Implementing a New Business Vision Improve Software Delivery Revitalize an Organization Scale a Software-as-a-Service Organization (A company) Apply SOA to Improve Business Results Use Agile to Improve Delivery  Fix Revenue Leakage Revitalize a Software Engineering team  Internationalization  Reuse Staff Effectiveness Span of Control Topic: Managing Virtual Teams Value of International Viewpoint Value of International Viewpoint Value of International Viewpoint Breaking Vendor Holds Security Policy Improvements Integration Enterprise Resource Planning Systems Aligning IT with business Aligning IT with business  Aligning IT with Business Goals Innovation in Selling Ideas Topics: Complete Challenging Projects on Time Innovation for cost savings Innovation for cost savings Innovation for cost savings Innovation for cost savings Innovation for cost savings  Innovation for cost savings  Innovation for cost savings Integration of ERP with Logistics suppliers Implementing a New Business Vision Situation: When I joined SaaS company, there was no clear vision for what the company should be doing. The work was driven by what the Clients requested and would pay for. The result was a large monolith of software that included customer software for over 400 distinct financial institutions. Changes were difficult to make and slow. The complexity made software quality processes nearly impossible. Solution: I developed a vision for the company's software products based on changes being parameterized version of a standard product offering. The other areas of Client-requested changes were at the UI. I had the UI separated from the business logic. The business logic was encapsulated by a façade of WebServices. This allowed those Clients who wanted custom UI to use a company provided portal or a third party software company to maintain the UI. Those that moved to an API-type integration could do so through the common UI. Result: Clients could make changes to their business rules at their convenience. Those changes were not part of the Release so the quality of the release improved. Half of the software engineering staff was refocused on delivering new product and services because they no longer had to maintain custom software. Improve Software Delivery Situation: When I joined one company, the software was largely developed based on some ideas of the engineering's managers. The requirements, the design, and the tests were not documented. Every software Release resulted in a mad scramble to fix bugs introduced or add features that were missed. Solution: I did three things: • Upgraded skills • Adopted Agile methods, with training for the whole department • Tied compensation to quality results Result: Within six months, the group was delivering over 500 software changes with a bug rate of less than .1%  Revitalize an Organization Situation: When I joined start-up, the VP of Engineering was under siege. The business was waiting for much needed features and systems stability improvements. His own management team had been part of the company since its start and had close, family connections with the CEO. Any attempt to change how they were working was met with calls to the CEO complaining of persecution or bad technical decisions. Solution: I worked with VP of Engineering to define a clear technical strategy that could be understood by the business partners. I then helped him recruit stronger engineering staff that could take over the jobs of the existing managers. As the skill level improved the old staff realized that they could no longer maintain the status quo. A few stayed but most left, after a confrontation with the CEO, where he supported the new approach. Result: The software engineering group started delivering the product roadmap regularly and with improving quality. The amount of unplanned down time dropped dramatically.  Scale a Software-as-a-Service Organization (A company) Situation: I was hired as COO of A company to “scale the operation.” In the CEO's mind this was to provide the systems features and operational capacity and security for growing the operational transactions without significantly increasing the support costs. I identified the follow impediments to growth: • There were a lot of customer problems coming into the organization because of flaws in the software or systems. • Software Engineers were busy handling customer questions rather than building software improvements. • There was no training for new people so it was hard for new staff to be effective. • The organization still thought of the professional services costs of a complex on-board process as an way to increase revenue, which is counter to the CEO's business model. Solution: Using standards based middleware, my team designed and built a distributed object system that wrapped the existing legacy databases and provided a consistent, high availability location where customer information service that could be used by staff, customers, and other applications. The system was design so that implementations only involved download of a plug in to the existing databases. Result: This was delivered in three months using a staff of 3 people, saving the company many man years of specialized design and software construction.  Apply SOA to Improve Business Results Situation: At a SaaS company, the product line had been built as siloed applications. Each development team was recreating many functions and there was inconsistent customer information across the silos. Solution: Using standards based middleware, we developed a Services view of each of the core functions. These were then tied together at a product integration layer to create the different products. Result: Quality of information improved dramatically and there was more synergy in the product offerings.  Use Agile Methods to Improve Delivery Situation: When I joined mid-sized communications company, they had no formal development methodology. They approximated a water fall process but the documentation was so poor that no engineer could accurately deliver code that you could be sure implemented the business rules. Solution: I brought in an out side expert on development methods, who coached a small team in using Agile. The process was expanded as the pilot team showed success. . Result: This was delivered in three months using a staff of 3 people, saving the company many man years of specialized design and software construction.  Fix Revenue Leakage Situation: When I joined middle tier communications company, they were providing customer support and billing direct services through a company they acquired. The systems of this acquired company were all built in-house in PL-SQL. There was no software development cycle and only primitive QA processes. I knew there must be significant loss of revenue because of the poor quality of these systems. Solution: I replace the billing system with a packaged solution, Portal, now Oracle. This package was widely used in telecommunications for customer billing and was a proven solutions. The biggest challenge was to get the business to accept the business processes supported by the package, rather than re- implementing the old legacy processes Result: The project required almost 8 months, primarily because of “special needs” of the customer support organization. The new systems billed $1.3M more revenue per month with the existing customer base.  Revitalize a Software Engineering team Situation: Before joining a mid-tier communications company, the CEO said that he was spending 25% of the company's revenue on software and wasn't getting anything for it. In fact the systems were going down repeatedly every week. Solution: I ended the “working at home” policy. I brought in an expert to drive the use of a RUP methodology. Structured the organization to deliver to the critical business needs and stopped doing some of the low impact work. I replaced managers and staff with people who could follow a methodology. Finally I implemented a quality management process across the entire organization. Result: The result was the staff head count went down by 30% but there were regular monthly delivery of quality software releases across the business. The application portfolio went down from 66 to 25..  Internationalization Situation: When I joined a brokerage firm they had bought companies in five countries, each with distinct order execution systems. The firm wanted to offer products available in one country in the others. Solution: I led the design and development of an order routing system that allowed listing of products available across countries and to check orders against regulatory and business rules, and then ship the order to the best market for execution. Result: Using industry standards (FIXML) and commercial software, we were able to deliver a system that exactly fit the business need, at one third the cost of a package, and which could be easily change to improve competitive advantage.  Reuse Situation: At DHL we needed to get to customer information that was stored in different databases in over 180 countries. This was needed to quickly insure a consistent view of the customer regardless of physical location, driven by the Internet. Solution: Using standards based middleware, my team designed and built a distributed object system that wrapped the existing legacy databases and provided a consistent, high availability location where customer information service that could be used by staff, customers, and other applications. The system was design so that implementation only involved download of a plug in to the existing databases. Result: This was delivered in three months using a staff of 3 people, saving the company many man years of specialized design and software construction.  Staff Effectiveness Situation: I joined a firm where architecture had become the group that had all those people who did jobs that no one understood. This meant the group had many people and a large budget but few people who could deliver against the system delivery goals the company had set. This had negative affect on morale and trust with business partners. Solution: After identifying the critical skills needs, I worked with those that did not have the right skills, to find other positions in and outside the firm. I set up a training program to fill some of the skills gaps in the staff that could do the work. Finally, I added two highly skilled teams members that could mentor others. Result: Net reduction of staff from 25 to 12, number of critical business design deliverable went from two a year to three a quarter, and the budget was reduced by 30%  Span of Control Situation: I was promoted to manage a team tasked with delivering many large complex systems needed to operate and invoice services for 6 million customers. The annual budget was 52M. Under the previous management delivery was slow and did not follow plan. Solution: I reorganized to group to simplify organizational communication and give the business partner a single, dedicated point of contact. I set standards for project management and reporting and introduced new methods for predictably delivering new software. Result: In one year the team of 50 people delivered six major systems that meet commercial “five 9's” reliability and reduced the annual budget by $5M.  Topic: Managing Virtual Teams Situation: I was asked to deliver a set of tools to allow adding customers to service database when the main customer service system was down. The lowest cost way to do this was to build PC-based systems that could both update field equipment and the central data store when it was available. But the main programming group had no experience with PC's/ Solution: I put together a team of experts on each environment: one group in Montreal, one group in Boston, and one group in Düsseldorf. I was living in SF. I set up a process to ensure effective communication among these teams that allowed them to function autonomously but still deliver an integrated solution. Result: A low cost system, delivered on time and under budget that solved the problem. The estimated savings in operating cost of buying and staffing redundant customer care systems was $12M per year.  Value of International Viewpoint Situation: At Schwab, they had started their international expansion trying to use the same solutions as they had in the US. Besides being too costly, these solutions did not support local languages. Solution: I developed a set of technical principles and standards that reflected the business needs. These standards were used to buy products in the local markets that still worked well with the other countries and cost less. Result: Total Cost of Ownership for systems was reduced by 67% and staff training budgets were reduced by 75%.  Value of Speaking a Local Language Situation: Xerox was trying to introduce new products at a new media conference in Germany. I was asked to participate with two other Xerox executives on a panel discussion, trying to convince this skeptical audience that this was not just another American take over of the industry. My two colleagues spoke in English and received considerable negative feedback. Solution: I spoke in German directly addressing the audience concerns. I explained how the ideas were complimentary to the local interests and ways of working. Result: I received an ovation and was asked to work with industry groups to introduce the Xerox product.  Value of Speaking a Local Lanuage Situation: I was technical advisor to a travel agency introduce their services into the Chinese market. The Chinese partners were clearly cool to the idea of working with a Japanese firm, my client. Solution: I invited the partners to lunch at a good local restaurant where we spoke only Chinese. Result: The partnership agreement was signed by the Chinese partners.  Breaking Vendor Holds Situation: I was asked to consult with a firm that had chosen to standardize on Microsoft products. However, as the firm grew the IT budget was growing exponentially. They were seeing high costs of operating many small Wintel systems and they continually had to start over on development because new programmers could understand the VB-based applications. The system had many outages and the license costs were growing very fast. Solution: I recommended and implemented a technical architecture based on open standards and utilizing open source software. Result: Total cost of ownership for the system decreased by 50%, system availability went from one outage by day to no outage for two years. The effective life span went from three months to 3 years for 83% of the applications software.  Security Policy Improvements Situation: I was working for a firm that had hired an outsider firm to draft a corporate information security policy. However, this policy only addressed things like protecting desktop and operation data back up procedures. It did not address customer data privacy and protection of applications that implemented business rules nor did it address issues related to Internet security. Solution: I worked with the CFO to draft a set of policies that could be implemented in applications and databases. This included setting technical standard for authenticating users and mechanisms for enforcing access policy across the corporation. Result: The firms was one of the first to conform to the EU's strict guidelines for protecting customer information, allowing it to increase its market share in Europe by 3% in one year.  Integration Enterprise Resource Planning Systems Situation: A firm for who I was working was trying to offer more seamless integration into its customers' supply chain. This meant that it needed to share information with all the ERP systems that were currently being used by large corporations, including SAP, PeopleSoft, Baan, and JD Edwards. However, each of these systems has proprietary API's for getting at the required information. Solution: I developed a “services at the boundary” model that adapted the different proprietary API to a common information model. The system was built around platform independent technology that allow easy technical integration into the existing environment. A versioning mechanism using a standard design pattern was used to allow easy change. Result: The system enabled the firm to offer new services into a new market estimated worth $3B.  Aligning IT with business Situation: I took over development responsibility for a web-based customer care system the systems was originally designed to support their existing de-novo business model. The business then decided to go into a franchise business model, where quality control on services is the critical issue. The applications being built did not support this franchise approach. Solution: I worked with business partners to articulate their priorities in the systems. I was able to translate these priorities into contain changes to the software under construction. With some careful changes in the design, we able to use much of what had already been built and extend a few parts to include the franchise needs. Result: The project was delivered on time and on budget, the new application worked for the new business model, and we rescued a $4M investment.  Aligning IT with business goals Situation: For historical reasons, DHL had built its own middleware. This meant that over half of the IT budget was devoted to maintaining infrastructure software that did not enable new business growth. Solution: I devise a few key open standards to insulate the applications from the middleware, developed a plan for separating the two layers, and substituted commercial middleware products for the homegrown systems. Result: More IT budget was available to solve business problems. Reduced operating expense by 50% because the firm had a more stable platform for its applications. Reduced infrastructure costs by $20M per year.  Aligning IT with Business Goals Situation: When I joined a US brokerage fim, management had an implicit deployment strategy of copying the technology that was used in the US operation. However, technologies were too expensive to buy and operate for the international start-up subsidiaries. Solution: I restated the technical strategy in terms of open standards. Then I proposed lower cost technology that meet those standards. Result: Improved operational support in the countries. The firm had flexible platforms that would scale from a few customers to over 1 M. The firm save $12M annually on software and support license.  Innovation in Selling a New Technology Situation: PARC had great technology for protecting high value documents delivered over the Internet. But they were sell this new technology through the existing high cost sales channel. And setting up a new sales channel for this technology would have been too costly and take too much time. Solutions: I worked with existing vertical industry groups to leverage their existing business relationships to create a series of businesses that give Xerox a new revenue stream. Result: $100M annual new income with SG&A less than 3%  Topics: Complete Challenging Projects on Time Situation: I walked in the door at a large brokerage and was told the department had to deliver a web-based brokerage application for Japan in four months. The business regulations for Japan were not even agreed and the department had three qualified programmers. Solution: I worked with the business to define a critical set of Use Cases, developed a highly flexible design, and augmented the programmers with a few outside experts. I teamed these outsiders with internal staff and lead the hands on decisions around the system. Result: The new web trading system was delivered on-timer. Cost exceeded budget by only 5%. Accommodated 80 changes during the development cycle.  Innovation for cost savings Situation: When I was delivering new applications for several countries, I discovered that the US-based IT organization had used a different network supplier for each country, all connecting back to the US only. This meant multiple communications suppliers and a complex operational environment. Solutions: I had an engineer pull together a detailed set of requirements for communications and then selected a vendor that would meet those requirements. Result: $1M annual saving in network costs. There was a single point of contract on problem resolution  Innovation for cost savings Situation: When I was delivering new applications for several countries, I discovered that the US-based IT organization had used the same e-mail systems as was used for the large organization in the US. This meant high license fees and additional operational complexity for features a small group did not need. Solutions: II standardized on industry standard open source e-mail that supported both the customer and the internal needs. Result: $600K annual saving in software licenses, redundant hardware and operational expense  Innovation for cost savings Situation: A US-based IT organization had deployed a desktop used in the US in Asia. This desktop did not support Asian languages and would only communicate with US systems. This meant the Asian staff had two desktops systems, one for the US and one for local languages. Solutions: I specified an open source alternative that would support all Asian languages and which communicated with existing US desktop. Result: Desktop costs were reduces 75%. A simpler system for local staff. Improved customer support  Innovation for cost savings Situation: Business partners needed quick solutions to implement local business services. There were packages developed by third party suppliers that implemented these services. But the packages all were developed for open source platforms, which were not standard with the US security policy. Solutions: I developed a few crucial standards that would insulating the open source platform from the secured one and still allow them to exchange information. Result: $500K saving in porting costs. Fast delivery of business capability  Innovation for cost savings Situation: Our internal software development staff was unable to build new applications and support the existing ones fast enough for the business. We had a adopted a software model that relied on a set of core products used by many countries. This required a common software build fully tested. Solutions: I developed a process and my engineers design supporting technical infrastructure that allowed developers at outside firms and our internal staff to work on a common software build securely over the public Internet. Result: $900K annual savings in networking costs. Reduced support costs by handing off maintenance to an off-shore group Faster delivery of business capability by using third party software components.  Innovation for cost savings Situation: At Schwab each country was building and supporting applications that did much the same things. There were only variations in the areas of pricing, taxing, and regulatory reporting. Solutions: I built a decision framework to work with the business partners in each country. This allowed us to gree on those common business rules and to identify points for local innovation. Result: $250M savings over five years by using commercial software components to deliver the 80% common functions. Freed up resources to focus on new products and services.  Innovation for cost savings Situation: I was asked to integrate systems in five countries. Each country had different middleware and technical standards. Solutions: Rather than go through the time and expense of upgrading middleware in each country, I applied new web services standards to integrate the firms. Result: No change to the current business operation. Fast delivery of business capability. $3.5 million savings in upgrade expense  Integration of ERP with Logistics suppliers Situation: DHL's large customers needed to see details about shipping details in their ERP systems. However, each customer had one of several such systems and each had its own way of integrating. Solutions: I with industry standard to focus on setting business standards that would easier integration of these different systems and still protect vital customer information. Result: $500M saving potential lost revenue. Reduced support costs.

Implementing a New Business Vision

Improve Software Delivery

Revitalize an Organization
Scale a Software-as-a-Service Organization (A company)
Apply SOA to Improve Business Results
Use Agile to Improve Delivery
Fix Revenue Leakage
Revitalize a Software Engineering team
Internationalization
Reuse
Staff Effectiveness
Span of Control
Topic: Managing Virtual Teams
Value of International Viewpoint
Value of International Viewpoint
Value of International Viewpoint
Breaking Vendor Holds
Security Policy Improvements
Integration Enterprise Resource Planning Systems
Aligning IT with business
Aligning IT with business
Aligning IT with Business Goals
Innovation in Selling Ideas
Topics: Complete Challenging Projects on Time
Innovation for cost savings
Innovation for cost savings
Innovation for cost savings
Innovation for cost savings
Innovation for cost savings
Innovation for cost savings
Innovation for cost savings
Integration of ERP with Logistics suppliers

Implementing a New Business Vision

Situation: When I joined SaaS company, there was no clear vision for what the company should be doing. The work was driven by what the Clients requested and would pay for. The result was a large monolith of software that included customer software for over 400 distinct financial institutions. Changes were difficult to make and slow. The complexity made software quality processes nearly impossible.

Solution: I developed a vision for the company's software products based on changes being parameterized version of a standard product offering. The other areas of Client-requested changes were at the UI. I had the UI separated from the business logic. The business logic was encapsulated by a façade of WebServices. This allowed those Clients who wanted custom UI to use a company provided portal or a third party software company to maintain the UI. Those that moved to an API-type integration could do so through the common UI.

Result: Clients could make changes to their business rules at their convenience. Those changes were not part of the Release so the quality of the release improved. Half of the software engineering staff was refocused on delivering new product and services because they no longer had to maintain custom software.

Improve Software Delivery

Situation: When I joined one company, the software was largely developed based on some ideas of the engineering's managers. The requirements, the design, and the tests were not documented. Every software Release resulted in a mad scramble to fix bugs introduced or add features that were missed.

Solution: I did three things:

• Upgraded skills

• Adopted Agile methods, with training for the whole department

• Tied compensation to quality results

Result: Within six months, the group was delivering over 500 software changes with a bug rate of less than .1%

Revitalize an Organization

Situation: When I joined start-up, the VP of Engineering was under siege. The business was waiting for much needed features and systems stability improvements. His own management team had been part of the company since its start and had close, family connections with the CEO. Any attempt to change how they were working was met with calls to the CEO complaining of persecution or bad technical decisions.

Solution: I worked with VP of Engineering to define a clear technical strategy that could be understood by the business partners. I then helped him recruit stronger engineering staff that could take over the jobs of the existing managers. As the skill level improved the old staff realized that they could no longer maintain the status quo. A few stayed but most left, after a confrontation with the CEO, where he supported the new approach.

Result: The software engineering group started delivering the product roadmap regularly and with improving quality. The amount of unplanned down time dropped dramatically.

Scale a Software-as-a-Service Organization (A company)

Situation: I was hired as COO of A company to “scale the operation.” In the CEO's mind this was to provide the systems features and operational capacity and security for growing the operational transactions without significantly increasing the support costs.

I identified the follow impediments to growth:

• There were a lot of customer problems coming into the organization because of flaws in the software or systems.

• Software Engineers were busy handling customer questions rather than building software improvements.

• There was no training for new people so it was hard for new staff to be effective.

• The organization still thought of the professional services costs of a complex on-board process as an way to increase revenue, which is counter to the CEO's business model.

Solution: Using standards based middleware, my team designed and built a distributed object system that wrapped the existing legacy databases and provided a consistent, high availability location where customer information service that could be used by staff, customers, and other applications. The system was design so that implementations only involved download of a plug in to the existing databases.

Result: This was delivered in three months using a staff of 3 people, saving the company many man years of specialized design and software construction.

Apply SOA to Improve Business Results

Situation: At a SaaS company, the product line had been built as siloed applications. Each development team was recreating many functions and there was inconsistent customer information across the silos.

Solution: Using standards based middleware, we developed a Services view of each of the core functions. These were then tied together at a product integration layer to create the different products.

Result: Quality of information improved dramatically and there was more synergy in the product offerings.

Use Agile Methods to Improve Delivery

Situation: When I joined mid-sized communications company, they had no formal development methodology. They approximated a water fall process but the documentation was so poor that no engineer could accurately deliver code that you could be sure implemented the business rules.

Solution: I brought in an out side expert on development methods, who coached a small team in using Agile. The process was expanded as the pilot team showed success. .

Result: This was delivered in three months using a staff of 3 people, saving the company many man years of specialized design and software construction.

Fix Revenue Leakage

Situation: When I joined middle tier communications company, they were providing customer support and billing direct services through a company they acquired. The systems of this acquired company were all built in-house in PL-SQL. There was no software development cycle and only primitive QA processes. I knew there must be significant loss of revenue because of the poor quality of these systems.

Solution: I replace the billing system with a packaged solution, Portal, now Oracle. This package was widely used in telecommunications for customer billing and was a proven solutions. The biggest challenge was to get the business to accept the business processes supported by the package, rather than re- implementing the old legacy processes

Result: The project required almost 8 months, primarily because of “special needs” of the customer support organization. The new systems billed $1.3M more revenue per month with the existing customer base.

Revitalize a Software Engineering team

Situation: Before joining a mid-tier communications company, the CEO said that he was spending 25% of the company's revenue on software and wasn't getting anything for it. In fact the systems were going down repeatedly every week.

Solution: I ended the “working at home” policy. I brought in an expert to drive the use of a RUP methodology. Structured the organization to deliver to the critical business needs and stopped doing some of the low impact work. I replaced managers and staff with people who could follow a methodology. Finally I implemented a quality management process across the entire organization.

Result: The result was the staff head count went down by 30% but there were regular monthly delivery of quality software releases across the business. The application portfolio went down from 66 to 25..

Internationalization

Situation: When I joined a brokerage firm they had bought companies in five countries, each with distinct order execution systems. The firm wanted to offer products available in one country in the others.

Solution: I led the design and development of an order routing system that allowed listing of products available across countries and to check orders against regulatory and business rules, and then ship the order to the best market for execution.

Result: Using industry standards (FIXML) and commercial software, we were able to deliver a system that exactly fit the business need, at one third the cost of a package, and which could be easily change to improve competitive advantage.

Reuse

Situation: At DHL we needed to get to customer information that was stored in different databases in over 180 countries. This was needed to quickly insure a consistent view of the customer regardless of physical location, driven by the Internet.

Solution: Using standards based middleware, my team designed and built a distributed object system that wrapped the existing legacy databases and provided a consistent, high availability location where customer information service that could be used by staff, customers, and other applications. The system was design so that implementation only involved download of a plug in to the existing databases.

Result: This was delivered in three months using a staff of 3 people, saving the company many man years of specialized design and software construction.

Staff Effectiveness

Situation: I joined a firm where architecture had become the group that had all those people who did jobs that no one understood. This meant the group had many people and a large budget but few people who could deliver against the system delivery goals the company had set. This had negative affect on morale and trust with business partners.

Solution: After identifying the critical skills needs, I worked with those that did not have the right skills, to find other positions in and outside the firm. I set up a training program to fill some of the skills gaps in the staff that could do the work. Finally, I added two highly skilled teams members that could mentor others.

Result: Net reduction of staff from 25 to 12, number of critical business design deliverable went from two a year to three a quarter, and the budget was reduced by 30%

Span of Control

Situation: I was promoted to manage a team tasked with delivering many large complex systems needed to operate and invoice services for 6 million customers. The annual budget was 52M. Under the previous management delivery was slow and did not follow plan.

Solution: I reorganized to group to simplify organizational communication and give the business partner a single, dedicated point of contact. I set standards for project management and reporting and introduced new methods for predictably delivering new software.

Result: In one year the team of 50 people delivered six major systems that meet commercial “five 9's” reliability and reduced the annual budget by $5M.

Topic: Managing Virtual Teams

Situation: I was asked to deliver a set of tools to allow adding customers to service database when the main customer service system was down. The lowest cost way to do this was to build PC-based systems that could both update field equipment and the central data store when it was available. But the main programming group had no experience with PC's/

Solution: I put together a team of experts on each environment: one group in Montreal, one group in Boston, and one group in Düsseldorf. I was living in SF. I set up a process to ensure effective communication among these teams that allowed them to function autonomously but still deliver an integrated solution.

Result: A low cost system, delivered on time and under budget that solved the problem. The estimated savings in operating cost of buying and staffing redundant customer care systems was $12M per year.

Value of International Viewpoint

Situation: At Schwab, they had started their international expansion trying to use the same solutions as they had in the US. Besides being too costly, these solutions did not support local languages.

Solution: I developed a set of technical principles and standards that reflected the business needs. These standards were used to buy products in the local markets that still worked well with the other countries and cost less.

Result: Total Cost of Ownership for systems was reduced by 67% and staff training budgets were reduced by 75%.

Value of Speaking a Local Language

Situation: Xerox was trying to introduce new products at a new media conference in Germany. I was asked to participate with two other Xerox executives on a panel discussion, trying to convince this skeptical audience that this was not just another American take over of the industry.

My two colleagues spoke in English and received considerable negative feedback.

Solution: I spoke in German directly addressing the audience concerns. I explained how the ideas were complimentary to the local interests and ways of working.

Result: I received an ovation and was asked to work with industry groups to introduce the Xerox product.

Value of Speaking a Local Lanuage

Situation: I was technical advisor to a travel agency introduce their services into the Chinese market. The Chinese partners were clearly cool to the idea of working with a Japanese firm, my client.

Solution: I invited the partners to lunch at a good local restaurant where we spoke only Chinese.

Result: The partnership agreement was signed by the Chinese partners.

Breaking Vendor Holds

Situation: I was asked to consult with a firm that had chosen to standardize on Microsoft products. However, as the firm grew the IT budget was growing exponentially. They were seeing high costs of operating many small Wintel systems and they continually had to start over on development because new programmers could understand the VB-based applications. The system had many outages and the license costs were growing very fast.

Solution: I recommended and implemented a technical architecture based on open standards and utilizing open source software.

Result: Total cost of ownership for the system decreased by 50%, system availability went from one outage by day to no outage for two years. The effective life span went from three months to 3 years for 83% of the applications software.

Security Policy Improvements

Situation: I was working for a firm that had hired an outsider firm to draft a corporate information security policy. However, this policy only addressed things like protecting desktop and operation data back up procedures. It did not address customer data privacy and protection of applications that implemented business rules nor did it address issues related to Internet security.

Solution: I worked with the CFO to draft a set of policies that could be implemented in applications and databases. This included setting technical standard for authenticating users and mechanisms for enforcing access policy across the corporation.

Result: The firms was one of the first to conform to the EU's strict guidelines for protecting customer information, allowing it to increase its market share in Europe by 3% in one year.

Integration Enterprise Resource Planning Systems

Situation: A firm for who I was working was trying to offer more seamless integration into its customers' supply chain. This meant that it needed to share information with all the ERP systems that were currently being used by large corporations, including SAP, PeopleSoft, Baan, and JD Edwards. However, each of these systems has proprietary API's for getting at the required information.

Solution: I developed a “services at the boundary” model that adapted the different proprietary API to a common information model. The system was built around platform independent technology that allow easy technical integration into the existing environment. A versioning mechanism using a standard design pattern was used to allow easy change.

Result: The system enabled the firm to offer new services into a new market estimated worth $3B.

Aligning IT with business

Situation: I took over development responsibility for a web-based customer care system the systems was originally designed to support their existing de-novo business model. The business then decided to go into a franchise business model, where quality control on services is the critical issue. The applications being built did not support this franchise approach.

Solution: I worked with business partners to articulate their priorities in the systems. I was able to translate these priorities into contain changes to the software under construction. With some careful changes in the design, we able to use much of what had already been built and extend a few parts to include the franchise needs.

Result: The project was delivered on time and on budget, the new application worked for the new business model, and we rescued a $4M investment.

Aligning IT with business goals

Situation: For historical reasons, DHL had built its own middleware. This meant that over half of the IT budget was devoted to maintaining infrastructure software that did not enable new business growth.

Solution: I devise a few key open standards to insulate the applications from the middleware, developed a plan for separating the two layers, and substituted commercial middleware products for the homegrown systems.

Result: More IT budget was available to solve business problems. Reduced operating expense by 50% because the firm had a more stable platform for its applications. Reduced infrastructure costs by $20M per year.

Aligning IT with Business Goals

Situation: When I joined a US brokerage fim, management had an implicit deployment strategy of copying the technology that was used in the US operation. However, technologies were too expensive to buy and operate for the international start-up subsidiaries.

Solution: I restated the technical strategy in terms of open standards. Then I proposed lower cost technology that meet those standards.

Result: Improved operational support in the countries. The firm had flexible platforms that would scale from a few customers to over 1 M. The firm save $12M annually on software and support license.

Innovation in Selling a New Technology

Situation: PARC had great technology for protecting high value documents delivered over the Internet. But they were sell this new technology through the existing high cost sales channel. And setting up a new sales channel for this technology would have been too costly and take too much time.

Solutions: I worked with existing vertical industry groups to leverage their existing business relationships to create a series of businesses that give Xerox a new revenue stream.

Result: $100M annual new income with SG&A less than 3%

Topics: Complete Challenging Projects on Time

Situation: I walked in the door at a large brokerage and was told the department had to deliver a web-based brokerage application for Japan in four months. The business regulations for Japan were not even agreed and the department had three qualified programmers.

Solution: I worked with the business to define a critical set of Use Cases, developed a highly flexible design, and augmented the programmers with a few outside experts. I teamed these outsiders with internal staff and lead the hands on decisions around the system.

Result: The new web trading system was delivered on-timer. Cost exceeded budget by only 5%. Accommodated 80 changes during the development cycle.

Innovation for cost savings

Situation: When I was delivering new applications for several countries, I discovered that the US-based IT organization had used a different network supplier for each country, all connecting back to the US only. This meant multiple communications suppliers and a complex operational environment.

Solutions: I had an engineer pull together a detailed set of requirements for communications and then selected a vendor that would meet those requirements.

Result: $1M annual saving in network costs. There was a single point of contract on problem resolution

Innovation for cost savings

Situation: When I was delivering new applications for several countries, I discovered that the US-based IT organization had used the same e-mail systems as was used for the large organization in the US. This meant high license fees and additional operational complexity for features a small group did not need.

Solutions: II standardized on industry standard open source e-mail that supported both the customer and the internal needs.

Result: $600K annual saving in software licenses, redundant hardware and operational expense

Innovation for cost savings

Situation: A US-based IT organization had deployed a desktop used in the US in Asia. This desktop did not support Asian languages and would only communicate with US systems. This meant the Asian staff had two desktops systems, one for the US and one for local languages.

Solutions: I specified an open source alternative that would support all Asian languages and which communicated with existing US desktop.

Result: Desktop costs were reduces 75%. A simpler system for local staff. Improved customer support

Innovation for cost savings

Situation: Business partners needed quick solutions to implement local business services. There were packages developed by third party suppliers that implemented these services. But the packages all were developed for open source platforms, which were not standard with the US security policy.

Solutions: I developed a few crucial standards that would insulating the open source platform from the secured one and still allow them to exchange information.

Result: $500K saving in porting costs. Fast delivery of business capability

Innovation for cost savings

Situation: Our internal software development staff was unable to build new applications and support the existing ones fast enough for the business. We had a adopted a software model that relied on a set of core products used by many countries. This required a common software build fully tested.

Solutions: I developed a process and my engineers design supporting technical infrastructure that allowed developers at outside firms and our internal staff to work on a common software build securely over the public Internet.

Result: $900K annual savings in networking costs. Reduced support costs by handing off maintenance to an off-shore group

Faster delivery of business capability by using third party software components.

Innovation for cost savings

Situation: At Schwab each country was building and supporting applications that did much the same things. There were only variations in the areas of pricing, taxing, and regulatory reporting.

Solutions: I built a decision framework to work with the business partners in each country. This allowed us to gree on those common business rules and to identify points for local innovation.

Result: $250M savings over five years by using commercial software components to deliver the 80% common functions. Freed up resources to focus on new products and services.

Innovation for cost savings

Situation: I was asked to integrate systems in five countries. Each country had different middleware and technical standards.

Solutions: Rather than go through the time and expense of upgrading middleware in each country, I applied new web services standards to integrate the firms.

Result: No change to the current business operation. Fast delivery of business capability. $3.5 million savings in upgrade expense

Integration of ERP with Logistics suppliers

Situation: DHL's large customers needed to see details about shipping details in their ERP systems. However, each customer had one of several such systems and each had its own way of integrating.

Solutions: I with industry standard to focus on setting business standards that would easier integration of these different systems and still protect vital customer information.

Result: $500M saving potential lost revenue. Reduced support costs.

Here are examples of business results I have delivered.