Essent (2002 - 2011)
What have I done:
April 2002 - August 2005:
- in the role of IT strategist I was a member of a small team that reported and advised directly to the CIO and the Board of Directors. In the first years the Corporate level IT organization was a small supporting team and the accountability for IT was distributed into a number of Business Divisions. In this time-frame I started working on the simplification, standardization and central approach to IT. This eventually lead to a new centralized IT Organization with a 'multi vendor' sourcing policy for Application and Infrastructure services. My personal contribution was focused on: IT Architecture, Business/IT alignment, Services Portfolio management and Project Portfolio management.
August 2005 - March 2006:
- as the manager the 'Planning & Control' organization and member of the CIO Management Team, I was responsible for all 'staff', consultancy and architectural activities in the organization. I managed a team of roughly 60 persons.
March 2006 - December 2010:
- as 'Principal Architect' I was a member of the CIO Office team. I was involved in definition, implementation and maintaining all IT policies, where the 'Sourcing' policy and the SAP policy played the most important role. In this respect I represented Essent in the 'Advisory Customer Counsel for Utilities (ACCU)' of the SAP company.
- my 'final job' was the preparation of the merger of Essent with RWE with regard to IT, which made my position in the company obsolete, so I went for an early retirement.
What have I learned:
A few hard lessons:
- apparently external consultancy is always better than listening to your own employees. More specifically when this external consultancy is very expensive.
- 'responsibility' is not just a task but most importantly a feeling. Where responsibility is not felt, the result will be chaos.
- as long as somebody can get away with a reasonable explanation of 'why he/she did not deliver on promises', there will be no real improvement.
- advice is by definition something that is not needed to be followed up upon. Unsolicited advice is not appreciated.