A Personal Note

I hope you will allow me this personal blog post, but I learned today that David Taylor of the PCI Knowledge Base passed away suddenly Tuesday. Dave was a friend and colleague. I was privileged to know and work with Dave. He built the PCI Knowledge Base after a distinguished career at Gartner. Many of you may also know Dave from his not-to-be-missed weekly post at StorefrontBacktalk where he offered factual and often irreverant (Dave had a great sense of humor) observations on PCI in the retail world.

I first met Dave about 3 years ago at RSA. We hit it off and he asked me to help out in a small way on the PCI Knowledge Base. Dave and I did a couple of webinars together, and each was an experience. We never rehearsed as such, but we discussed our talking points, who would talk when, and agreed on the general flow. I never knew why we did this prep since once we started, Dave went off on whatever topic or thought or whim he felt was important...and his instincts always turned out better than my plan.

I shall miss Dave a lot. We saw each other too briefly at the PCI Community Meeting in September, and we spoke just a couple of weeks ago, making plans for him to speak at the Treasury Institute's PCI Workshop this spring. We also talked about general PCI developments and emerging technologies. As always I learned something new.

The world doesn't produce a lot of David Taylors. We are the poorer for that, and we are even more the poorer for his passing.