The development of a strategic plan begins with the identification of the company's internal strengths and weaknesses, followed by an analysis of its competitive position. This involves a detailed analysis of the company's technical position. The CIO should play a lead role in these tasks. The final plan will have both internal and external objectives. The internal objectives deal with enhancing profitability, meeting system requirements, and business objectives as defined by senior management. This is an area where the CIO should lead in analysis and in establishing forward-looking targets. With respect to the external objects, the CIO should be part of a team entrusted to identify alliances with vendors and participate in the execution of these objectives.

The CIO should identify the types and degree of risk management appropriate for the company’s technical and operational activities.

Since information systems are usually the largest part of the MIS system, the CIO must remain abreast of developments in the technologies.

Because a majority of the communications with owners and potential owners is the explanation of the firm's past technical decisions or its future expectations, the CIO should take a lead role in this communications program. This will entail a detailed understanding of the firm's operations, financials, and competitive position. The CIO will have to be aware of developing industry trends, and have full knowledge emerging technologies.

Development and extension of a flexible plan of work

As a consultant for 18 years and the Vice President of an IT department for two years, I have had countless instances where it was my responsibility to develop business plans and solutions to business issues. During this process I have created, implemented and followed business plans to achieve business needs and goals. While at 1800Flowers.com these plans have included the business critical need to reduce headcount, streamline operations, eliminate waste, and improve the reliability of the ecommerce solution that was outsourced. With these plans developed, I then moved to the implementation phase which included a reduction in headcount, the movement of the web development and taking control of hosting capabilities in-house, the addition of redundant sites, and the complete elimination of a 3^rd party Disaster Recovery site. All of these activities were performed while yielding higher productivity and increased reliability for a savings of several million dollars in recurring expenses.

Over the years I have had ample opportunity to meet with and build strong working relationships with people from all levels of management and at many levels of the corporate organization.  To this day I am in close contact with many of my former managers and peers as we continue to have personal relationships.

Providing quality solutions and options for optimizing the ROI

Customers and employers have told me on many occasions that I am an out of the box thinker. I use every resource available to me to build the best possible and optimal solutions within the constraints applied by the environmental issues at hand. Although I am able to think quickly on my feet, I am also quite capable of methodical planning when it best fits the situation. Such examples include a project in which I was the project manager of a nation wide UNIX Y2K upgrade. While taking a step back from the task at hand, I was able to completely redesign the project such that 90% of the UNIX systems could be upgraded remotely. This required that I design and document a process that allowed my team and I to preload UNIX system hard disks and ship them to remote locations country wide to be installed by NCR field engineers. Once the disks were installed (also following detailed documentation I created) my team and I were able to perform the upgrades from my virtual office. These upgrades frequently took 14-30 hours. By creating the process to allow remote upgrades, each engineer was able to perform several upgrades simultaneously, dramatically reducing the manpower required and completely eliminating travel costs.

There have been many instances in which I was responsible for reviewing “Requests For Proposals” (RFP), project plans, and business plans. Many of the projects I have worked on were business critical in nature, had strict deadlines, aggressive schedules, and required a comprehensive understanding of business models and current technologies. Many of my projects were completed ahead of schedule, below cost, or both. These projects required that I develop a plan from scratch and/or direction from senior management with complete understanding of the business function process or requirements. Management concerns and industry environments have frequently been prime factors in the development of these plans. At 1800flowers.com I utilized these capabilities and skills to develop plans of action and employee guidelines for data security, business practices, and application architectural designs requiring a comprehensive understanding of business function and key processes while following management concerns and guidance. I was also a key member of the architectural team that designed, developed, and implemented the entire operating environment at 1800Flowers.com, both as a consultant for six years and Vice President of IT Operations for two years.

Having started in the work force in 1982 and with continuous employment since, I have 20 years experience in all levels of business organizations from sales, support, project management, company operations and management. I have worked in many fields directly or indirectly through sales support in the areas of Brokerage, Insurance, Hospitality, Retail, Communications, Networking, Technical Support, Help Desk, Sales, and consulting services.

In the role of a consultant for many years especially in presales support, it was my responsibility to answer proposals, develop relationships with customers, and prepare written and verbal presentations. In my duties I have also performed presentations to audiences from 3 to 300 people. My formal training also includes several courses in presentation, interpersonal communications, public speaking, and effective presentation skills.

The demanding role of project manager and RFP responses demonstrates my abilities to remain highly focused on customer issues.

My roles as project manager as well as VP of Operations required that I continuously lead and contribute positively in a multi-skilled environment. I have on many occasions participated as both the leader and participant in projects of different levels. Some projects have required a very high level approach such as the planning of a multi-site web hosting capability to the low level involvement of performing UNIX upgrades.

As part of my involvement in numerous projects at 1800Flowers.com, I had to perform project management and time management skills. In the high paced and critical nature of the retail environment it was my responsibility to perform early planning and quick implementation of projects and programs to ensure high availability and adequate system capacity to support the peak demands of major holidays. The peak and burst nature of the retail environment at 1800Flowers demanded we be well prepared to handle the extreme demands of a major holiday. Consider the ramifications if a system outage or lack of capacity caused even a one day delay in the ability to deliver Valentines products on the 14^th of February. Delivering flowers on the 15th would cost the company a significant loss in customers; as well as destroy the trust our customers have in our abilities to meet their expectations. I have also attended several formal classes on effective time management and project management skills.

While performing the leadership roles of Project Manager at NCR and VP of Technical Operations at 1800Flowers, it was common practice to have many projects running concurrently, if not dozens. Whether it is the hundreds of sub-tasks of a complex web site implementation, the inter-relationship between building a new call center in another state,  upgrading the network locally, or consolidating hundreds of T1 lines to a few T3 lines all at the same time, I adapt quickly to the demands and handle interruptions well.

You can’t get much more dynamic than the role of a consultant. My roles and responsibilities changed with every project I worked on. Some projects were high level and others were task focused. Each was based on the needs and goals of the customer in an effort to achieve the desired results in the fastest, most economical way possible. In addition to being called an out-of-the-box thinker, I have also been known to be a jack-of-all-trades with “MacGyver” type skills to be able to find a solution to any problem, even when the available tools or resources appear to be insufficient.

I have the advantage of saying that I have been taught by many of what I consider to be the best coaches and managers in the business environment. Not withstanding the formal training I have attended with respect to coaching and leadership skills I have had the opportunity to learn from very effective managers over the last dozen years. My time spent with my senior manager David Evans (Partner at NCR), and both Chris & Jim McCann at 1800Flowers has given me the opportunity to witness the vision and skills of very successful managers. I also believe that coaching is a very dynamic skill which needs constant cultivation and training.

Creativity has always been one of my strongest skills. I have shown great interest in being very creative at all times whether it be at home or work. I am constantly looking for ways to improve or streamline processes as well as develop better ideas with creativity. I frequently use my creative abilities to help the Nassau Count PBA, my children’s school, my sons Boy Scout troop, and the MS Society as a volunteer.

I am well known for my ability to remain impartial and neutral while presenting my findings of any process, investigation, or design. I take great pride in my ability to build solutions based on the facts and produce reports for all levels and skills of management. At 1800Flowers one of my responsibilities was to perform constant monitoring of all systems and produce weekly and monthly reports of systems response times, up-times, and availabilities. I produced both automated and manual reports that were presented weekly to IT and monthly to the board of directors.

One of the benefits of having worked on so many projects over the years is that I have been exposed to countless organizations and designs. This allows me to adapt quickly to the environment of each new project and my thirst for knowledge keeps me up to date on technology. I spend a considerable amount of time outside of the work environment learning new technologies allowing me to remain current with the most recent discoveries and developments. I am an avid reader of technology publications and keep-up-to-date with business trends in the industry.

It is my feeling that you are never done learning. I use every opportunity to learn from my experiences, both informally and in formal training classes. Many of the formal training classes I have taken can be viewed via the hyperlinks in the Professional Development section of my Resume. I am always willing to attend seminars and training classes to continue my personal development.

Many of the consulting projects I have worked on had very real commitments and deadlines with grave impacts if not met. Besides any penalties or delays not meeting the deadlines would cause, it would also have impacted my customers businesses greatly. Also, while working at 1800Flowers.com one can easily understand the impact of delivering flowers or other gifts the day after a wedding, funeral, Valentines Day, or Mother’s Day. These represented real commitments and deadlines to achieve desired goals of the business at hand. It was my responsibility to run and manage the Operations organization that had to keep the back office systems, computers, and Website working in order to meet these deadlines. There had been many times where my commitment to excellence has kept me at work 30+ hours straight in order to complete that critical UNIX upgrade or mange the implementation of a new Website.