September 2022 - Present

Engaged as a fractional CDO/CIO with a company in the travel industry to help recover and grow their business post-pandemic by automating, maturing, and increasing the effectiveness of their marketing capability. 

• Working with senior leadership, marketing, and IT to select and implement a customer data platform (CDP) within a multi-year marketing, data, and digital roadmap.

June 2019 - September 2022

Divisional Chief Data Officer for a Fortune 150-sized division specializing in food manufacturing and food supply chains with 70,000 employees operating in 16 countries.  Accountable to champion the value of data to enable global business growth and cost reduction through strategy, innovation, and execution.

STRATEGY

• Created an end-to-end data and analytics strategy and roadmap in partnership with division leadership, IT leaders, and application portfolio leaders, focused on data readiness, data products, and data maturity
• Recruited by corporate leadership as the one resource to work across four workstreams of organizational and operating model design for new corporate data function.

INNOVATION

• Nominated for the 2022 Cargill Breakthrough Award as part of a team that utilized predictive analytics and artificial intelligence to identify key positions in each shift that will be understaffed and make recommendations to plant management for optimal staffing
• Production facilities were dealing with 70% annual turnover and 10% staffing shortage.
• Solution was deployed in the first 7 of 60 facilities in fiscal year '22, delivering an initial $21M in income generation and $1.2M in cost reduction.

• Identified gap and led creation of a modern data integration architecture, consistent data sourcing, canonical data models, and reusable data assets in a complex, global application ecosystem. The resulting data fabric became the global target architecture for data and integrations.

EXECUTION AND DELIVERY

• Provided project prioritization and project execution oversight for a large portfolio of CPS data and analytics initiatives for commercial excellence, smart manufacturing, intelligent supply chain, and ERP deployments.
• Accountable for a team of 50 people in a heavily-matrixed environment spanning disciplines of data engineers, data architects, project managers/scrum masters, business analysts, and technical architects, with dependencies on a much broader team for master data management, application deployments, technology platforms, middleware, security, and more.

In addition to the many things I learned about a global manufacturing business with complex supply chains, my biggest takeaway can be summarized by the famous Peter Drucker quote that says "culture eats strategy for breakfast."  A healthy culture and effective change management within that culture are critical to any success.

January 2018 - December 2018

Executed a successful 12-month turnaround for the Minneapolis branch at a time when it was highly-leveraged and had a team of 40 people.

• Improved net profits from -2% to 6.5%
• Improved cash flow to reduce borrowing for operating expenses by 40%
• Drove operating metrics from 10-year lows to 7-year bests

The biggest lesson I learned was that financial and operational performance is critical to keeping a company going, but while focusing on the many challenges and putting together new plans and strategies, we cannot lose sight of the fact that there are a lot of people not directly involved in the process who need communication, confidence, and clarity, even if we as leaders do not yet have all of the answers ourselves.

April 2019 - June 2019

Led a team of Go Next (www.gonext.com) business leaders to create a multi-year data and digital roadmap covering the end-to-end customer journey of Go Next's business model. 

• The first phase of the roadmap required Go Next's primary software vendor to create a custom and complex module within their product for managing available inventory.  I led the effort to clearly define the business need, the data structure, and the data flows to support Go Next's business objectives and business processes.  Upon seeing the business value of and our design for the capability, the vendor agreed to build this new module and make it generally available in their core product offering.

My biggest takeaway was the reinforced concept of doing what's right.  Go Next looks for partners, not just vendors, where there can be mutually beneficial wins as in the example above.  However, in those situations where a win-win cannot be found, doing what's right is always the best course of action.  Go Next exemplified this during Covid by working with individual travelers to cancel and refund their purchases, regardless of the impact to Go Next.  This is true partnership and integrity in business.

May 2017 - June 2019

Go Next (www.gonext.com) was using spreadsheets and emails to set and track sales goals, forecasts, and results. We defined the data and metrics the business needed to capture, manage, and analyze in order to ensure their sales performance was meeting or exceeding targets in support of the targeted growth and objectives of the business. 

• Led the Go Next leadership and sales teams of 8 people and a project team of 3 people
• Custom-built an application to capture and manage the sales data, integrated with their business applications, to ensure clean and accurate data across the business.

March 2017 - May 2019

South Country Health Alliance (www.mnscha.org) needed a strategy and roadmap for their customer experiences supported by their customer relationship management (CRM) system.

• Led a SCHA team across 5 functional areas in the creation of an enterprise data model to which to align their systems, beginning with the CRM system. 
• Architected a multi-year, multi-phased customer experience roadmap to integrate more business capabilities, automate more customer journey stages and communications, and capture more and better data for compliance and internal reporting.

May 2018 - March 2019

Werner Electric's (www.wernerelectric.com) new business strategy called for new digital customer experiences and improved internal analytics, both supported by new data capabilities like data integrations, master data management, and data governance. 

• Worked with Werner Electric business and IT teams to create a multi-year data strategy and roadmap, sponsored by the CIO with the senior leadership team as the executive steering committee.
• Architected an enterprise data model and the definition of product taxonomies to support an improved digital customer experience through an enhanced eCommerce digital capability. 
• Designed a data fabric architecture, an API-first data integration layer, and an enterprise data warehouse to support these business objectives, and managed a hybrid team of Werner Electric IT staff and our consultants for the delivery.

May 2016 - January 2017

PreferredOne (www.preferredone.com) needed a foundation for an enterprise-wide, data management and analytics capability to help members, employer groups, and providers see them as best in class in reducing the cost of medical care and improving patient outcomes. This initiative focused on four major business capabilities:  enrollment, utilization, quality, and eligibility.

• Created a multi-year roadmap across a multitude of data disciplines, including data integration, data management, data architecture, and data governance
• Created new data and analytics capabilities for more timely reporting to identify lack of adherence to treatment plans, predictive analytics to improve patient outcomes, data mining to detect claims fraud, and more.

October 1999 - March 2022

Founded, created, and provided leadership for a professional services firm specialized in data, analytics, CRM, and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solutions.

• Founded and led a boutique consulting firm of 12 employees, providing value-added solutions to Fortune 100 companies, the U.S. military, state governments, as well as mid-size, small, and start-up companies.
• Owned plans, P&L, employee hiring and development, partnerships, and client satisfaction.
• In 2005, transformed the company with a new business model focused on a project-based, team-based approach, resulting in year-over-year increases in average client contract, increased resource utilization rate, and profitability for four consecutive years.
• Increased employee retention 50% by transforming recruiting and coaching process to focus on getting the right people for culture-fit and team-fit and then developing them into great team members using a three-year coaching program.
• Scoped, estimated, sold, and managed client projects for small to Fortune 100 organizations, including a data integration initiative, accountable to four state agencies and the office of the governor.
• Branded our unique services delivery model as a competitive advantage while also delivering higher quality and higher profitability.
• Led the creation of a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solution to create a recurring revenue stream.

December 2013 - March 2022

Led an Agile team of 7 people to create a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solution to bring robust data and analytics capabilities to smaller companies and to create a recurring revenue stream for iBusiness Solutions. 

• Owned marketing, sales, product development roadmap, and customer onboarding and support. 
• See the experience below "Brand Benchmarking @ Association of Taco John's Franchisees" under iBusiness Solutions for more information on this client success story using The iBLeague^TM.

April 2014 - March 2022

The Association of Taco John’s Franchisees (www.atjf.net), comprised of more than 300 franchised units, was challenged to find a timely, cost-effective, and more frequent way to produce performance benchmarks across the Taco John’s brand.

• Utilized The iBLeague™, a Software-as-a-Service, to collect data from the franchisees, map disparate charts of accounts to a common chart of accounts, and calculate performance benchmarks for the brand by sales volumes and other restaurant characteristics.
• The iBLeague™ provides analysis of the data through interactive and personalized metrics, dashboards, scorecards, trending, detailed reports, and benchmarking.

       
With accurate, relevant, and more timely information, the ATJF members found value from:

• Increased efficiencies with a streamlined process for gathering clean, consistent, and critical trend data to identify profit improvement opportunities
• Visually comparing their performance to brand benchmarks
• Providing prospective franchisees access to real-world numbers from operating restaurants
• Greater accuracy and reality of forecasts and pro forma statements provided to lenders

February 2011 - January 2015

The State of Minnesota (www.sleds.mn.gov) was challenged to produce a data warehouse that encompassed the longitudinal life of a student from early childhood, elementary and secondary education, up to and through higher education and employment, accounting for the various pathways people take through education, to employment, and back and forth.

• Worked with stakeholders for Early Childhood, K-12 Education, Post-Secondary Education, and Workforce to create a SLEDS data warehouse that linked more 120 million records into nearly 7 million uniquely identified people.
• One piece of the solution involved a custom-built data linking engine allowing data from many disparate data sources to be linked at one-third the cost of purchasing and implementing a commercial solution.
• The de-identified and anonymized data warehouse keeps the data and personal identities fully secure while providing targeted reporting and analytics.
• The SLEDS data warehouse provides a valuable data repository for educational and employment analytics to improve the educational experiences and outcomes of students and increase the likelihood of meaningful and sustained employment.

May 2007 - August 2014

Spader Business Management (www.spader.com) needed a digital transformation to improve how they capture, manage, and analyze data at a time of unprecedented market and economic uncertainty for their customers in 2007. A new generation of customer-facing applications was needed to increase customer profitability, employee productivity, and business predictability for themselves and their customers.

• Implemented a customer-facing portal with interactive dashboards
• Customized and deployed Microsoft Dynamics CRM to manage all customer-related data across the entire customer experience continuum.
• Developed a custom-developed Web application for collection of customer annual budgets and monthly actuals.
• Created a new data warehouse for reporting and analytics that enabled peer group reporting, comparisons to benchmarks and industry trends, ranked performance for dozens of key performance indicators, and forward forecasting based on business seasonality.
• Spader’s customers now spend less than half the time previously spent to get their financial data to Spader, time that can instead be spent analyzing their performance against the previous year, against their current year budget, against a group of peers, against top performers in their industry, and against Spader benchmarks.
• Spader is well-positioned to capture many new pieces of data and more detailed data to provide value-added reporting and performance benchmarking to their customers.

My biggest lesson came from a conversation I had with the president of Spader. One day when I was onsite, the president had just finished a phone call with a client who ran a great RV dealership, "doing everything right."  However, the RV manufacturer had just declared bankruptcy, and in an instant, millions of dollars of inventory held by the dealership was worth pennies on the dollars and the bank would soon call their loan.  Without hesitation, Spader committed to continuing working with and coaching this dealer through the situation without charging any of their fees.  Spader always saw their clients as people first and a business second.

July 2012 - September 2012

Northcott Hospitality, the brand owner for Americinn hotels (www.wyndhamhotels.com/americinn) and a franchisee of multiple restaurant brands, needed a data strategy and roadmap to bring together all the data across their properties and lines of business to understand their guests, their guests buying behaviors, and their general business performance across key performance indicators.

• Led a hybrid team of consultants and Northcott Hospitality business and IT resources to define their key business objectives and corresponding key performance indicators, the data needed to support their business, a data architecture model reflective of how the business is operated, and a number of technology recommendations to support this data strategy.

January 2011 - September 2011

Fairview Pharmacy Services (www.fairview.org/pharmacy) needed a data strategy and roadmap to better understand the performance of their lines of business and many pharmacy locations.

• Engaged by another consulting company as a data strategy expert as this was outside their area of expertise.
• One input into my data strategies and roadmaps is a business hierarchy model, constructed in as little as two hours with the right subject matter experts. At the end of this workshop, the client CFO commented, "In 90 minutes, you made sense out of our business."

October 2008 - October 2010

Wells Fargo Wealth Management (www.wellsfargo.com/wealth-management-services) was challenged to manage the sales process and coach producers on improving performance. Management lacked a comprehensive view of producers:  their pipeline activities, their book of business, resulting sales, revenue generated, and compensation earned.

• Managed the project and team to create an integrated data and analytics application to provide visibility to 1,500 producers and managers on activities, leads, and opportunities through sales, revenue and compensation across the entire sales pipeline continuum.
• Advanced predictive analytics identified “green zone” sales opportunities as those most likely to close where producers should focus their sales activities.
• Enterprise visibility across the full sales pipeline continuum positioned management to empower producers with the best practices and coaching materials necessary to achieve an ideal sales funnel mix that would diversify and maximize the products and services sold to their customers.

December 2004 - August 2010

Minnesota State Colleges and Universities, or MnSCU (www.minnstate.edu), struggled to effectively meet its reporting and analytics needs across the system of 33 colleges and universities due to multiple, fragmented data sources.

• Architected a strategic, enterprise-wide data strategy and execution roadmap to meet MnSCU’s current and future information needs.
• A strategic plan and enterprise data model were developed along with an implementation roadmap to cost-effectively phase in the data infrastructure to meet MnSCU’s short and long-term challenges.
• Established a responsive and agile data environment for system-wide reporting and set the stage for predictive analytics in the future.

April 2008 - February 2009

Wells Fargo Wealth Management (www.wellsfargo.com/wealth-management-services) was challenged with the implementation of a new compensation system that lacked the reporting needed to support the sales team.  Producers and management lacked an end-to-end view of compensation and the sales that generated the compensation.

• Brought in to lead, coach and assist a cross-functional team of client IT and business resources in the implementation of a consolidated reporting database that included sales, revenue and compensation data.
• Consolidated, enterprise visibility, allowed management to coach producers and allowed producers to efficiently monitor their progress toward goals and track their compensation.
• Compensation and finance teams were able to reallocate staff from support to analysis tasks due to a 60% reduction in support calls.

April 2006 - March 2007

McKesson Pharmacy Management (www.mckesson.com/pharmacy-management), a national acute care pharmacy outsourcing division of a leading fortune 20 wholesaler, was challenged in retaining customers against lower cost providers.  Management lacked a means of quantifying and communicating the value of their services to their customers in a consistently repeatable way, resulting in erosion of revenue streams, customer loyalty, and market share.

• Architected a performance management application that quantified by customer the financial and operational value of McKesson's services.
• Solution consisted of web-based dashboards, an enterprise data model, and a single source of truth from 12 transactional systems and was designed and delivered into production in less than 4 months. 
• Visibility into the value of services provided across drug purchasing, drug utilization, clinical interventions, and staff retention allowed McKesson to identify challenges in their value proposition so McKesson and their client could take corrective action.
• In the first year of use, more than $56 million in customer value was identified and 100% of their customers were retained by moving customers along the loyalty scale and transforming customer discussions away from costs towards creating mutual value and benefits.

December 2005 - December 2006

In the wake of 9/11, the U.S. Army Recruiting Command (USAREC) (recruiting.army.mil) was required to increase recruitment to meet the needs of the U.S. Army's new mission.  The USAREC recruiters were assigned geographic territories that included recruitment offices, high schools, individual recruits, and event locations, resulting in the recruiters spending an excessive amount of time traveling from one location to another.

• Architected a location intelligence application which presented the recruiter's upcoming appointments visually on a map
• Solution enabled USAREC to much more efficiently and effectively meet the U.S. Army's recruitment goals of more than 70,000 new recruits annually.

October 2005 - November 2006

Motorola (www.motorola.com), a Fortune 100 global communications company, faced barriers to communicating the performance results of their three business units: Connected Home Solutions, Mobile Devices, and Networks and Enterprise.

• Led the creation of a database application that collects and manages supply chain, finance, and HR data from multiple database platforms, improving the data integrity, data quality, and data timeliness, thereby increasing the confidence in the data.
  

• Led the creation of a dashboard application for C-suite leadership to quickly communicate what has happened in the key drivers impacting the performance of each business unit.
• The dashboard included a custom-built collaboration feature for leaders to influence what is being done to correct performance that falls below expectations and proactively address performance and actions before they negatively impact future business results.

July 2004 - January 2006

Nextel Partners was a part of the Nextel network, a fortune 500 wireless telecommunications company.  Nextel became Sprint, which in turn has merged with T-Mobile (www.t-mobile.com).  Nextel Partners struggled to meet the challenges of increasing costs of customer retention, increasing customer churn, and falling customer ARPU (average revenue per unit).

• Created and implemented a performance management system that provided front-line, customer-facing representatives visibility into customer ARPU along with the ability to quickly analyze the impacts to ARPU of changes in price plan, equipment, and service subsidies.
• The application delivered actionable customer account data to more than 2,200 customer support specialists along with 500 sales representatives in over 70 locations.
• Nextel Partners realized a sharp reduction in time spent on customer billing-oriented questions—15,000 hours per month—and a simultaneous 32% increase in service revenue. 
• Visibility into ARPU and the clear cost of customer retention offers, such as changing the price plan or offering free equipment upgrades, modified customer support behavior to increase customer retention in a more cost-effective way.

December 1999 - August 2005

Designed and wrote a three-course training curriculum for business intelligence and analytics tools.

Trained thousands of business users using this curriculum at many companies:

• Allete
• Allied Insurance
• Allstate Insurance
• American Medical Systems
• Connexus Energy
• Digi International
• Federal Reserve Bank of Minnesota
• Fiserv
• Gage Marketing Group
• GfK Custom Solutions
• Huttig Building Products
• ING
• Jet Blue
• Mutual of Omaha
• Nationwide
• Northwest Airlines
• Pioneer Hi-Bred
• United Hardware
• U.S. Army
• W.R. Berkley
• Wells Fargo
• Westar Energy

October 1999 - November 2015

The following client stories are being written. Please check back again.

• Financial Reporting @ Hallmark www.hallmark.com, September 2006 - December 2007
• Project @ Piper Jaffray (now Piper Sandler) www.pipersandler.com, May 2006 - September 2007
• Project @ GMAC (now GM Financial), www.gmfinancial.com, October 2006 - August 2007
• Research and Development Analytics @ Pioneer Hi-Bred (now DuPont), www.pioneer.com, March 2005 - April 2007
• Visual Factory @ Honeywell, www.honeywell.com, March 2005 - March 2006
• Project @ Mayo Clinic, www.mayoclinic.org, 
  February 2005 - October 2005
• Project @ Catalog Marketing Services, February 2005 - September 2005
• WorldPerks & Cargo Analytics @ Northwest Airlines (now Delta Airlines), www.delta.com, August 2004 - March 2005
• Shipping Optimization @ Koch Logistics, www.kochlogistics.com, 
  August 2004 - December 2004
• Sales Forecasting and Analytics @ techies.com, April 2000 - August 2001
• Operations Metrics @ b-50 (now Delaget), www.delaget.com, February 2001 - July 2002
• Sales and Distribution Analytics @ Digi International, www.digi.com, March 2000 - September 2000

• Identified a new market opportunity for Analysts International to create a new service offering in the data and analytics space.
• Created and pitched a proposal to company leadership to start a new data and analytics practice area. 
• Upon approval, was asked to start, grow, and lead this practice area, working with marketing, sales, and recruiting on a new projects-based business model in a firm built on a staff augmentation model. 
• We created and grew the practice very quickly to $1MM in revenue and 15 billable consultants the first year and then acquired another consultancy to accelerate the growth. 

This experience was the beginning of my journey into finding and creating value for my customers to grow their business, and not just sell them to grow ours.

March 1994 - May 1998

As my first and only client through Analysts International, Cargill (www.cargill.com) moved me from one successful project to another, including my first exposure to data and analytics as a project manager for a new thing called "data warehousing."

• Managed Cargill's first-ever enterprise data warehouse project.
• Managed and architected Cargill's cross-divisional customer data warehouse to support their new go-to-market strategy called Cargill AgHorizons^TM. 

The first analytics that came out of the Cargill AgHorizons^TM data warehouse showed the #2 largest farmer in terms of Cargill buying grain at harvest time was buying no inputs -- feed, seed, chemicals, or fertilizer -- from Cargill.  This was the first time I saw firsthand the business value of mastering customer data across lines of business to know your customers and to find new business opportunities.

July 1990 - March 1994

After completing a four-month training program on structured programming in a mainframe environment, I joined the team responsible for the development, maintenance, and support of all corporate and accounting systems as a programmer and later a programmer/analyst. 

One of the lessons I learned at Securian is that the first time you get called at 2:00am because your production job failed and you have to drive into the office to fix it so the rest of the production schedule can finish, you tend to put more emphasis on quality code and thorough testing.  To this day, I still enjoy jumping in to help my teams do testing to make sure we deliver the best possible quality to the users.

May 1998 - July 1990

Worked part-time during my college years and full-time during the summers as a one-person IT department, learning a bit about everything from coding to hardware to networking.

The most important lesson I learned was that providing quality service to and creating value for my business leaders must always be job #1.