About Alan Alper

A content authority with 40 years-plus of professional experience, Alan began his career as a journalist, covering sports, politics and business-technology, before becoming an industry analyst and later thought leadership (TL) architect for one of the world’s largest IT, business process services, and consulting firms.

At Buday Thought Leadership Partners, Alan is primarily responsible for internal operations across the entire thought leadership (TL) development process. This includes ideating, argument shaping and researching breakthrough PoVs with clients, and overseeing the creation of compellingly designed and written high-impact TL assets. In this role, he works closely with Buday TLP’s team of internal content experts and external creatives — writers, copy editors, designers, animators, and videographers.

Previously, Alan spent the last decade and a half as a corporate thought leadership architect, evangelist and storyteller at Cognizant Technology Solutions, a leading global IT, business process and consulting services firm. Serving as VP of Global Thought Leadership Programs, Alan was responsible for developing/disseminating a diverse array of TL assets for all vertical industries, horizontal business units, and geographies. This included primary research reports and white papers; special interest publication; blogs; information graphics; animations; and short-form, transmedia content that integrates, light text, with static, motion or interactive graphics, animations and/or video.

As part of his remit, Alan directed the publication of three award-winning business books written by colleagues from the Cognizant Center for the Future of Work – Code Halos, What To Do When Machines Do Everything, and Monster. He also oversaw all TL-focused live-streaming video webinars, audio podcasts and events, including Cognizant’s presence at the World Economic Forum’s Annual Meeting in Davos.

Alan started his professional career as a journalist at The Albany Times Union (Hearst Publications). He later covered the high-technology industry (first as a reporter and then as an editor) for publications such as Electronic News, (Fairchild Publications), Computer Systems News (CMP Media), Computer Industry Daily (Ziff Davis), Computerworld (IDG), and Managing Automation (Thomas Publishing). Along the way, he also served as Editorial Director at Gomez Advisors, a pioneering e-commerce research, benchmarking, and advisory services firm.

Alan received a BA in Rhetoric & Communications from The State University of New York at Albany.  He lives in Holliston, MA with his wife Debbie and pandemic puppy, Nigel.