Reporting directly to the CEO, responsible for annual operating budget of $7M covering all aspects of information technology  including day-to-day IT operations across four offices, two data centres, and public cloud services, with service desk and end-user support for a predominantly remote 350+ workforce, and 24×7 operations.  Accountable for IT strategy, infrastructure, software development and support, project management, management of outsourced services, enterprise and data architecture, and information security.  Led six direct reports and 40 information technology professionals. 

• Assessed initial state of IT division and developed IT roadmap aligned to the business strategy, achieving unanimous buy-in from Senior Executive Team and other stakeholders.  Execution of roadmap enabled delivery of projects that had been stalled for 5+ years, decreased risk, and over $1M in cost reductions.
• Built previously non-existent cyber security function within Numeris, substantially reducing the likelihood of a cyber security incident, and avoiding the potential ~$6M cost of a breach.
• Oversaw development and implementation of strategic new product offerings in collaboration with other divisions, including measurement of streaming video, and incorporation of set-top box data into Enhanced Television Audience Measurement increasing data value for customers.
• Led efforts to prepare for remote work in face of impending global CoVID-19 pandemic.  Moved to remote work over two days for all staff, with no material interruptions, and all SLAs met throughout and thereafter.
• Oversaw IT efforts to transform part-time-employee, on-premise call centres to virtual call centres with full-time staff, shutting down one office, and eliminating $3M annually in operations costs.
• Implemented rigorous project portfolio management, including preparation and approval of business cases for initiatives, resulting in reduced project costs and risk.
• Initiated and led Data Architecture and Governance function within IT to reduce risks and costs associated with poor data integrity and data misuse.
• Introduced leading-edge big data and open source technologies, including Hive, Spark, and Scala, increasing the amount to data assimilated, positioning the company for additional product development.
• Completed acquisition and migration to new converged infrastructure for private cloud increasing capacity and reducing overall spend by $1.5M.  Migrated successfully with no business interruptions.
• Migrated SharePoint to SharePoint on-line.  Leveraged other public cloud technologies for various areas of the business (e.g., Dynamics CRM), reducing cost and risk.
• Drove conversion of telephony from PRI to SIP, saving over $100,000 annually.

Senior-level consulting to a variety of clients in technology solutions, management, and leadership, including:

CTO, Exposure Assessment Inc., Toronto | 2016

Developed a cyber security offering, including supporting technology to assist in vulnerability assessments.  Managed all other IT-related activities, including cloud service acquisition.

CIO, Koprash Inc., Burlington | 2013 – 2016

Aligned IT strategy with business direction. Advised on and created strategy for information management and effective collaboration, information security, DRP and BCP, and acted as a trusted advisor to the executive team. Day-to-day monitoring and management of IT infrastructure.

Interim CIO, Acting Head of Finance, Administration, and HR, The Leslie Group Ltd., Toronto, 2014-2015

• Remediation of IT issues, including infrastructure upgrades (new server, high-speed fiber internet connection, in-house eMail moved to cloud, cloud-based backup, mobile device information security policy), reducing risk to the business and increasing employee effectiveness.
• Interim Executive, taking over Finance and Accounting, HR, and General Administration, as well as continuing to act as Chief Information Officer, reporting directly to the president. 
• Designed and implemented a new reporting system for a business-critical function that vastly increased the speed, accuracy, and availability of reporting.

Other Assignments

• Technical due diligence of web technology company for a Cayman-based venture capital fund.  Target company leveraged AWS, Nginx, MongoDB, MySQL, RabbitMQ, ElasticSearch, Docker, ZooKeeper, Synapse Enterprise Service Bus (ESB), and various other tools.

Led 20 professional staff in delivering consulting services to the firm’s clients, developing software products, and in maintaining and enhancing the firm’s technical and operational infrastructure.

• Implemented a time tracking and metrics reporting system to improve project profitability, utilisation, and billability.  Cut billing preparation effort by 50%.
• Transformed product development activities to adopt a release approach and feature generalisation, allowing for commercialisation of software products.  Resulted in incremental $100,000 annual income in one product.

Projects overseen include business process automation for a health-care agency, records management system for a municipality, risk management system for a global mining company, supply-chain business process automations for a major utility, and KPI monitoring for a department of a municipality.

Led 150 software engineering professionals building, maintaining, and supporting the company’s credit solutions software offerings, with tens-of-thousands of users globally.

• Led work to improve software quality, metrics gathering and reporting, and improvement in release scheduling and management, to achieve better final-time-to-market, lower overall cost, and improved customer satisfaction.
• Reorganized department to realize efficiencies and implemented change management to ensure successful transitions to new structure.

Consulted to clients in strategy and leadership, including:

• Led work for a large, global financial institution providing a strategy and overall roadmap for re-engineering its software delivery process, the implementation of which would result in potential cost savings of $30 million annually after three years, or roughly 23% of the software delivery budget for the targeted division. 
• Directed the infrastructure architecture work for the implementation of a web-based enterprise-level claims management systems at a leading Canadian insurance provider.  Coached client’s team on strategic software licensing and services contract negotiations with third-party vendor.

Accountable for 150 professionals enhancing and supporting core transfer agency systems, used by thousands of concurrent users, providing full functionality for maintaining unit-holder records of over 150 mutual fund companies, representing 30% of the Canadian mutual fund industry, or $270B (as at Jan 2007).  Also responsible for systems such as Sales Force Automation, Oracle Financials and HR, and Work Flow and Imaging.

• Managed the strategic core-technology-change replacing the sun-setting development languages used for Unitrax®.  Led significant re-architectural work that resulted in a savings of over 20 effort-years or $1.8M of the overall cost of the initiative.
• Directed service-oriented architecture initiative, providing key services to transfer agency clients, generating additional revenues of $250,000 initially, with anticipated additional annual revenues of at least $1M.  Also provided critical technology foundation for strategic architectural direction of Unitrax®.
• Achieved highest scores amongst all departments in the division on employee satisfaction survey in all key areas.
• Led significant turn-around work in the Unitrax® development team to improve quality of developed software.  Defect levels dropped to lowest ever, with increase in Citigroup-over-client-captured defects by 33% in less than one year.
• Prepared critical information and was key respondent on Unisen’s side in due-diligence process for the Citigroup acquisition of Unisen from AGF, a $124M purchase.
• Performed due-diligence review of underlying technology, software development processes, and other business area reviews as part of the $65M Jewelstone acquisition.
• Managed the complex conversion within three months of Global Strategy’s Transfer Agency systems into AGF’s, delivered on time, under budget, and with full functionality in place for all key dates.  Delivery permitted Global Strategy unit holders to switch without penalty into AGF funds, retaining $1M in annual revenues for AGF.
• Designed and implemented software engineering approaches and solid project management for the AGF Transfer Agency System team, decreasing overall delivery time and dramatically increasing software quality and end-user satisfaction.  Changes led to 100% of all started projects being completed and the resulting systems used in production.