Dr. Salah Bendifallah has joined DL&A after over a dozen years as a consultant in the areas of teamwork facilitation, business process design and change management. He brings to his work a sensitivity to cross-cultural workplaces that is informed by both a broad background in technology and business and a multicultural upbringing.

As a native Berber in Algeria, he grew up navigating three linguistic systems and world views while pursuing his formal education primarily in French all the way through college, where he majored in industrial engineering and informatics. He then worked as a software engineer on a multilingual (Berber, Arabic, French and English) project team, before coming to the United States to pursue graduate degrees in engineering and computer science. He first focused on systems analysis, decision analysis and organizational behavior, and received a Masters degree in industrial engineering from Stanford University. He then obtained a graduate certificate in problem-solving and decision-making as well as a Masters degree in machine intelligence from UCLA. Ultimately, his interests converged in the emerging field of software process management, culminating in a Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Southern California (USC). Inspired by his observations as a project manager in an experimental “software factory” at USC, he focused his research on productive teamwork structures in multi-ethnic teams of software engineers.

Dr. Bendifallah’s experience with cross-cultural business issues spans over twenty five years of involvement in information technology and related industries, including the software, microelectronics, aerospace, insurance, and healthcare industries. In various roles such as software engineer, project manager, college lecturer, senior scientist, interim executive, and consultant, he has gained insight into the pivotal role that cross-cultural interaction plays in the success of projects small and large -- from those undertaken by homogeneous, co-located start-up teams to those carried out by diverse teams spanning multiple time zones or hemispheric divides.