Signature Accomplishments

Influencing Customer Strategy

While advising a top 3 bank on cloud computing, I developed a data monetization strategy predicated on the belief that the majority of “unbanked” people, a primary topic in the news at the time, were poor at managing their own money due to a lack of knowledge and impulse control. I developed a concept titled Data as Currency that espoused using AI to help customers make better financial decisions in their everyday life by injecting insights and guidance into purchase transactions via their mobile device. The goal was to instill discipline by demonstrating the opportunity cost of unnecessary purchases, while exposing them to upstream banking services. I shared this idea with the CTO who loved the concept and sponsored a meeting with the Chief Data Officer. From that meeting we co-developed the bank’s AI strategy which started with his organization beginning a massive overhaul of their data quality. Through the retail AI strategy work, I was introduced to the SVP Retail Branch Strategy. We collaborated on redefining the retail footprint in what evolved into their current format with the teller counter moved to the rear and offices in front. The change underscored the transition of banking from transactional to relational; while creating obstacles for would-be thieves by ensuring they would have to navigate past several cameras on ingress and egress. I was invited to attend the opening of the first new format location which is only a few miles from my home. In addition, we virtualized their workforce by incorporating telepresence rooms enabling customers to engage the services of an employee at another branch rather than having to wait. This concept was rolled out to 500 branches and was instrumental in helping them navigate COVID.

Marshaling Machine Vision

A large supply chain logistics firm that handles returns for large electronics brands in Europe needed to improve their efficiency and tracking to meet new contractual requirements. I led the development of a strategy using machine vision to track the receipt of boxed items, automated sorting of content, automated storage and retrieval of equipment, and tracking of returns through re-boxing and re-shipment. The implementation used a variety of automated guided vehicles to move inventory throughout the facility, an automated warehousing system for storage, safety cameras to alert fork truck drivers to human presence, and with the arrival of COVID, infrared detection at the entrance to identify staff that did not meet policy guidelines for on-site work. The resulting solution reduced the average processing time for a package from 2hrs to 22min, increased facility capacity by 30%, improved handling accuracy from 92% to 99%, reduced re-shipment costs by 6%,and reduced fork truck incidents to zero.

Avoiding the Wall Street Journal

In response to an OCC finding and Rule 8210 letter from FINRA, Verizon was engaged to upgrade security compromised routers at 4600 bank locations including branches, offices, and headquarters. Each upgrade required a 5 week preparation phase, organized in weekly batches, to determine COVID status of the site, negotiate an install date, coordinate on-site resources, gain access approval, complete device configuration, submit and marshal change requests, execute the upgrade, and provide Day 1 support. Staff included 12 project managers, 2 change managers, 5 business analysts, 22 engineers, and 80-150 on-site technicians each day. Daily status meetings and bi-weekly executive reviews were conducted.

Due to a loss of confidence in Verizon after five program leads failed to deliver the targeted 200 sites per day over the first seven months, I was asked by executive leadership to change roles and take responsibility. I assembled the variety of data sources into a dashboard and identified the primary issue was sites being removed batches prior to execution. COVID closures comprised 30% of the removals due to the fluidity of the COVID status of a site, 22% were removed due to incomplete site preparation by the bank (router location id, configuration requirements, etc.), 15% due to incomplete change requests, and 5% due to business considerations (client meetings, special processing, etc.).

I changed Verizon’s messaging to tie the downstream failures to upstream issues within the bank due to the COVID closures (lack of available personnel to facilitate after-hours entry and testing) and incomplete site prep. I highlighted that Verizon related failures were consistently 5% or lower. Bank leadership immediately began to focus on fixing their problems. I removed COVID closures from our KPI calculation. We realized COVID closures were rarely longer than 2 weeks and adjusted our process to keep 80% in their assigned batch. We assumed responsibility for the change request function, eliminating the impact. We identified the common causes of incomplete site preparation and developed an automation tool in partnership with the bank. These changes enabled us to implement an escalation path for critical sites, shortening preparation to 2 weeks.

Three months after taking over the program, our batch failure rate dropped from 40-60% to 5-12%. Within six months, Bank of America’s senior executive sponsor referred to our team as a “well oiled machine” and directed his team to add more sites to our scope, an extension worth another 30% of the overall program. The loss on the first phase of the program, estimated at $750k prior to my assignment, was narrowed to less than $250k. With the extension the program finished with a profit and was viewed by the customer as a major success. Of the 4600 sites, only 18 were unable to be completed.

Rescuing a Relationship

Verizon’s largest outsourcing customer notified the company of their intent not to renew their 10 year, $500M agreement due to misalignment on execution. I was tasked by senior executive leadership to examine the contract and determine if Verizon had failed to meet any of its obligations and develop a strategy to resurrect the renewal. I interviewed the leaders aligned to each section of the contract and walked through the delineated responsibilities, identifying where Verizon was and was not compliant. I determined Verizon was non-compliant with 27% of the contract terms, but of those the vast majority, and all of the major misses that had been verbalized by the customer in their notification, were the result of the customer not fulfilling their initiation responsibility. I developed a strategy that started with a mea culpa for not following up with the customer when they failed to initiate a program, identified several areas where no value had been exchanged but had not been identified and therefore could likely be eliminated from a renewal to streamline execution and shift spend to more important areas, and ended with a request to resume discussions.

My script was executed immediately and six months later the client signed a renewal. The former Verizon client executive was promoted to VP due to the renweal and is now an SVP with Verizon.

Launching Customer Success

To take advantage of my creativity and executive presence, I was assigned to a pilot Customer Success program tasked with leveraging the desired business outcomes of customers to engage them in large, innovation driven transformations. To limit risk, only customers who spent less than $50k per year could be targeted, but each program had to be worth at least $25M in revenue to Verizon. Clients needed to sign-off on an eight-stage business case that represented their agreement to work with Verizon to develop and implement the solution. Once completed, the business case was turned over to the sales team for pursuit. All of the business cases were tied to revenue generation for the customer, whether new digital services or enhancements to existing services.

To engage with sales teams, I spoke to their desired outcome of building executive relationships. I assembled a matrixed team and used a design thinking approach to build 2-3 truly innovative ideas that would solve real business challenges, each one rooted in a Verizon capability. I then solicited meetings by reach out to C-suite executives and suggesting I had an idea that would help them achieve a specific desired outcome by anywhere from 2% to 5%, and if they were interested, I’d appreciate be connected to the right person. Using this approach, I was able to create relationships at the C-suite and senior executive levels with five companies who now represent over $50M/yr in spend with Verizon. The most significant idea developed is now available as a $15/mo subscription: OnStar Guardian.

Growing A Relationship

AT&T had been largely excluded from deals at a major retailer, only used as a second provider where the primary wasn’t available. Upon assignment to the team in a Customer Success role, I immediately sought to understand before being understood. I learned their network strategy was a mess, control having been ceded to vendors with no traceability to the company’s strategy. Leading with generosity, I asked for a copy and returned with a blueprint for a five year, vendor agnostic strategy that aligned with the public statements of the CEO on vision and strategy, combined with industry insights I gleaned from the Internet. The Director of Networking was astonished, appreciated my effort, and after a couple of iterations my strategy and architecture roadmap was submitted. I soon learned it was the only one submitted to the VP of Enterprise Architecture who was leading an effort professionalize IT. He asked to meet and walk him through the modifications I made to his template, which he incorporated. I shared my thoughts on how to leverage my work to get responses from his peers, treating it as a campaign and suggesting the CIO approve budgets in order of submission. I was soon talking with the CIO about overall IT strategy and the adoption of emerging technologies. Among several topics, I shared my recently developed concept for in-store 3D printed hard-to-find parts. He introduced me to the VP of Retail Strategy who showed me how similar my concept was theirs, and he added me to his team as an “advisor”. When the Voice Transformation initiative was announced, I was asked to help write the RFP, and then asked to create the evaluation framework, both adopted as best practices by the customer. I implemented a firewall between my role and sales to prevent any impropriety. AT&T won the $35M contract, growing account revenue by 10x in less than nine months. Prior to my assignment, I’d never worked in the retail industry.

30 Minutes to Impress

When the CTO of a Tier 1 bank puts 30 minutes on his calendar and invites you to a meeting without any explanation, you go. Upon arrival I was presented with the following problem. The Federal Reserve had tasked his bank with figuring out how to ensure 100% uptime, the continuation of banking operations even if both the primary and secondary data centers were unavailable. He explained they were the weakling in the field, their very public failures had put a target on their back that gave the Fed an opening to push and push hard. What I didn’t know at the time was that he was testing me. Would I, as the newly established Verizon Customer Success person on the team, throw products and services at him or admit it was an unsolvable problem. What he didn’t expect was the solution I presented.

Banking data for each customer I theorized couldn’t be very large, maybe a single megabyte at most. He agreed. The Fed only cared about people with savings and checking accounts, correct? Yes. And they wanted to make sure that during a disaster, people would have access to at least some of their funds, if not all? Correct again. What if a copy of all the most recent transactions was stored on the customer’s phone, in the secure sandbox where the app resides. It would be encrypted and only available to the app. In the case of a data center outage, the phone would act as a proxy for the bank’s data center, able to initiate transactions at branches and ATM’s and store the results. When the data centers were restored, at the next interaction the updated data would be uploaded and processed and life could continue as normal.

He sat across from me for two minutes with a blank stare and deafening silence. He turned to the sales director who’d facilitated the meeting and told him “I like this guy.” From that point forward, we had carte blanche access to the CIO and his team, who helped me get in front of the retail banking SVP to discuss improving the customer experience.

My Apology Tour

Affina was in a difficult position. The company generated $50M a year in revenue and was losing $25M a year to churn as clients decided latest generation technology was more valuable than white glove service. Customers representing about 80% of our revenue had signaled an intent to put their business out to RFP. Having deployed a sales force automation solution that included teaching salesmen who’d never used a laptop, I was tasked with the CEO to retain as many of these customers as I could. The future of the company depended on me, nobody was listening to him anymore. He gave me a list of names and access to the company plane.

I interviewed the account manager for each customer, all of them high brand value companies like Kellogg’s, Domino’s Pizza, Quaker, M&M Mars, and our largest customer who represented nearly half of our revenue, Brother. I scheduled meetings with the buyer at each customer and started what a VP called “Brian’s apology tour”.

At each stop I listened to every complaint and concern my customer could voice. When done, I told them we had received the message and were in the process of moving to a new platform with the functionality they demanded. While we would never lower our quality, we would certainly face obstacles and setbacks, and we might even need their help. On that tour I gained the support of every leader, 100% retention of their business, with two even offering to loan me their own IT resources for weeks at a time to help out as needed.

Abandoned in Miami

Upon arrival at PwC, I was removed from my new hire training in Atlanta halfway through my first day and told to get on a plane to Miami. I joined a team architecting a solution to transfer money more efficiently to South America for a company called Mercantile Servicios Financieros (MSF). Although hired as a project manager, I had a very technical background and quickly took over as the lead architect. This change in role earned me an invitation three weeks later to a partnership meeting between PwC, Sun Microsystems and iPlanet, a developer of high-end internet backend systems. During the meeting I was assigned as the PwC representative to join a Sun and iPlanet team the following day to discuss building the first Spanish language portal on the Internet for a Chilean phone company, Americatel. My job was to elicit requirements. Perfect.

I arrived at the meeting to find 30 IT professionals including two managers, the only ones who spoke English. I speak no Spanish. Nobody else arrived. Panicked, I called my boss who was dumbfounded. He told me to do my best, that’s all he could ask. I huddled with the managers: what was their expectation. Your job is to walk us through the architecture and design of an Internet Service Provider (ISP). The closest experience I had was using one. Not perfect.

I did about 30 minutes of quick research and phoned a friend from the MSF project to join me the following day to discuss user access and authentication. I introduced myself and was immediately asked which model Cisco router would we be using. Undaunted, I broke the solution space down and we walked through all the components of an ISP and how they worked together over the next six hours. I got four hours of sleep that night as I poured over every document I could find on ISP architecture and design. I arrived the following day, joined by my MSF counterpart, and we completed the workshop. I delivered a design and quote three days later, defended the design at an orals presentation three days after that, and we were awarded a $6M contract to implement 123.com, followed by a $2M extension to build an customized email service on top of the portal, news aggregation, personal web space and calendar service in the first release.

The Painful Leading Edge

General Motors spun EDS out and in doing so turned over several software licenses, including my two products, WinVLT and CalTools, used during the development of GM cars worldwide. GM had already decided to sunset both as they moved to a new provider of in-vehicle controllers, Siemens, who would also provide a new software suite. Despite several offers to share our intellectual property in the interest of our mutual customer, who strangely still paid my salary despite me being allocated to EDS, Siemens went at development on their own. I senses impending disaster.

I decided to find a way to keep both products alive, just in case GM changed its mind. I had only support level funding, five months at most, and needed to find new revenue sources. I reached out to newly displaced Delco Electronics and signed a distribution deal bundlng our tools with their controllers. I pushed GM international companies to buy licenses and support, explaining the tool had been sunset and EDS now owned the rights. Through this effort I discovered engineers at two foreign auto manufacturers were illegally using our software, and reached out to offer licensing agreements in the form of cease and desist letters.

While negotiating one of those deals, I was pulled into a meeting with the lead engineer for GM vehicle calibration who informed me the new supplier had missed every deadline and they were now past the point of no return. He lamented that WinVLT and CalTools were dead. Well, not really. Within 60 days we had a new contract that took us from subsistence to full funding and completed the overhaul and migration to 32-bit windows in 16 weeks. Siemens was told to stick to hardware. As a team, we generated more revenue per head than any other group at EDS, by a wide margin.

Reversing an Industry Forward

Invited to sit in on a meeting at the request of an audit partner, Duke Energy’s SVP of Smart Grid shared their vision: give customers more granular knowledge of how consumption impacts cost. He walked me through their Smart Grid architecture, single board computers installed inside of meters and connected via a mobile network to the Internet and Duke’s data centers. Throughout the day, each smart meter would stream usage data to Duke, which in turn would provide up-to-the-minute costs to customers via a mobile application and customer portal. I asked how billing was done today. A mainframe intensive task that took several days to complete. How were they going to move from batch to real time billing to meet the sub-second expectations of the Internet masses when bills took days to compute? Well, Duke needed the data to address customer billing disputes. How many customers disputed bills? Less than 5% each month, and they were usually resolved with a credit due to the lack of usage data.

I asked if he was aware of how an intra-vehicle control system worked. No. I explained a distributed system where work is pushed down the stack as far as it can go to minimize network traffic. The engine controller cares about airbag deployments, and traffic about radio settings cannot be allowed to interfere. What if Duke Energy reversed its architecture, using real time where it made sense but using a pull instead of push approach for data? I suggested even the most minimal specification for a smart meter had to exceed the storage and computing power required by an order of magnitude.

Over dinner that night, I walked him through a new architecture in which usage data was accumulated on the smart meter with only the final answer for any given month, the total energy consumed which was analogous to yesteryear meter reading, uploaded when requested or in periodic batches to keep the buffer from filling. Minute-to-minute bills were algorithmically calculated as estimates using the pulled data. By minimizing network traffic to answers instead of raw data, the mobile connectivity costs were minimized, speed of the overall solution maximized, and data would be available when needed. I worked with his architects over the next several weeks to finalize our approach. Duke Energy adopted my distributed architecture, creating enough momentum it shifted the entire industry to match.

Out-clouding Google and Salesforce

While at AT&T in 2011, I was asked to participate in an Oxford style debate at the InterOp Enterprise Cloud Summit in Las Vegas where I was presenting on Cloud Economics. The resolution: private cloud will always be superior for enterprises to public cloud. I was asked to argue the pro side despite being a strong critic of private clouds, having referred to them as a weak crutch in both my Network World blog and at prior conferences. My opponents: Peter Coffee of Salesforce and Peter Magnusson of Google Cloud fame. I was informed 30 minutes before the debate that my partner had flight issues and wouldn’t arrive in time.

The pre-debate survey was narrowly tilted to the con side at 46 to 44. Truly I had an unfair advantage because I talked to Fortune 500 CIO’s and CFO’s all the time, my opponents did not. I was already in the thick of the fight, trying to change minds while they were figuring out how to get access. For the debate my platform was simple: security, privacy and cost predictability matter more than the vague promise of lower capital expenditures. I successfully blunted every argument they made. Lower cost. Maybe, but enterprises could get close enough on their own without sacrificing privacy and security. Greater flexibility. Not really, because most enterprises don’t see wild swings in consumption, and those areas that do can be migrated to public cloud when it makes sense. Over the course of 45 minutes our battle raged. When the post-debate votes were tallied, private cloud, the position I didn’t agree with, won: con 30, pro 54, with a few attendees unable to pick a side.

The loss did not sit well with my opponents, one of whom tried in vain to hire me (I had no interest in returning to California). The low profile guy from AT&T bested the experts from Google and Salesforce simply by listening to his customers.