Univ.-Lektor Dipl.-Ing. Dr. techn., CMS (UK)
Chief IT Architect
Software
GmbH Österreich
And,
of course, not to the least, the Institute
still provides enough Web space on the real Internet for me to
display these few ;-) words.
1995 - 1996 Technical Manager Screen Phone Services
Responsible for concept, design and effective realisation of a European
pilotproject
in the area of ScreenPhone Services/Call Center implementation. This
also
included full accountability for the formation and leadership of the
whole
(technical) project team.
The project was a technical success (on time, on budget, on quality). Commercially, though, the era of the Internet brought about a change in strategy towards web-based access and delivery models instead of phone-based customer premises equipment.
1997 - 2001 Service Practice Manager OIS
Full bottom-line responsibility (and accountability) for all Austrian
activities
of the service practice Operationals Infrastructure Solutions in
the
following areas (yearly revenues approx. 8-9 MEUR):
- Mainframe processing
- LAN, WAN, and Internet projects,
solutions, and services
- Telephony/Switchboard operations
- EDI (Electronic Data Interchange) services
1999 - 2000 Chief Technical Officer (CTO) &
Managing
Consultant
The CTO
heads a projects group of 6-8 people which is responsible not only for
bidding
projects (i.e. pre-sales support projects), but also for transformation
and
implementation projects in the course of which client infrastructure
services
are integrated into the on-going service delivery process of Managed
Services
. This is complemented by various consulting engagements
2001
- 2004 Management Consultant
in the newly created Management Consulting Line of Service as Domain
Pricipal for the areas
- Information Management, Alignment, and Strategy
- Strategic Sourcing
- IT analysis (e.g., the IT Maturity Model)
- IT
strategy (e.g.,
the IT Driver Model and the IT Score Card, a transformation of the
classic Kaplan-Norton BSC to the IT domain -- which, after all, is not
trivial)
- IT
alignment (e.g.,
by designing and conducting the first ever "IT Alignment Study"
measuring quantitatively the level of sychronicity of business strategy
with IT strategy in 2003, and inventing the "IT strategy matrix")
- IT
outsourcing
(e.g., integrating transaction cost and resource-based theories of
outsourcing and advanced evaluation methods such as AHP [Analytic Hierarchy Process] into a
consistent and coherent strategic sourcing framework)
- IT investment appraisal (e.g., by
developing the "Triple A approach" to investment evaluation)
Major
results of his engagements were
- expansion of Atos Origin's industry segments into new domains (e.g., utility, government, banking, retail, pharmaceuticals)
- extension of Atos Origin's engagements with existing clients towards a truly strategic level
- establishment of Atos Origin as thought leader in IT strategy consulting
- empowerment of fellow consultants by providing a proven and practice-oriented consulting methodology
- enchantment of prospective customers to Atos Origin's consulting methods by providing risk-free (and affordable ;-) workshops and seminars introducing a selection of analysis and design methods
- exposure of
the
Atos Origin brand (marketing wise) by delivering over 50 national and
international appearances at major conferences or seminars.
His presentations
have
been ranked "best presentation" at over 60% of all evaluated
conference, amongst them well-known brands IDC, LSZ, CMG, CECMG, Future
Network, and Euroforum
In the course of his activities at Atos Origin he
gained broad and
diverse practical experience in managing highly complex and/or
completely
new projects, the largest of which has been the Zumtobel IT infrastructure outsourcing
deal.
Mr. Strnadl has been the Global Project Manager for this largest ever international Austrian IT infrastructure outsourcing deal involving in excess of 5.000 devices at over 100 locations in 16 countries. The core project team consisted of approx. 20 people and over 100 persons have been involved in various stages of this multi-national project which had to be approved ad board level at both organizations.The actual contract amounts to more than 200 documents with over 1.600 pages -- and has been negotiatied and signed after the breath-takingly short time of only 5 months and 1 week. While this certainly provided tangible (read: cash) benefits to both companies it meant that the core project team had to (literally!) work day and night during the hot phases just before signing / closing.
During 2002 and 2003 postgraduate studies in Management Science (focus: Change Management) at the University of Huddersfield (UK) and graduation "CMS (UK)" which amounts to a "Certificate in Management Science" acknowledged by the British / UK Management Council. The only difference to an MBA being the fact that while an MBA finishes off with a purely theoretical piece of work (the "thesis") a CMS (UK) has to be completed with a full-fledged Change Management project in one's own organization -- which, simply put, is not really amenable to platitudes and academically sounding verbiage and lots of citations.In this position responsible for SAG's high level and strategic solutions (and, of course, products) such as
- business process
management (BPM for the cognoscenti and BPMS for the technically
inclined)
- semantic (web)
solutions or enterprise information integration (EII) aiming to
provide a single and meaningful view (meaningful to you as manager -
not to yor programmers) onto disparate corporate data.
As opposed to the
rather simple-minded and technically oriented data warehouse approach
semantic solutions recognize and honor that usually the meaning of
corporate data is not well defined, inconsistent, and imprecise. EII
circumvents these non-technical obstables by letting the user implement
so-called Ontologies (which are nothing more than individually defined
hierarchies of meaningful terms, their relationships, and rules how to
derive additional terms from a set of given propositions). Combined
with a powerrful inference engine this lets the user explore the true
meaning of certain terms or let her follow "chains of reasoning"
(so-called transitive closures) .
If you have ever wanted to discover the subtle flavours of "customers" hidden in your corporate application silos or the various ramifications of "revenues" without some technician telling you that he cannot really explain how that number got into the data warehouse or Excel spreashett without yet another week of looking into ETL code -- than EII certainly is something you might want look into!
If you have ever wanted to discover the subtle flavours of "customers" hidden in your corporate application silos or the various ramifications of "revenues" without some technician telling you that he cannot really explain how that number got into the data warehouse or Excel spreashett without yet another week of looking into ETL code -- than EII certainly is something you might want look into!
- service-oriented
architecture (SOA).
Have you ever
wondered why IT still has not succeeded in cleaning up the mess and
complexities of their n-tier architecture (consisting of m times 3- or 4-tier applications
such as SAP R/3) despite a plethora of buzzwords they offer? Are you
tired of having to let go business opportunities because your IT
manager (once again) has convinced you that he will not be able to
implement the such-and-such change to the "Customer information system"
because your current version of your CORBA ORB does not provide IIOP to
MS .NET without having to set-up an intermediate J2EE environment for
EJBs. And, even if that would work, he will not be able to guarantee
any performance or service levels because of an old JMS version
not supporting Log4J?
A service-oriented
architecture might be able to clean up this mess because, for the first
time ever, a SOA starts with business logic in mind and sets out to
define meaningful activities or capabilities (aka "services") from a
process logic or business point of view and not (!) from a technician's
vantage point. In its fullest vision a SOA would even let the user
design her applications without any software developers involvement at
all by simply "orchestrating" and chaining together given services in a
meaningful workflow.
Sure, there is some way to go from the here and now to implement this vision -- but we might be able to help you jump-start this journey with quick returns :-)
Sure, there is some way to go from the here and now to implement this vision -- but we might be able to help you jump-start this journey with quick returns :-)
Activities
- Member of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)
- Author for Computing Reviews
(over 50 articles)
- Member of Computing Reviews' Reviewer
Advisory
Board
- Senior Member of the IEEE (The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc.)
- Past Chair of the IEEE Austria Section within IEEE Region 8
- Member of the IEEE Computer Society , a Society of the IEEE
- Senior
Referee/Reviewer
for the
IEEE Computer Magazine
- Member of ÖCG
Taskforce "IT Service
Contracts" (ÖCG Arbeitskreis IT
Leistungsverträge) - as the only contributing non-lawyer
- Member of the IEEE Engineering Management Council
- Co-Moderator of
the XING Group "Geschäftsprozessmanagement
/ Business Process Management"
- Member of the Board
of
ÖVO ("Österreichische Vereinigung für
Organisatoren und Management" - Austrian Association for Organization
and Management)
- Auditor of the Institute Vienna Circle (Institut Wiener Kreis). The Institute directs its efforts to the further development of science and philosophy in the broad tradition of the Vienna Circle (Wiener Kreis). Besides the purely organizational (i.e., financial, for that matter) interest the active involvement in the Institute's (research) program has sparked off some minor written precipitations .
During the course of my career I have delivered over 140 presentations, seminars or public workshops on a wide variety of current IT issues and themse at conferences of LSZ, IDC, Future Network, CMG-AE, CECMG, IEEE, Euroforum and various others. 60% of my presentations have been ranked "Best Presentation" by the audience. Together with my other (written) contributions my publication list counts more than 100 entries -- if you are still interested you*'ll find a download PDF here.
Lately, however, I
have started to become quite interested in the laws and started to read
some introductory works (e.g., Koziol-Welser, Barta, Zankl) in Civil
Law with a
decided focus on contractual law, warranties and representations and
liability ("Schuldrecht"). But this includes also other areas
relevant for my diverse interests such as "Vereinsrecht" (Law of
associations) or the questions under which circumstances non-profit
organizations ("gemeinnützige Vereine") are exempt from the
obligation to pay taxes (§ 34ff BAO, if you care). In lieu of
other knowledgeable people I have been asked more than once and had to
develop quite some expertise (also in order not to become myself liable
due to § 1299 ABGB - "Sachverständigenhaftung").
... you will find me out-side (as opposed to in front of a PC or a book) with my three most important companions. My wife, Susanne, who holds a Ph.D. in biology, still tries to get me more acquainted with "real" life (as opposed to artifical intelligence). She sees that I come to a (fair) share of fresh air and impressions from nature. Apart from that she is an excellent coach and sounding board: More than one of my public talks have been shaped by constructive criticism from her.
Usually and with impeccabe (female?) instinct she would uncover (sometims subtle) flaws in my reasoning. In many instances these glitches could be related to my supposing to much prior knowledge on the listener's side. While it is certainly not easy for me to admit defeat (being a consultant, after all), I inevitably have to conceed that she's right. And, later during actual performance, the audiences usually value the additional clues to my thinking.
She works as a self-employed science journalist in the area where biology, communications, and journalism meets and you could read her articles in several media, amongst them Der Standard.
Quite recently she has completed her first book, actually a Children's book,, "Herbert & Co", featuring a fox living in a pleasant wood and his adventures (amongst them, finding his wife, meeting some monsters and other things. The book is aimed towards parents who are looking for more than 20 "good night" stories to be read aloud to their children. Together with the quite extraordinary illustrations an ideal present (and, no, I do not get any provisions ;-)
Katharina, on the other hand (born November 1996), does not at all care when her daddy tells about how "nice" actual demonstrations of IT's alignment with business strategy might look like using the Success-Resource Deployment (SRD) model. To her it is a colorful display of squares irregularily scattered on a piece of paper and begging for some more colorization and other details. In addition, she is also more concerned with her next riding lesson or with her next short story (she is writing stories faster than I can spin out Powerpoint slides -- and I am quite a master at that...). Not to forget Peter (May 1999), who is most likely to become an engineer himself if you take his current interest in technical details at any level as a sign for his future occupation.
Or have you ever noted that some trams carry a rear mirror on their left side and some don't? Or that the "MAN" logo on some of our urban buses differs depending on the place where it is affixed? Or have you ever noticed a Taurus locomotive with three (!) pantographs? He has -- and, usually they only carry two.
And thanks to their persistence they will sometimes hear me not speak shop-talk for days (even weeks during holidays!).Together all this makes up an exciting life which is nicely framed by both, technology and humanity.
All views expressed in this page are mine and not (necessarily) those of my employer.
Last changed: 2009-03-14 by cfs.