<a href="https://news.google.com/rss/articles/CBMiP2h0dHBzOi8vd3d3Lm55dGltZXMuY29tLzIwMjEvMDUvMjkvdXMvdGhvbWFzLXN1bGxpdmFuLWRlYWQuaHRtbNIBQ2h0dHBzOi8vd3d3Lm55dGltZXMuY29tLzIwMjEvMDUvMjkvdXMvdGhvbWFzLXN1bGxpdmFuLWRlYWQuYW1wLmh0bWw?oc=5" target="_blank">Thomas Sullivan Dies at 91; Investigated Corruption in Chicago’s Courts</a>&nbsp;&nbsp;<font color="#6f6f6f">The New York Times</font>

Thomas Sullivan Dies at 91; Investigated Corruption in Chicago’s Courts - The New York Times

<a href="https://www.thenewstribune.com/sports/article251682618.html" target="_blank">Youth wins at Chambers Bay: College players advance to semifinals of U.S. Amateur 4-Ball</a>&nbsp;&nbsp;<font color="#6f6f6f">Tacoma News Tribune</font>

Youth wins at Chambers Bay: College players advance to semifinals of U.S. Amateur 4-Ball - Tacoma News Tribune

University of Nebraska at Omaha

San Jose State University

Business Technology Leader

San Diego, California, United States

Parachute Technology, Inc.

Director of Professional Services

Washington State University

Adjunct Professor

Provide Strategic Technology Guidance for our larger Bay Area clients and manage the team of Technical Account Managers who engage regularly with all of our clients to ensure that technology is aligned with their business needs.

Director, Account Management

Orange County-based IT Services firm supporting clients with both traditional and Managed Services IT needs, CIO, Disaster Recovery and Security.

Transformed this local IT Services firm from a marginally profitable break-fix firm to a service-driven managed services firm, with best-in-class profitability and client satisfaction.

Our growth was fueled by focusing on technology strategy, business continuity and security.

Sold Acutech to Integritek in 2018 and stayed on through September 2019 as the VP of Client Success, building the team, the Technology Business Review framework, monthly client reports and staffing and compensation models for the Client Success team. Drove price adjustments through legacy Austin, Dallas, and Atlanta markets, realizing over $1 million in ARR in Q1 2019.

Acutech Network Services, Inc.

Owner and vCIO

Coordinated cross-functional initiatives that Hyperwallet needed to complete in order to meet the strategic growth needs of the company.  Also responsible for Security Governance, and in that role, successfully led the company through its PCI DSS compliance audit. Other initiatives included SSAE16 SOC 2 Type 2, Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery, Money Licensing in all US States, and an enhanced anti-Money Laundering initiative.

Hyperwallet

Interim Vice President - Strategic Initiatives

Fixed under-performing, critical component to Service Delivery for CDS (internal MSP for Omnicom) by stabilizing staff, streamlining processes, implementing SLAs, reporting, a strong knowledge base, quality controls and measures, and standardized incident management. These changes improved client sat, provided cross-company visibility thereby enhancing trust, and allowed Senior Management to focus on the expansion of CDS.

Omnicom Media Group

Director of Customer Care

Recruited to fix Compushare's Service Delivery organization, whose dysfunction was causing excessive client churn, while simultaneously containing costs as the company prepared to be acquired.

My first priority was to fix Managed Services.  With over 23,000 security patches backlogged in its patch management system, I reorganized and focused the team, directing a milestone-driven project that reduced the number of outstanding patches below our target within 90 days and kept it there.

The next biggest problem was the remote monitoring solution which was unstable and unreliable. Working closely with the vendor and reviewing all alert configurations, the system was stabilized, with false alerts reduced by 40%. Finally, the backup and disaster recovery solutions were unmanaged, exposing Compushare and its clients to excessive risk. I assigned dedicated owners over this and each service offering so we could sustain the improvements I had implemented.

Outside of Managed Services, my focus was to better leverage our human capital; encouraging staff to work with and rely more on each other. The Service Desk staff had had no guidelines or metrics, no knowledge base and the teams hoarded information. I collapsed the four Service Desk units into one team, and established clear guidelines for service quality. I also integrated the four field service delivery teams, and cross-pollinated the regions so they could learn from each other.

These improvements delivered results!  Service delivery employee turnover dropped from over 100% to under 20%, our staff satisfaction climbed from -23% NPS (Net Promoter Score) to 50% NPS, we improved client sat and kept it between 70% and 80% NPS, which I measured weekly, and because of the flattened organization, led to the most profitable period in the company's history.

Finastra

Vice President, Client Services (Compushare)

As a Management Consultant, worked with several firms to optimize or build their Service Delivery operations. Highlights include:

-  Captured needs, crafted the RFP, reviewed candidates, negotiated contracts. selected tools, and then designed and built NOC and remote monitoring practice for a mid-enterprise technology support firm.

-  Assumed day-to-day management of InfoPartners' Remote Support Team and implemented operational changes that reduced open issues by over 50%, while capturing more detailed data about client issues. These improvements led to a 70% improvement in client satisfaction and a 140% improvement in client experience with the Remote Support Team.

-  Designed, built and deployed client reports so clients could better appreciate the value their Managed Services Providers were providing.

-  Automated server patching for managed clients leading to more stable client environments with minimal staff effort.

-  Optimized monitoring alerts from Kaseya into Connectwise to allow for better management of client infrastructure.

-  Worked with management of InfoPartners and Compushare to support smooth transition during acquisition.

This Direction Consulting

Principal

Prior to my joining, All Covered was perennially unprofitable, with divergent and contradictory practices, out-of-date systems, and a business model that would not sustain this nationwide IT Services firm.  As part of a larger strategy, I was brought in to centralize as much work as possible and optimize how we delivered service.  I defined and built out the Managed Services organization to support the consulting services of the company, while simultaneously updating the IT infrastructure, applications, processes and staff, allowing us to change the relationship with our clients from one based on visits to one based on Service Level Agreements.

This strategy shifted 1/3 of the company’s work to the Managed Services organization, which helped improve client retention, gross margin, consultant retention, and contributed to the company’s first sustained period of profitability.  The Managed Services organization consisted of a 24x7 Network Operations Center, National Service Desk, and Remote Server maintenance for 1,500 clients, 5,000 servers, and 35,000 desktops.

Besides architecting and managing the Managed Services organization, I also upgraded the company’s technology infrastructure.  Highlights were virtualizing our data center, implementing MS Exchange and SharePoint, and consolidating 20 disparate phone systems into a nationwide VoIP service.  I also updated our core business systems by embedding business rules and processes in the application, implementing and integrating with <a href="http://Salesforce.com">Salesforce.com</a>, and building role-based dashboards and Business Intelligence with SharePoint.

These strategies grew the Managed Services and IT functions ten-fold, with negligible turnover and high levels of esprit de corps even though the staff was highly distributed.

All Covered

Chief Information Officer

Worked in the Inovant Division of Visa  managing multiple IT projects in the company's IT Portfolio.  Duties included working with company stakeholders to understand business requirements, and quantify effort, duration, inter- company chargebacks, and ROI for Inovant Products  Responsible for Mobile technology, Security Management, and other initiatives.

Visa

Department Head

Xpherix, an early cloud and mobile device service provider, was initially established as an International personal 411 service before the widespread adoption of smartphones.  This strategy was clearly not working, so I was brought in to optimize the infrastructure and help drive a business plan that would attract customers.   After normalizing the infrastructure so we could support the tens of thousands of users we were expecting, and streamlining the company's structure so we could achieve profitability, we re-directed the delivery of this information away from the carriers' 411 services directly to end-users' phones using WAP, J2ME, and BREW -- the handset development tools at the time.

With our back-end scalable, and a solution we felt would be attractive to cell-phone customers, we approached the wireless carriers and began selling subscription services to our growing portfolio, which included iphonebook, idatebook and Remo (an inclusive service that synced contacts, calendar and email from Outlook to any cell phone for $5.99 a month). These early cell phone business productivity applications were moderately successful in the marketplace and we quickly went from no customers to over 30,000 paying subscribers. My strategic and technical leadership helped turn this service into a going concern, but we ultimately decided that the cost structure was too high in the US, and sold the assets and the subscribers to an offshore company.  This company, Remoba, is still selling and supporting the applications we built.

Remoba Inc

COO & CTO

Sigma Networks, incubated at Benchmark Capital, was started to solve for Metropolitan Area Networks (MANs) what MFS, Level 3, Global Crossing and others had addressed for Wide Area Network Connectivity.  Namely, our objective was to resolve bandwidth bottlenecks at metro exchanges.  I was brought in as CIO, at startup, to architect and deliver the Operational Support System (OSS) that would attract data carriers, and concurrently help convince investors that we had a solution and talent edge over the incumbents and other players entering this space.  In less than a year, we had achieved both goals -- our industry-leading OSS was in production, and we had raised $440 million in capital to fund the network build-out.

Given our aggressive business plan, the approach I took to build our competitive OSS was to license leading OSS tools -- including MetaSolv, Daleen, Cygent, Netcool, Openview, AIM, and Cisco, Nortel and Ciena Vendor Network Tools.  These components, along with some homegrown applications and Upshot (Sales Force Automation), were integrated with Vitria's BPM engine, which routed work through the organization based on mapped business processes, and was exposed to our carrier clients via the cutting-edge, bandwidth management portal we'd built -- MAINPoint.  No other company in the world at that time allowed carriers to throttle their bandwidth real-time via an Extranet.  These advantages helped us to attract some very large data consumers such as AOL and Cable & Wireless.

Sigma Networks' network, OSS, and culture were recognized throughout the industry, and at the end of 2001, Harvard Business Review built a case study based on our efforts.  This case study can be found at <a href="http://hbr.org/product/sigma-networks-inc/an/802103-PDF-ENG">http://hbr.org/product/sigma-networks-inc/an/802103-PDF-ENG</a>.  Ultimately, the telecom bubble burst, and as Om Malik chronicled in his book Broadbandits, Sigma Networks, along with the other carriers trying to build a more dynamic metro area network fabric went down with it.

Sigma Networks, Inc.

Full strategic and tactical responsibility for defining, managing and leading the re-engineering, implementation and integration of IT operations, including networks, systems and applications.   Hired, trained and mentored a staff of 30.

Securities America Inc.

Fast-track promotions through a series of increasingly responsible management positions for this data and telecom start-up.  Was initially hired as IS Manager for MFS Datanet to establish IT operations and integrate technical infrastructure after acquisition of Cylix.  Was promoted to Senior Director of IS and moved to Omaha to lead the integration and support of Internet, Intranet and Extranet enterprise-wide initiatives.  Was kept on after acquisition by WorldCom as Director of IS Support to effectively integrate MFS and WorldCom support infrastructure.

Patrick Sullivan

Patrick Sullivan