Bio

Matt Light is Planisware’s Executive Advisor. He joins Planisware from Gartner, where he served as Research Vice President for the Program & Portfolio Management research group and led its cross-disciplinary PPM Research Community for many years.

Mr. Light has proven to be a thought leader throughout his career. His full-length report, Project Management Office: The IT Control Tower was widely influential – #1 on Gartner.com for months after publication – and his Pairing Agility with Quality: Gartner’s 10 Principles in 2005 was the company’s first Research Note on the agile methodology. From 2001 onward, his work on the PPM ‘Magic Quadrant’ drove innovation in that software market, and he introduced and co-authored Gartner Magic Quadrants and Market Guides on ALM (Application Lifecycle Management), Requirements Definition & Management, IT Planning & Control (later Integrated IT Portfolio Analysis), Professional Services Automation, Project Collaboration Workspaces and more. 

Prior to Gartner, in the 1990s Matt led a line of engineering publications including CIM Review at Auerbach Publishers in New York City, and he managed a pre-Web software provider of online consumer information, American Videotex. In the 1980s he managed Computer Currents magazine, was a Project & Quality Manager for the early PC office-software vendor, Select Information Systems, and was a Research Editor with the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco.

Matt Light is not to be confused with the former football player (of the same name) who played for the New England Patriots, though both are originally from Indiana. He holds an M.B.A. from Sacred Heart University (Fairfield, Conn.), an M.A. from San Francisco State University, and a B.A. from the University of Connecticut.