journey summary
I am an engineer who happened to work in healthcare
- ... and IT professional by training. A leader and decision-maker by experience.
- Offering Business-Technology strategy, helpful frameworks, and executive coaching.
- Over 34 years in the field starting with a small 300-bed hospital in New York. “St John’s Riverside” where I rose from weekend operator to heading the installation of new Patient HIS and Admission+Discharge+Transfer platforms (1986).
- Leadership exposure as a thought leader in Medco, Express Scripts, Merck, and Johnson and Johnson.
- Exposure as a partner in healthcare relationships (deal-making)with Google, McKesson, Microsoft, …, and SAP
- Part of J&J’s factory of the future core team, duties covered advanced automation, IOT, additive manufacture, and advanced logistics of materials, through manufacture and ship.
Industries
Information Technology Leader - Global
- Pharmacy, PBM, Healthcare
- Payor, Provider, Manufacturer
- Regulatory & Compliance
- Supply Chain, E-Commerce / CRM, R&D
- Finance/Tax, A&D and Valuations
- Insurance
- Engineer/maker - home automation, telematics, RF/Wifi
EXPERTISE
In my work, I have found real progress and value only comes with a focus on bold goals, empowered teams, and small cycles of test & learn. You can advance further than you thought with a different set of thinking frameworks.
And my services stick with you and your team. They are a collection of coaching, training, delivered assessments, roadmaps, policies, and even memorandum for stakeholders.
What I do and am known for
- Leading directly or through influence. Teams >> 1,000
- Strategy augmentation or full delivery based on Systems Thinking, Complexity Science, Economics, and People Dynamics
- Problem-solving taught and delivered. Critical thinking is the most important approach, beyond interpersonal relationships. However, in today's buy-side IT setting, it's often short-circuited or shunned. I help get it back where it belongs, right "before" a solution is implemented.
- First-Principles or "Ab-Initio" drives my thinking process and I convey that to your teams. If you can reduce a problem-solution "couple" to its first principles, you can port that thinking into any other domain or approach. If you don't challenge your team's behaviors to come from first principles, you will get best-practice answers with no understanding or benchmarks with no context as answers.
- Systems thinker - a follower of Goldratt, Ackoff, Demming, Bungay, and others.
Particularly, some examples
- 22 Years in US PBM “Medco”, now ESI, now Evernorth a Cigna company. Member of leadership for efforts such as our e-commerce website 1996, our automated pharmacy while owned by Merck (94-2001), our therapeutic resource centers 2006, and others including A&D.
- 5 ½ years in Johnson and Johnson. Implemented their one-jnj strategy along with business partners resulting in the consolidating of 55 ERP systems, implementing real-time order and split management enabling the company to acquire and divest without outward disruption e.g. single catalog, single invoice, globally. Responsible IT liaison for Verb Surgical (J&J and Alphabet a $280m robotic surgery deal). Verb was bought by J&J in 2018.
- Medco 2.0 transformation 2008-2012 –referenced in Ch 6 Jeff Sutherland’s book. Innovation – use IMDG to “impedance match” future data changes and needs largely unknown at the time and a legacy mainframe/distributed platform.
- J&J Enterprise Cloud & Enterprise Data Strategy – Integrated 3 years of 57 ERP data silos into a "single version of truth" data fabric without re-installing the platforms using "schema on read " & in-memory grids. Innovation – having created “pull” via beneficial attractors, move up the stack to data (agility) as a platform “pivot”.
- US DoD $125BLN Study 2016 – Contributor (more below).
In familiar terms
- Software Development Life Cycle. Software team models (Agile and related). Sourcing strategies, including Global
- Infrastructure and support desks. Architecture practice.
- Organization - I show people a new way to work
- Cloud - From just-servers to optimum without getting stuck with one vendor
- Innovation - Fan of the likes of the late Clay Christensen https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clayton_Christensen
- Data "freedom" from silos, making it simple to consume, easy to change, and prototype, without blowing things up or reimplementation. Get rid of busses, queues, integrations. Give your teams even more agility beyond code. Pat US8832020B2
- User experience and feedback - champion/challenger
chronology
2013-2018 J&J
- Thought leader, innovator and change agent, IT governance leader
- Software-Defined Data Center, concept, governance & program delivery. Funded through shaping P&L impacts for 260+ operating companies to attract sponsorship rather than compel it
- 1st "Real" Enterprise Data at J&J through "Schema on Read" & Ontological means where lift & shift data warehouse canonical models were not practical. I talk later on about using best practice v.s. allowing for emergence. This experience was one of several light bulb moments for many when we removed the restrictions of "best practice".
- Created and deployed our first Federated Enterprise Architecture operating model. A unique and repeatable method to leverage failure demand in delivery of value demand, this circumvented commonplace funding/sponsorship conundrums. Not a heavy change-management effort, rather an opportunity based incentive program.
- Introduction of DevOps & Agile through "Systems Thinking" (TOC), driving for business value-based prioritization. Being mindful and respectful of the norms of a company, while challenging disconnected group-think. It was a balance...
- 2012-2013
- Strategic advisement for global technology leader EMC/VMWARE prior to Pivotal's creation
- Product creation and go to market plan/delivery for "Agile Data Services", a data-fabric based transformation platform
- Contributor to DOD $125Bln savings study
- Patent Holder Agile Data Fabric
Earlier...
- CTO Medco Health
- CTO GSI commerce mentoring coaching transformation technology leadership for human beings