A / G
Digital
Transformation
Expert.
My Passion and Vision.
As a digital technology executive, my days are filled with three activities: obsessing with the needs of the customer, aligning a digital operating model to those needs, and most importantly leading teams to implement the necessary solutions.
Digital organizations put the customer at the core of their business and take an outside-in perspective on their offerings. The mantra is simple: if the customer falls in love with the experience that you deliver, they will return again and again. For every type of customer, your organization must have a person whose only job is to live and breathe that customer's journey. Whoever owns the customer owns the product.
But you might ask, "Isn't keeping all those customers in love with us expensive?" Digital operating models meet customer expectations without incurring additional operating costs because their key processes, organizational structures and technologies, including data models, have been fundamentally aligned to support customer journeys. It turns out that the same factors that increase customer satisfaction, also result in an efficient business. These operating models can only be achieved if IT, Operations and Sales bridge their traditional divide and embed digital thinking up-front. They are more efficient and effective in delivering improvements because IT and the business work closely together throughout development from inception through implementation, ensuring that expectations and delivery plans are fully aligned.
Leading is the most important skill that a digital executive possesses because leadership is the catalyst, the amplifier, and the glue that holds teams and organizations together in unwavering focus on achieving a single goal. I reject the notion of leadership as the exercise of power and force or the possession of extraordinary analytical skill. I believe that a leader is a person of impeccable integrity who understands individual needs and interests and aligns them to the team's purpose.
Technology is my passion but a modern CIO has to be about more than IT. I am a partner to the business, possessing a deep grasp of technology and the ability to clearly convey how it can support the company strategy to business leaders. My legal education is a tremendous benefit in highly regulated industries like Financial Services and Healthcare.
"The secret of success is to do the common thing uncommonly well."
-John D. Rockefeller Jr.
How I Can Help?
I can help you align your people, process and technology for a full digital enterprise. Together we can plan and build a solution that's right for you.
Data & Analytics
Lean Six
Sigma Process
Improvement
→
I can work with your team to improve process performance by systematically removing waste and reducing variation. As an L6S green belt, I have the knowledge and experience necessary to drive collaboration to accomplish this goal.
CTO as
a Service
→
Let me pull all the other digital disciplines together for you. As your digital / IT executive I bring a consultant mindset to the table, building a data driven technology road map that supports the business strategy, and delivering on that road map.
IT Engineering
& Delivery
→
At the end of the day nothing is accomplished unless quality code ships to production. As a former software developer, I enjoy going deep to design micro-services architectures, mobile friendly APIs, and getting teams to adopt, devops, infrastructure as code, and test automation.
Vendor
Management
→
Whether you need an extra pair of hands to complete your project or 100 extra hands, someone needs to manage the vendor. I have worked with most major technology vendors and can negotiate your contract, and manage the outsourced delivery of your project.
Automation &
Workflows
→
Robotic Process Automation & Business Process Management tools are providing quick ROI for legacy enterprises. However too many companies make the mistake of applying automation to the wrong problem. You need the right tool for the right problem. Don't go at it alone!
Machine
Learning & AI
→
I'll help you unleash the power of AI - whether it's to suggest the next best action for your sales team, to automate call center support of common problems, intelligently scan scanned documents, and more.
Product
Management
→
Customer obsession, personas, journey mapping, CSAT, outside-in-perspective. If these terms aren't already at the core of your product organization, I can bring modern digital skills to your organization.
Data &
Analytics
→
Do you need to make the right business decisions take your enterprise to the next level? Whether relational or No-SQL, on-prem or in the cloud, I can help you build a strong data foundation which provides you with the empirical data to enable your most important decisions.
My Portfolio
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Education
→ Juris Doctor, Fordham University School of Law,
cum laude, New York, NY - 2014.
→ MS - Software Eng, Carnegie Mellon University,
high honors, Pittsburgh, PA - 2009.
→ BS-Computer Science, Rutgers University
honors, New Brunswick, NJ - 2003.
Licensing
→ Member of NY State Bar
→ Member of FL State Bar
→ Licensed to practice before USPTO
Competencies:
→ Organizational Oversight (150+ FTEs)
→ Budget Management (to $50M)
→ Executive Communication
→ Digital Transformation
→ Client-Centric Product Management
→ Software Architecture
→ Distributed Real-Time Systems
→ Enterprise-Scale Mobile Apps
→ Big Data, AI, ML, NLP Processing & Predictive Analytics
→ BPM & RPA Solutions
→ DevOps & Agile Delivery
→ Driving User Adoption
→ Regulated Environments
Technology is my passion but a modern CIO has to be about more than IT. I am a partner to the business, possessing a deep grasp of technology and the ability to clearly convey how it can support the company strategy to business leaders. My legal education is a tremendous benefit in highly regulated industries like Financial Services and Healthcare.
For the past 3 years I have served as the first enterprise CTO for Greystar, the world's largest residential property management company, with over 850,000 apartments around the world. I lead a global team, created a technology strategy, focused on leveraging our data across the property management, development and investment lines of business, and launched a digital transformation effort which will turn Greystar into a consumer facing company and drive up property NOI by over 10% over the next 18 months. This platform relies on a combination of mobile technology, smart home hardware, AI based leasing agents, but most importantly, flips the operating model on its head to focus on the consumer and centralize operations. Read more about it here.
As Divisional CIO for Colonial Life & Accident Insurance Company, a $1.8B subsidiary of Unum Group, I led a 150+ person technology department through a digital transformation. Working closely with my business & enterprise IT partners, I helmed a team that delivered customer facing apps, operational efficiency, stability, cloud infrastructure, data & predictive analytics. Check out some of the things my team built above.
In an earlier role, as Vice President, Technology at Raymond James Financial, I led a multi-year transformation of the Client Onboarding program, successfully reducing account opening SLAs by 50% while achieving 100% adoption across the firm’s 3,500 branches in four months after roll out.
Prior to RJ, I headed up software development at Direct Edge Stock Exchange. I joined as employee 25 of a startup ECN, and 8 years later, we grew to be America's third largest stock exchange, processing 12% of all stock trading in the country, and led to an acquisition by CBOE. DE had an amazing engineering team - we built a system that could process 100,000 orders per second, with latency sub 200 microseconds. Check out the article from the New York Times below.
Paying It Forward.
Education is the great equalizer in this world. It teaches independent thinking, gives us knowledge, allows us to earn a living and empowers us to change the world around us into something better. It is the beating heart of innovation in this country and the world. Great universities nurturing the curiosity of students are what will keep the United States as the world's foremost innovation hub.
I had the good fortune to attend Rutgers University, Carnegie Mellon University & Fordham Law School, and benefited from the counsel of experienced mentors at each school. I believe strongly in paying this advantage forward to the next generation of students. Take a look below to learn more about my contributions to education throughout the years.
In my spare time I give back to the software engineering community by serving on the boards of Universities, helping them design curricula, mentoring students, and connecting them with industry.
Advisory Board Member
Digital transformation starts with customer obsession. I advise the faculty of USF's Muma College of Business on the content and delivery of the Digital Marketing Certificate Program, which produces world-class user experience engineers.
Alumni Advisory Board Member
I partner with the faculty of CMU's Master of Software Engineering program, ranked #1 in the nation by US News, to design a curriculum reflective of industry needs, give tech talks, and mentor students to prepare them for real-world interviews.
Advisory Board Member
I serve on the board of the Integrated Information Technology Program at USC College of Engineering and Computing. In this role I advise the faculty in structuring the program, score student capstone projects, and connect top students with local companies.
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Copyright 2023, Andrei Girenkov.