After obtaining his Masters Degree in Electrical Engineering in 1970 at Eindhoven University of Technology in The Netherlands, Jan Dietz worked as practitioner in the field of automation and information systems. He developed one of the first relational model based production control systems at Philips Factories, a revolutionary computer accounting system at Eindhoven University of Technology, and a terminal-based, interactive theatre reservation system.

In 1980 he returned to academia, where he obtained his Doctoral Degree on the subject of modeling and specifying information systems in 1987. Right after that, he was appointed Professor of Management Information Systems at the University of Maastricht in the Faculty of Economics and Business Administration, where he started the development of the DEMO theory and methodology. From September 1994 on he is Professor of Information Systems Design at Delft University of Technology. His research and educational interests have always been in modeling, (re)designing and (re)engineering organizations, and in designing and engineering advanced ICT-applications to support them. In this area he has (co)supervised over 300 M.Sc.'s and 15 Ph.D.'s.

Jan Dietz has been involved in developing and teaching numerous courses inside as well as outside the university, and he has published over 200 scientific and professional papers as well as several books. He has been the Dutch national representative in IFIP TC8 (Information Systems) for many years and is member of IFIP WG8.1 (Design and Evaluation of Information Systems). He has been lecturer in many postgraduate courses, and he has held several managerial positions in organizing these courses. He has held several commissionerships and he has been chairman of the Dutch national professional association of informaticians. Next to that he is (or has been) member of the editorial board of numerous journals and of the program committee of numerous conferences.

Jan Dietz is the spiritual father of DEMO (Design & Engineering Methodology for Organizations). He is co-founder and chairman of the DEMO Knowledge Center (www.demo.nl) and he has participated in numerous practical DEMO-projects regarding (re)designing and (re)engineering organizations. Since early 2004 he is also the leader of the national research program Extensible Architecture Framework (www.xaf.nl). His current interests are in the emerging field of Enterprise Engineering. He has published a book on Enterprise Ontology, and is working on a book on Enterprise Architecture. To proliferate these ideas he started to set up an international network, called the CIAO! Network (Cooperation & Interoperability - Architecture & Ontology) (www.ciao.tudelft.nl).