman And Co. taught dozens of companies how to use computers. The early work was computing based on mathematical equations, but the firm quickly moved into what became known as information technology.

"We didn't use the label but that's what it was," Dr. Gellman says. "At Imperial Oil, for example, we experimented with transmitting data from Sarnia to Toronto in 1956-57. We called it information processing."

Dr. Gellman was a founding member of the Canadian Information Processing Society (CIPS) in 1958, becoming its president in 1965. He was also a founding member of the Institute of Certified Management Consultants of Ontario (ICMCO) and its president in 1968.

By the late 1950s, large corporations were flocking to H. S. Gellman And Co. for advice on how to manage computers as business tools. The firm was sold in 1964 to a subsidiary of De Havilland, and subsequently to AGT Data Systems. In 1974, Dr. Gellman together with James H. Hayward formed Gellman Hayward & Partners, which grew to about 100 employees before being acquired by the CGI Group in 1992. Dr. Gellman was a senior vice president of CGI until his retirement May 21, 1998.

Since 1997, he has been executive vice president at Alacrity Inc. of Toronto, developing the market for Alacrity Results Management, a set of tools for improving the performance of organizations. He is the co-author (with Alistair Davidson and Mary Chung of Alacrity) of Riding the Tiger (Harper Collins Canada, 1997), a book that helps business managers develop corporate and personal strategies for using information technology.

Dr. Gellman has received many honours. The Association for Systems Management named him International Systems Man of the Year in 1967. CIPS named him an honorary member in 1991. He received the ICMCO President's Award in 1992

He has been married to the former Lily Applebaum since 1946. They have two sons and five grandchildren.

Dr. Gellman made significant contributions to many companies, and helped thousands of people in their careers, but he does not claim to have been a visionary.

"In the 1950s, with all our know-how, we never predicted how quickly the technology would change," he says. "We never predicted the personal computer. And nobody predicted the World Wide Web. But we knew that the computer would have a very powerful effect on our civilization.

"I always put the interests of our client first," he sums up. "In simple terms, I started early and have done good work. It's not more complicated than that."