I have been very fortunate in both my private and business life. In my private life, I have great friends, fantastic children and a very supportive family. In my career, I have had many opportunities in multiple diverse industries which has afforded me a large variety of experiences enabling my professional growth.
Founder/CEO
Out of college, I had the opportunity to start a custom software company providing automation to manufacturing companies. Our largest customer was Linde a division of Union Carbide. We provided CAD/CAM software for numerical cutting machines that they sold globally. This experience definitely gave me insight into the do’s and don’ts of running a business. After several years, I sold the company and started a small consulting company. We provided business process reengineering and various program/project management services. Several of our clients required help with integrating disparate systems and designing custom applications. I later decided to become an independent consultant and had an opportunity to offer my services to one of the largest systems companies in the world at the time.
Working for Great Companies
One of my consulting engagements lost their Vice President/Chief Information Officer and I was asked to fill the spot.The company was eventually acquired and I was offered the CIO/CISO position with my current employer. My current employer has given me enough autonomy to implement an infrastructure, development and support processes and systems that add true value to the organization. In addition, I have been given the latitude to run projects outside of the strict Information Technology domain including operational efficiency strategies and financial procurement controls. This autonomous lattitude enabled us to develop a customer facing system that we eventually turned into a revenue generating product offering that was spun off into its own P&L. I am always looking for new opportunities in life and I cannot wait for the next adventure.
2004-Present
Report directly to the CEO and President of this publicly traded international logisitics/aviation transportation provider. Responsible for all systems evaluation and procurement, hardware infrastructure, software design and development, data and voice connectivity, cyber security analysis and abatement, and regulatory compliance.
Created an agile approach to custom software development providing the ability to dynamically work on multiple simultaneous projects drastically reducing time-to-product.
Lead a Cost Reduction and Efficiency program to reduce direct and indirect costs through vendor negotiations, vendor replacement, and process efficiencies. This program results in millions of bottom-line savings per year.
Automated system access and change management processes reducing Sarbanes Oxley reporting complexities and improving regulatory compliance requirements (bi-annual external audits since 2004 have resulted in 0 findings).
Instituted multiple automated cyber security systems and developed several internal and external testing scenarios and procedures for intrusion detection and mitigation.
Implemented a large ERP system and developed custom integration and reporting systems.
Developed several custom vendor and customer facing systems. Vendor B2B systems have significantly reduced inventory and procurement costs.
Created a disaster recovery/failover architecture using virtual redundant systems across data centers in Lafayette and Phoenix Arizona.
Initiated, designed and co-developed the Helipass kiosk system.
1999-2004
Reported directly to the CEO/President of this global engineering firm. Responsible for all US and international systems, budgets, and over 100 technical personnel located in 23 offices worldwide.
Implemented several large ERP systems including Oracle HR and Financials.
Created an enterprise decision support team representing engineering, finance, HR, and executive management.
Renegotiated multiple vendor contracts resulting in millions in savings per year.
1994-1999
Information systems consulting company specializing in multiple large software development projects.
Provided program management services for Unisys Corporation on multi-million dollar government contracts. Handled all customer expectations and coordinated all systems development activity using multiple teams located in the US and Chennai India.
1985-1994
Custom software and systems development company specializing in robotic/numerical systems automation.
Invented the Grafion graphical design and machine control system. Supplied software to Linde a division of Union Carbide.
Business Success Model
Operational Performance Management
Cost Efficiency Management
Value Chain Optimization
Creative Problem Solving
DevOps
The Business X.0 Success Model reflects the prerequitsites of toady's business environment for a company to be ultimately successful. Relentless customer focus in all endeavors, an innovative vision with futuristic insight, creative design that appeals to the target market, agile implementation to meet market demands, and iterative performance management to ensure maximized efficiencies.
A company's vision can no longer follow the standard 'Provide quality goods and services to our customers and return on investment to our stakeholders'. Today's corporations must have an innovative/entreprenueral vision that seeks to disrupt the marketplace.
Balanced scorecards, key performance indicators, and dashboards are all tools that can create a visualization of the strategic initiatives and measurements that an organization has identified to manage their company. Each tool has unique properties and capabilities and should be used in concert to create a complete and holistic picture of what is measured, how it is measured, and how the measurements translate into results.
A balanced scorecard is used to identify benchmarks or focus areas where performance should be measured. Scorecard categories are developed using the strategic goals and objectives of the organization. The term “balanced” refers to the fact that interaction and influence exists between functional areas and success within one category of performance does not guarantee the fulfillment of achieving the overall goals of the organization. A balanced scorecard is traditionally divided into 4 perspectives: 1. Financial 2. Operations, Business Processes 3. Employees, Training and Innovation 4. Customers, Market Share and Satisfaction
Key performance indicators (KPI)s are based on an organization’s strategic goals and objectives and must be quantifiable. Using the Balanced Scorecard as a starting point, key performance indicators can be selected that best reflect the measurement side of the focus area or perspective. For example, a company setting a monthly target of revenue based on an aircraft would create a KPI that would measure the under achievement, achievement, or over achievement of the goal amount.
A KPI can be considered either a trailing or leading indicator. Financial metrics like revenue are typical trailing indicators distinguished by the lag between the events that create the measurement and the final result. Leading indicators are often operational and can give a closer to real-time picture of what is occurring in an organization. For example, flight hours and aircraft utilization can be calculated on a daily basis. Leading performance indicators can be more useful than trailing indicators, however, care should be taken in reacting to fast changing indicators. Cause and effect should always be considered when making business adjustments based on KPI results.
A performance dashboard is a visual tool that creates an intuitive representation of the performance indicators selected to measure the success or failure of achieving the organization’s strategic goals and objectives. Based on the KPI metrics that represent the balanced scorecard initiatives, the dashboard uses graphs, charts, gauges, and other visual tools to quickly and easily communicate how well (or poorly) the organization is performing. Performance dashboards offer multiple benefits to an organization: 1) Communicates Strategy 2) Increases Visibility and Transparency 3) Increases Coordination 4) Displays a Consistent View of the Business and 5) Delivers Actionable Information.
A cost cutting initiative involves multiple phases of coordinated and planned activities. In addition to reducing costs, a company should concentrate on improving efficiencies, enhance vendor relations and performance, and establish a corporate culture of cost/value awareness. All of this must be accomplished without sacrificing safety, quality or customer satisfaction.
Start with a Cost and Efficiency Framework that outlines the phases and steps required to perform a thorough analysis and implementation of a cost cutting initiative. The Framework contains 4 phases:
1. Preliminary Analysis (allow approx 3 weeks)
2. Baseline Business Model Opportunities (allow approx 4 weeks)
3. Recomendations and Action Plans (allow approx 4 weeks)
4. Design and Implementation (allow approx 3-6 months)
Phase 1 of the Cost & Efficieny Framework - Preliminary Analysis includes 4 tasks:
1. Initial assumptions of business expenses
2. Preliminary data gathering of expenditures
3. Define a process for analyzing data and forming conclusions
4. Create a high-level work-plan
Historical information concerning costs will provide answers to several questions concerning current expenses that might not have been originaly apparent:
1) Are certain expenses trending up or down?
2) How do expenses correlate to revenue or provide value?
3) How do expenses compare to employee count and assets?
4) What is the rate of annual cost increase by expense category?
5) How do expenses compare to industry benchmarks or standards?
THe Opportunity Identification phase of a cost reduction effort includes 6 primary tasks:
1) Creat a baseline cost model
2) Analyze Service Delivery
3) Define a business model
4) Perform benchmark comparisons
5) Define cost reduction opportunities
6) Define process improvement opportunities
The 3rd phase of a cost reduction effort is focused on developing recommendations and actions plans.
Using the opportunities identified in the previous phase, an action plan should be formulated. The action plan should include:
1) Recomendations for vendor negotiations (RFP, Contract Terms, etc.)
2) Efficiency improvements in new proceccesses and automation
3) Reductions in unnecessary and/or low-value expenditures
The final phase of a cost reduction effort involves constructing and implementing the action plans developed in the previous phase of the cost efficiency framework.
Implementation should center around 5 action plans that address:
1) Company-wide cultural realignment
2) Vendor transformation and change management
3) Labor cost management
3) Business process rennovation
3) Governance and continuous improvement
The book “Competitive Advantage” by Michael Porter describes the concept of a value chain as the set of tasks required to create a value proposition for consumers. In other words, by placing a quantitative value on the inputs: human resources, capital, raw goods, equipment, etc. required to provide output: services or products and by optimizing the conversion of the input value to the output value, a company can create a competitive advantage.
The original concept of the value chain included Primary Activities and Support Activities. Primary Activities include Inbound Logistics, Operations, Outbound Logistics, Marketing & Sales, and Services. Support Activities include Infrastructure, Human Resources, Technology, and Procurement. The dependency of an organization creating value through each activity will vary based on market, products, and customers.
Most organizations do not have a clear picture of their value chain. Analysis is required to identify the key elements that comprise both the Primary Activities and Support Activities that create value for the company. Identified elements must then be broken down into their source of value, which can have tangible and intangible beneficial attributes. Tangible attributes directly contribute to producing products and services. Intangible attributes are indirectly related to delivery of product or services and are usually classified as “part of doing business”.
Once the key elements that comprise the Primary and Support activities have been determined, links between the elements should be identified. Each element of an activity has inputs that are received from other activities and outputs that are provided to other activities within the value chain. Optimizing efficiencies between these links will improve the overall value generated by the entire organization.
To maximize the benefits of Value Chain optimization, it is necessary to combine the analysis with a Business Process Reengineering (BPR) effort. The book “Reengineering the Corporation” by Hammer and Champy, emphasized the redesign and restructuring of business processes to lower costs and improve services within an organization. Using the principles of BPR in conjunction with Value Chain optimization provides a richer holistic approach to improving an organization’s efficiencies, quality, products and services.
Typically, BPR is structured around 7 principles identified to streamline processes and optimize efficiencies:
1. Organize for outcomes not tasks
2. Identify and rank processes in order of redesign necessity
3. Integrate and automate information processing
4. Treat remote resources as centralized
5. Link activities instead of results
6. Decision and control should be built into the process
7. Capture data once at the source
Implementing Value Chain optimization can be resource and time consuming but will ultimately provide valuable insight into the inner workings of an organization and significantly add to the profitability of a company.
Value Chain optimization and BPR exercise will require 4 success factors:
1. Executive management support
2. Change and goal alignment at all levels of the organization
3. Active participation by upper, lower, and line management
4. Teams composed of subject matter experts, process engineers, and data analysts
The ever changing business landscape is riddled with fierce competition, stifling regulations, and disruptive market forces that require a totally new way of doing business.
“How do we tackle the problem of maximizing opportunities from today’s challenging business environment?”
Brainstorming can be an individual or group activity. Group brainstorming tends to provide a more varied and creative solution set with results dependent upon the diversity of the group members. Group members with different personalities, backgrounds, and expertise will be more original and inventive.
Let's look at the more common approaches to brainstorming sessions.
1. Roll Playing – Approach a problem from another person’s point of view or pretend to be a famous person, historical figure, or a fictional person such as Bat Man or Wonder Woman.
2. Flipping – Opposite of trying to solve the problem. Develop ideas that actually increase the problem, make it more severe, or complicate the problem further. Provides a stronger perspective of what not to do.
3. Time Travel – Approach the problem if you could time travel to the future or the past of 10, 20, or 50 years.
4. SWOT – Considering Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats.
Additional approaches to brainstorming sessions include:
5. Abundant Resources – Imagine unlimited money, people, and supplies are available to you.
6. Mind Mapping – Start with a primary objective and branch out with as many possible solutions that you can think of.
7. Scope – Make the problem smaller, bigger, more expensive, less expensive.
8. Contrast – Use a random word, picture or other catalyst unrelated to the problem to stimulate your creative thinking.
Creating a focused and open environment is critical to a good brainstorming session. Common participant obstacles include:
1. Controller Participant – A participant who tries to take charge and push only their ideas.
2. Brown Nosing – Participants that are trying to impress the boss with their ideas.
3. Unfocused – Participants that are not embracing the goals and objectives of the session.
4. Flippant/not Serious – Participants need to be genuine, sincere, and thoughful in expressing their ideas.
Senior management should express their commitment to the objective of the brainstorming sessions by providing a concise statement of the problem, issue, or concern that the group is attempting to solve. Senior management should not offer their thoughts or solutions because it will bias the outcome of the session.
DevOps is a term used to describe the holistic approach of combining IT infrastructure design and allocation with accelerated software development and quality assurance. Typically, DevOps provides the ability to rapidly ramp-up computing and network power to accommodate agile software development and deployment efforts.
Rapid configuration of processing resources is accomplished using newer cloud technologies combined with automated configuration of virtual environments. Many companies are turning to a combination of Public/Private and hybrid cloud environments to provide a rich and versatile platform for software development and deployment.
The DevOps environment uses Agile software development techniques to streamline the production process. Agile involves an iterative approach to development involving customer participation, rapid prototyping, and incremental expansion of product capabilities. This provides an environment of real-time innovation and increased customer satisfaction with the final product.
Establishing a software architecture with a well-defined blueprint of coding standards is imperative to creating a successful team development environment. This will ensure that all developers work in concert on a project as part of a cohesive collective. Established coding practices provide long-term maintainability and a robust automated solution.
Utilizing a set of development tools not only helps establish coding standards but also provides a head start on most software development projects. Open source code and rich graphical interface libraries that have been created for modern “mobile-first” solutions should be a mainstay of the developer team’s arsenal. In addition, collaboration tools with version control and check-in/check-out features are a necessity for multi-person development efforts.
A fundamental aspect of a strong DevOps program is quality control and assurance. Iterative testing of software and systems combined with performance tolerances and user acceptance are key to delivering a customer-satisfying and successful product. DevOps requires continuous software testing including unit, peer, owner, and automated test systems that identify system weaknesses and software bugs. Often overlooked, integrated system testing with performance metrics and final user acceptance are crucial to releasing a quality product into the production environment.
One of the benefits of a well-planned and efficient DevOps program is the ability to accurately develop and control a transparent budget. Often, software systems projects are plagued with scope creep and cost overruns. Implementing DevOps with proper project controls can ensure that the scope and budget are closely monitored and managed. In addition, establishing performance criteria with measurement systems and a rich support system will help guarantee a successful product and satisfied customers.
Vendor Management
Leadership
Business 2 Business Systems
(June 15th, 2017) The Economist magazine recently ran an article discussing "Gedankenexperimente" or thought experiments. These are experiments that scientists use as a what-ifs and tend to be theoretical only.
Show More(June 10th, 2017) Barte de Langhe, Stephano Puntoni, and Richard Larrick discuss the phenomenon of how the human brain tends to assume a straight line between variables and outcomes (Linear Thinking in a Nonlinear World HBR June 2017).
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(June 2017) “The Hidden Reality” by Brian Greene – Brian Greene does an excellent job of presenting arguments based on theory and experimentation that suggest that our perception of reality may not be accurate.
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