Dean Ford, CAP, PE, is an author, automation industry thought leader, and digital transformation consultant with more than 30 years spent helping the world’s manufacturers and utilities solve their toughest operational problems. A licensed Professional Engineer in 24 states and a Certified Automation Professional (CAP), Dean has built and led sales, operations, and engineering teams through start-up, turnaround, and high-growth phases at firms ranging from regional integrators to national consultancies. His work spans the food and beverage, consumer packaged goods, automotive, chemical, oil and gas, and water and wastewater sectors. Time and again he has taken organizations from a single client or office to multi-site, multi-million-dollar operations, earning a reputation as a decisive, hands-on leader who pairs deep technical command of process control and industrial IT with sharp business instinct.

Today Dean channels that experience into two companies he co-founded. At Muddy Paws Automation, he leads an operations-first consultancy that acts as digital transformation engineers for plant systems and water utilities — delivering assessment, implementation, and management services grounded in the conviction that lasting results come from spending real time with the operators who must live with the systems. At OTEMIS, he is building an AI-powered observability platform that correlates fragmented IT and OT data with physical process behavior in real time — surfacing root causes of downtime in seconds rather than hours, hardening converging cyber-physical networks, and capturing the institutional knowledge walking out the door as a generation of veteran operators retires. A widely read author and frequent commentator on the future of the field — through pieces such as “Who Owns Your Career?” and “We Have a Demand Problem with the Automation Profession” — he speaks candidly on digital transformation, IT/OT convergence, workforce and knowledge retention, and the leadership obligations of a maturing industry.

Background & Affiliations

A longtime champion of the profession, Dean is a Senior Member of the International Society of Automation (ISA) who has held senior leadership roles including VP of the Image and Membership Department and Chair of the CAP Steering Committee, chaired the American Water Works Association’s Water Utility Technology and Automation Committee, served on the Automation Federation’s Government Relations Committee, and received the Nels Tyring Award. He holds an Executive MBA from the University of Maryland’s Robert H. Smith School of Business and a B.S. in Electrical Engineering from the University of Missouri (Missouri S&T), where he now serves on the Academy of Electrical and Computer Engineering.