Georgetown University McDonough School of Business

Collège de Staël

ETH Zürich

University of Waterloo

Entrepreneur, Professor, ex-Senior Digital Analytics Consultant at World Bank

▪ Taught a graduate level Digital Analytics course, focusing on digital marketing and business analytics
▪ Topics taught: web (GA4), social media (organic & paid), search (organic and paid), newsletters, display, setting the right goals & measurement methods, informing strategy based on KPIs, competitive analysis, marketing ROI, A/B testing, Excel, data visualizations, dashboards, generating insights from data, etc.
▪ Students are working towards a Master's in Integrated Marketing Communications, Journalism or Public Relations & Corporate Communications
▪ Teaching methods: Face-to-Face (PowerPoint, discussion and live practical exercises), online synchronous (2.5 hours on Zoom) and fully asynchronous (all material online, as text, images and screen recordings for demos).
▪ Set up extensive environments for students to run A/B Tests including advanced UTM codes management
▪ Proud recipient of the Outstanding Faculty Tropaia Award, May 2023

Georgetown University School of Continuing Studies

Lecturer, Digital Analytics & Measurement

Startup Leadership Program

SLP Fellow

I started Dishly, an innovative startup dedicated to transforming the dining experience and how individuals discover and enjoy food and beverages. This unique platform learns your taste preferences and dietary restrictions based on your voluntary inputs and your ratings. Then, it suggests dishes, cocktails, wines, and beers tailored specifically to you. No more scrolling through lengthy menus, agonizing on what to pick.
I incorporated the company, filed for a Trademark and a provisional patent. On the technical side, I developed the entire backend (the API) using the MEAN framework (MongoDB + Node.js) and supervised the creation of the front using Angular, a hybrid framework allowing to write once and deploy on the web, iOS and Android.

Dishly, LLC

Founder and CEO

- Designed and led the Digital Analytics training program for 500+ staff.
- Improved the architecture of the web metrics solution of the World Bank (Omniture/Adobe Analytics).
- Analyzed the impact of paid marketing on social media platforms.
- Created templates and standards to be used across the organization (e.g. dashboards, segments and custom metrics)

World Bank

Senior Digital Analytics Consultant

Community Empowerment Lab (CEL) is a research organization whose mission is to develop scalable solutions to improve the lives of poor communities in rural India.  CEL develops behavior change models which can be replicated across India, and potentially the world.  All of CEL's projects are donor funded, a large part by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

I've established an online Project Management tool (Wrike), best practices and jump-started the staff manual. I led the IT team to integrate a mobile data collection form that uses our core data (250,000 households) and is used in the field.  We launched a custom data collection app as a platform for creating forms quickly and easily, with an intelligent scheduler which helped field workers to identify which household to visit first.

I also integrated Technology and Operations as tightly as I can. The scale of operations is huge (100+ field workers, 0.6 million population surveyed just in 1 project), so every second counts.  For example, in our 2-monthly Pregnancy Surveillance System, each eight seconds gained for each form is equivalent to one full day less of work for each worker in our 2-months cycle.

Most importantly, I streamlined our processes and internal communication to achieve the highest possible Efficiency, Quality and Innovation.

Community Empowerment Lab

Technology and Operations Director

Led the strategic analysis to inform the Bank's position vis-a-vis the new gTLDs and .xxx domains.
Assessed the current state of domain names owned (or not) by the Bank, as well as trademarks.
Provided recommendations for partnership websites.
Led the Social Media Review project (first phase).
Improved web Q&A guidelines and processes.
Developed the External Communications dashboard, a managerial tool featuring key indicators about the Bank's web sites (1200+!) and mobile apps.

The World Bank

Business Analysis Officer, Web Governance Team

Jahia is one of the (literally) 1,000 Content Management System provider. In my too short time here, I answered the following questions:
a) How do we differentiate Jahia, and make it the de facto standard of 2011 and beyond? 
b) How do we make sure that the tool is solving business needs and not just techies' dreams? 
c) How do we address in particular the Higher Education Administration (Gov 2.0) markets?

Jahia Solutions

Strategy Intern

Intranet
The long-awaited intranet has been developed jointly with Tech Center and Student Services and features most information students need on a day-to-day basis: calendars, academic information, student activities, forums, as well as background documents vital to life at MSB.

Club web sites
Building on my predecessor’s work, all 45 club web sites were in production early 2010 and most were up-to-date. The major change is that all sites now have a similar layout and are managed using the same system (drupal). 

Email system
We evaluated gmail against Hotmail to decide which system the school should use. After a long debate, we decided for gmail (along with the whole google documents and calendaring suite) because it felt much sturdier and stable than the Microsoft version of online documents.

Common calendar
A “master” calendar of all events @ MSB was created and published, pulling from all clubs calendars'.

Student Education
I organized a couple training sessions about generic use of IT (especially for collaboration) and managing websites using drupal.

Georgetown University's McDonough School of Business

VP of Technology

This was arguably the first time in the history of conferencing that a conference was encouraging groups around the world to set up events to project conference content and discuss around it. This was the precursor to the TEDx events (http://www.ted.com/tedx). 
- Led $250,000 conference “Hubs” project, providing conference content to ~10,000 people worldwide in 130 hubs and 34 countries. Reached a 50% larger audience for a 1% increase in cost. Co-organized a “hub” in Durban, South-Africa with the University of KwaZulu-Natal..
- Co-organized a 3-day event in partnership with the World Bank’s GDLN with a 7-site video conference on the last day.
- Managed concept notes, promotion, legal matters, implementation, processes, web site and all the IT/AV requirements that hubs needed, leading a team of 4. Succeeded despite the robbery of $1 million worth of specialized AV equipment one day before the conference, by creatively redefining all processes and motivating staff and the suppliers.
- Produced and published in almost-real time 250 video files in 2 languages.

AIDS 2008

Conference Hubs Manager

Invented and founded Enitiatives.org - a Direct Democracy platform that allows any citizen to freely express his political opinion, either by starting an Enitiative or by supporting others' Enitiatives (by voting). Popular Enitiatives will be brought forward to an *action*.

Direct Democracy is an effective way to avoid corrupt governments and to insure that the people feels involved enough to take his destiny in his own hands.

Enitiatives.org

Director

Built the Project Plan for the AIDS 2006 Conference, which gathered more than 20'000 people in Toronto in August 2006, to speak about AIDS, how to fight it, and, hopefully, how to make more progress to fight this disease which kills 5 humans every second.

Took into account more than 60 people working on it, almost all full-time, during the whole year preceding the Conference.

I was also responsible of internal communications, allowing people in Geneva, Toronto, Berlin, New York, and throughout the rest of the world to communicate and be uptodate on the project status.

International AIDS Society

Project Management Coordinator

Expanding web services of the IAS, including
  the corporate web sites
  the budget system, now managing $200+ MM with tens of decentralized managers. 
  numerous application and web sites (e.g. Programme-At-A-Glance, Fraud Hunter, etc).

Project Manager IT

Missions in banks, international organizations and companies, including 
	Redesign, migration and fine tuning of a workflow application. Creation of intranet prototypes in advanced DHTML and JavaScript.
	Design and implementation of an online shop for www.citroen.ch
	Need analysis and pilot for an intranet using SharePoint 2003
	Implementation of a documentary intranet for WHO, including programming of Web parts in Visual Studio .NET 2003.
Most assignments included an evaluation of the situation, making a functional and financial offer, designing the architecture and framework of the project, as well as its implementation and maintenance.

Net@rchitects

Consultant

Gen-gen's main goal is to establish as precisely and exhaustively as possible the "cartography" of Geneva's people, both past and present and publish it on the internet. We have gathered almost 800,000 people to date, and keep adding! Our data sources are:
- trees that individuals, families or organizations send us
- individual contributions by email
- systematic data entry done by volunteers

Our most significant difference with other genealogy services is that we merge all the information we receive, aiming at having each person only once. This is done through a team of trained and accredited volunteers.

I founded the Society, created the web site (ASP.NET/SQL Server), featuring, among other things, displaying all individuals in the genealogical tree of the Society and a search capability to find the most direct relationship between any two individual of the tree as well as countless statistics.

Société Genevoise de Généalogie

President and Founder

Active in the company even before it was created, I started by creating the complete IT infrastructure from scratch. I then designed all business processes (purchasing, sales, repair, billing, etc…) for a company aiming to sell more than 100'000 Tablet PC on the German market within a year, through different business channels (phone operators, electricity operators launching PowerLine, etc…), as well as the database structure.
Creation of a very sophisticated, multilingual and powerful website management system. I was the main architect and programmer (VB.NET, SQL Server) of this project. Some examples include www.paceblade.com, my.symplon.com, www.highergate.com, www.gen-gen.ch, pioneering with the new Microsoft ASP.NET technology (in beta at the time of the decision!), now an established standard! 
Management of medium-sized projects. Management of client relationship for sales and the support of our software and hardware products. Creation of technical and end-user documentation

symplon AG

Head of Development

Analysis, design and implementation of the Financial Analysis program of the bank, which is used by about 2000 people. The program has been welcome with the warmest reactions by the users and is now one of the key selling advantage for the bank, as well as a vital tool for the fund managers and the analysts.
I led this project from the functional requirements analysis on, coordinating the database administrators and programmers, while writing a significant part of the program myself (about 30'000 lines of Delphi code). Delivery was before the deadline. Managed the very successful roll-out of the application.
I then moved to the position of Web technology engineer to design and create technologically advanced websites (especially intranets and parts of extranets). 
Complete design of a multi-tier workflow system to generate documents produced by the bank, using MS Office's OLE functions on the server-side, in ASP, from scratch. Extensive use of XML and XSL.

Nico Durand