Led the strategic and organizational restructuring of the technology function for the North American region. Formed one national organization from over ten independent teams. Won global corporate commitment to strategic roadmaps for card personalization systems, information technology, back-office systems (ERP), and e-Business. Reduced headcount by 30% and payroll costs by 45%, without compromising service levels.

Key participant in the development and execution of a two-year strategic plan for the card personalization & fulfillment division, a $60MM business spanning five sites. Seeking to triple profitability in two years, the plan called for restructuring around five sectors (financial, wireless, telecommunications, healthcare, and government) and consolidating disparate, aging systems. Midterm results were excellent: Closure of one site, with migration of profitable customers to other sites and systems, improved bottom-line profit by 50%. Systems consolidation and pruning of unprofitable customers at two other sites were well underway, with an expectation of on-time completion in 2003.

Managed a national initiative that reduced telecommunications costs by about 40%. Replaced a 200+ extension, Centrex system with a PBX at the regional headquarters. Replaced six local and long distance service providers with a single, national provider, and negotiated very low rates. Migrated from four Internet service providers to one.

Established a Technology Project Office that provided a project portfolio dashboard, basic resource tracking and forecasting, and process management for new project and product requests.

Led design, technology selection, and implementation of a complete rewrite and physical relocation of PhonePIN, an interactive voice response (IVR) system that allows consumers to conveniently and securely change their credit and debit card PINs.

Coordinated global development of PC software for use with smart Visa compliant cards. The software allows consumers to store personal information (i.e., dates, contacts) on their card.

Coordinated all product development efforts of the company's core offering, InsureStream, from a prototype phase to commercial availability. InsureStream was an Internet application that provided five lines of submission & review and rate & quote for the property & casualty segment of the global insurance industry. Managed an internal team of five, two development partners (with staffing of 20-25), and a development burn rate of over $500,000 per month. Most challenging was setting and achieving service level objectives (e.g., integrity, reliability and availability) to which our customers could commit their core business.

Led selection of Great Plains for the company's financial systems. Designed and led development of the transactional and billing integration between the financial systems and InsureStream.

Developed a customer service strategy to support a target customer base of thousands of agents and dozens of insurance companies. Seeking to offer high quality support with a low per-incident cost, the strategy emphasized a call center that could interact with customers via Internet chat, telephone, and e-mail. Gathered requirements and started technology selection for call center technology, including automated call distribution (ACD) and customer relationship management (CRM) systems.

Provided day-to-day leadership to build and run the company. This included: planning; budgeting; setting goals and expectations for the team; presenting the vision to investors, partners and customers; prioritizing; troubleshooting; managing vendors; recruiting; and setting compensation.

Led a security and application integrity assessment sponsored by the Board of Directors. Made recommendations to the Board and CIO, and was retained to assist with several initiatives. This project started my involvement with the company, which lasted until they were acquired.

Led a client-driven, crisis-response "death march" to develop an Internet application for the private placement of capital. A mission-critical component of their business strategy, the application promoted deals to the public, qualified investors, allowed investors to express interest in deals, allocated shares to investors, and managed communications with investors. Placed in charge by the new COO after a management changeover and the walkout of the entire development team, successfully delivered a working application in five weeks after abandoning nine months of flawed development. The application worked well and was used without major modification for several private equity transactions over a nine-month period.

Led the knowledge and equipment transfer of the company's application development environment from a departing team in Los Angeles to a new team in San Francisco.

Brought critical gaps in the company's strategy to the attention of top management, and was engaged to facilitate the development and implementation of business and product strategies. The results, in part, led to their profitable acquisition.

Chaired the Risk Management Committee for new product development. Devised and implemented the control and review processes that reduced implementation risks.

Engaged several product managers and assisted them in preparing market segmentation and positioning studies for four product lines (private placement, IPO placement, directed/affinity share programs, and on-line research). Subsequently, provided oversight and facilitation services as these managers rolled out their products.

Recommended the formation of a Project Management Office to top management and was retained to build and staff the department. Built a team of four that provided project support services for the product development and engineering teams.

Led a five-person team to address the process and quality concerns of the product development organization (roughly 300 engineers). Diagnosed these concerns as stemming from rapid growth and time-to-market demands, and recommended a program to mature and improve their development methodologies. Worked with subject matter experts to prepare a framework for the rapid design and deployment of e-Business products. The framework integrated the following concepts: product development lifecycle; quality assurance; continuous improvement; training; communications with and involvement of stakeholders; roles and responsibilities; accountability; shared vision; project scope and methodology; and standards and architecture. Facilitated meetings with key managers to gain universal management commitment to the framework. Led preparation of methodology documentation. Established a realistic implementation plan for the framework and provided oversight of the change leadership team during rollout.

Created a six-person Project Office team, whose mission was to improve delivery of new products by: providing project expertise and oversight; tracking status across the entire portfolio of projects; facilitating senior management in managing the project portfolio; identifying and escalating resource and priority issues; coordinating new project requests; and acting as a repository of best practices.

Directed up to five project managers, whose projects included: selection of enterprise project management software, integration with ECN partners to provide after-hours trading, selection of trading system technology, assessments of system architecture, implementation of WebTrust certification, assessments of call center systems, and development of an intranet portal.

Took leadership of AutoTax, a troubled software product that was over two years late for a release originally scheduled to take three months - and delivered two on-time releases over a six-month period. AutoTax was an Internet accessible suite of tax processing services provided to large corporations that internally processed payroll (and hence were not already existing customers). Because of its potential to gain market share, the project was highly visible to executive management. Managed a team of two project managers, two project analysts, and a cross-functional team spanning four departments.

Resolved several challenges intertwined with the delivery of AutoTax: established a product vision and strategy; performed a detailed security assessment and addressed security concerns; facilitated culture changes for an operations-focused, back-office team seeking to directly offer products; transferred knowledge and capability to key employees; resolved critical communications infrastructure and application architecture issues across departmental fiefdoms; and introduced product-centric development methodologies and documentation standards.

Led three analysts in preparing a strategy and migration plan to meet the application and connectivity needs of over 3,000 field agents. Performed a segmentation study of the user community and their application usage, then gathered and gained broad approval for a detailed set of requirements. After weighing alternative approaches, recommended a breaking-edge solution for the times: Virtual Private Networking (VPN) using PPTP over the Internet, with SecurID providing strong authentication. This may have been the first major insurance company to provide secure remote access over the Internet.

Led a team of five to build the proposed VPN infrastructure and pilot a 30 user implementation. The implementation allowed agents to remotely access a heterogeneous application environment that included: Lotus Notes, Novell Netware, an intranet, a Windows NT Domain, Unix servers (via client/server and telnet), and an IBM mainframe (via 3270 emulation). Detailed system and security testing was provided, as were operating and rollout procedures.

Lead analyst and project manager for the design through implementation of the Secure Client, which was the core of a $10MM information protection initiative. It controlled access by customers, competitors, and foreign nationals to highly proprietary and export constrained information. Based on the Distributed Computing Environment's (DCE) suite of enterprise security services, it managed and tracked access to: intranet applications, Unix client/server and telnet applications, electronic mail, database systems, and Novell and NT file services. Activities included: requirements gathering, business case preparation, systems design, staff management, presentations to management, application development specification and oversight, infrastructure development, support organization instantiation, testing, rollout planning, and implementation.

Assessed the security of a regional bank's Internet banking service, and presented the findings to the Audit Committee.

Performed a strategic assessment and recommendation regarding a single sign-on (SSO) solution for their highly heterogeneous computing environment. Participated in forming a strategic partnership with IBM to provide SSO services, and subsequently influenced the architecture and functionality of the IBM Global Sign-On product. Leading a team of two analysts, designed and implemented a proof of concept laboratory that demonstrated SSO and its underlying business case.

Lead consultant for latter phases of a $5MM information protection project. This project provided a unified security model (DCE) and single sign-on (SSO) for dozens of Sybase, IBM Host (3270), Unix (telnet), and Peoplesoft applications. Led hardening of the production environment and development of operating procedures. Coordinated rollout to hundreds of users in batches of ten; the rollout effort included training, PC conversions and upgrades, and systems administration activities. Created a 32-bit workstation image and installation process using WISE.

Built an electronic commerce prototype based on the distributed computing environment (DCE) and Internet technologies. This was later used as the basis for a large private network for NTT in Japan.

Designed and developed the Student Registration System, a commercially marketed application for running continuing education programs. It has been used for scheduling and tracking thousands of training sessions required of all employees and contractors at six major oil and chemical companies.

Managed product engineering for the Tracker, a commercial application for use across the recycling lifecycle. It included handheld collection applications at dozens of local recycling centers and inventory management and state compliance (CRV) reporting at several aggregator lots.

Designed and developed a maintenance management system for safety valves, turbines and docks.

Provided incremental enhancements for the Time and Materials Tracking system, which managed gate security for refinery employees and contractors. It also yielded a high ROI by reducing contractor overcharges through generation of pro-forma invoices based on contract terms and gate activity.

Led design and installation of a 1,100 PC wide area network spanning eight offices, which introduced the firm's attorneys and paralegals to personal computers and word processing software. Primary architect for the desktop environment.

Primary architect and project lead for development of an enterprise document management system. The system supported the daily document production for the firm with seven, synchronized document repositories containing over 800,000 documents (with an annual growth rate of 200,000). Included was a synchronization feature that kept a mini-repository of recently used documents on every PC; this allowed document production to never cease, despite network and server outages.

Primary architect and project lead for the Automatic Upgrade Facility, an enterprise software configuration management tool (i.e., software distribution, licensing). The resulting environment was highly standardized and updated monthly, resulting in a need for only seven desktop support staff.

Led technology selection for an enterprise contact management and scheduling system.

Managed development of a flexible benefits tracking and reporting system for Human Resources.

Managed development of a continuing education tracking system for MCLE compliance.

Developed a system to tackle the multi-project budgeting and billing needs of a civil engineering firm.

Developed an application to track contributions from congregational members and the public.

Developed a comprehensive, back-office system for a high profile start-up. The system tracked families (customers), inventory, referrals, delivery schedules, routing, ordering, invoicing and receivables. Daily operations were managed by this application.

Setup and supervised data entry projects with up to ten staff. Performed statistical and financial analysis of large databases. Produced court exhibits.

Developed the firm's professional time & billing system.

Developed a suite of document tracking programs. One program cross-referenced issues across the documents and other media related to a case; for one case it tracked 1.25 million pages in over 5,000 documents. Another program assisted paralegals to track depositions and locate source media. A third provided quick verification, through reference to source documents, of claims made in reports; it was used for a five-year case with over 200 reports containing thousands of exhibits.

Designed an application suite to manage and operate a multi-site realty company. The system tracked listings, expenses, advertising, deposits, escrows, closings, commissions, splits, and income.

Developed an application that tracked public and disc jockey responses to promotional singles. These responses were compiled and the results (i.e., top-100 lists) presented to record companies.

Developed spreadsheet applications for evaluating and tracking real estate projects.