With over 25 years of experience, Mr. Brown is a collaborative leader skilled in all phases of Information Technology; particularly as it applies to solving real business problems through the use of tried-and-true technologies and processes as well as the targeted application of emerging technologies and techniques. One recurring trend in Mr. Brown’s approach is his early recognition that communication processes are the key to successfully instantiating positive results. This was true in the early 1980’s with development of local area networks, through the internet revolution of the 1990’s, to the explosion of Social Media in the 2000’s. A brief survey of his career highlights these trends and his early adoption of those which made sense.
Starting his career with MHM, Inc. in Dallas (at the time, the largest independent hotel management company in North America), Mr. Brown was instrumental in the creation of the technology and process aspect of a rapid Hotel takeover platform that enabled MHM, with only 24-hours notice, to completely takeover the management, accounting, banking, and centralized reporting of a property anywhere in the continental US. This was accomplished through the pre-packaging of hardware and custom software (with the communications component having been designed and written by Mr. Brown) that could be drop-shipped to the target location the same day of notice, as well as the development of a staff trained in this type of transaction. This rapid response platform was one of the reasons that Richfield Hospitality acquired MHM, prompting Mr. Brown to relocate to Denver in the early 1990’s.
While at MHM/Richfield, Mr. Brown was involved in or led dozens of business-significant projects and transformations from full supply chain automation through the creation of custom systems for the purchasing department, to the implementation of JD Edwards ERP software, to creating the back-office reporting systems that seamlessly married the POS systems to the hotel Front Office systems, and creating a Decision Support System for the corporate office. But perhaps the most significant accomplishment Mr. Brown had during his tenure was the complete relocation of the Dallas data center to Denver over a 4-day period. This data center was connected to over 130 properties from Alaska to Florida (the communication software having been created by Mr. Brown) and, one day ahead of schedule, was brought back on-line in Denver with the all 130 properties.
While at Yellow Transportation, LLC., first as Director of IT and later as VP, Mr. Brown managed the creation of what was then the preeminent technology infrastructure in the taxi industry. This included fielding the first system to merge Global Positioning technology with computer-aided dispatch in a major fleet in North America. This resulted in on-air interviews of Mr. Brown on local Denver television affiliates which was picked up and broadcast on CNN. Mr. Brown briefed Denver Mayor Wellington Webb and later Colorado Governor Roy Romer on this new technology. Mr. Brown also created one of the first Internet-based reservations and corporate account maintenance systems as well as the creation of an Internet-based branded credit card system that his team managed. When interviewing customers for these projects he discovered that many of them wanted better visibility of where their important package deliveries were. Mr. Brown then created a sub-system that enabled account customers to view the real-time GPS location of their package over the internet. As the primary transportation provider for
organ transport between Denver International Airport and the major hospitals, this greatly aided the surgical teams to prep for the arrival of their precious cargo.
While at Yellow, Mr. Brown also managed the private radio network used for both voice and data communication to the vehicles. This included the installation of a direct beam microwave towers and transceivers at the dispatch center and on the top of El Dorado Mountain 27 miles away. During this time, Mr. Brown also contributed to several articles that were published in a variety of industry publications (Computerworld, Intelligent Transportation Systems, GIS World), was interviewed by the Denver Post and the Rocky Mountain News for various technology-related stories, and testified before the Finance Committee of the Colorado State Legislature on the impact of a de-regulation bill.
As the Director of Application Development for Vicorp Restaurants, Inc. (owner of the $500M Village Inn and Bakers Square brands), Mr. Brown managed the successful development and deployment of a Point-Of-Sale system that was deployed at over 300 restaurants. Written in Java (1250 classes with over 85,000 lines of code), the system is hardware independent and has allowed the use off-the-shelf components rather than dedicated POS machines that resulted in large savings. Features include bar-coded guest checks, split checks by amount or items, an active check panel, default condiments, 15” color touch screens, real-time transaction exporter to BOH (ReMACS), fault-tolerance (backup database on a separate machine kept in synch with primary database with automatic failover), Internet credit card verification, debit card acceptance, gift card program, remote menu maintenance utility, remote monitoring tool (for proactive Help Center intervention), wireless device access, CD-Rom based training, plus many others. This system is still in use today. During this time, Mr. Brown chaired the MIS Steering Committee which included all Regional VP’s, the COO, the CIO, and the CFO, sponsored and hosted the Radiant (ReMACS) Users Group in the Fall of 2002 (this meeting was held at the corporate offices and had participants from 9 separate chains), led an inter-departmental task force that, through technology and process change, reduced the gap between theoretical and actual food costs by 0.75% (an annual savings of $1.2 million), negotiated and executed multi-million dollar contracts with IBM, Oracle, and Sybase, and delivered a 45-minute technical presentation at the Spring 2002 Sybase User’s Conference.
As an E-commerce Consultant, Mr. Brown managed the e-commerce initiatives for the $600M animal health corporation Lextron, Inc. This involved the creation of the strategic technology plan which recognized several new market opportunities that were subsequently developed. Mr. Brown implemented this plan which entailed managing six vendors and contracts, hardware and software acquisitions, direct development, project management, running focus groups, briefing staff and customers, and training users. It also involved managing the creation of a series of portals to address various business needs. This included a customer portal giving customers the ability to view and download order history, invoices, and statements; a vendor portal allowing vendors to view or download product mixes, fulfillment times, and other statistics; an employee portal allowing employees to download or fill out a variety of HR forms, newsletters, and other collaborative documentation; and a management portal allowing management to run ad hoc queries and reports to enable them to better manage the business. Mr. Brown also developed the concept of co-branding web order portals with existing dealers to reduce their operational expense while increasing Lextron revenue.
As the VP of IS for Peter Piper, Inc. in Scottsdale, Arizona, Mr. Brown completely restructured the IT department to better align with the strategic goals of the business. This involved completely rethinking the traditional roles and responsibilities of IT, contextualizing them onto the corporation’s strategic goals, and molding the department in this new direction. The result is a department that is now seen as a partner to the other business units rather than an adversarial cost-center. To accomplish this, Mr. Brown renovated and modernized the technical infrastructure of the company, negotiated and executed contracts that brought T1s to each restaurant without incurring additional cost, assumed responsibility for all telecom, security, and large office equipment (copiers & printers) without the need to increase staff and negotiated and executed a contract with a new copier supplier that decreased the monthly fixed cost by 40% and the incremental cost by 56%.
Mr. Brown managed the creation of several development efforts to enhance corporate communications. These included an HR inspired effort that created a web application that allowed the entry of all personnel activities (new hires, terminations, rate changes) and used workflow techniques to automatically send the forms to the appropriate person for approval and ultimately uploading directly into our Great Plains accounting system and an automatic upload of the previous day’s invoice information from our primary suppliers (Vistar, Bella, and Pacific Star) into the Business Intelligence platform and providing the purchasing department with tools to compare edits with finals for the Pricing Guides and ensuring contractual pricing compliance.
Mr. Brown also managed the development of a Business Intelligence platform to better analyze and present the data to decision makers to enable them to make better decisions. This included advanced data warehousing and data mining techniques to analyze sales, labor, product mix, and food costs to provide the operators and executives with better quality data than they have ever had before. A series of flexible and customizable dashboards were developed to provide even greater data clarity.
Corporate-wide, free Wi-Fi access was provided to Peter Piper customers. This provides the basic communications platform for the major advances in on-line activities that are being developed. A new, modern website was recently launched which includes on-line ordering, on-line party reservations, and a unique content management system that enable Franchisees to fully customize all aspects of their on-line presentation including their social networking visibility. Mr. Brown has also leveraged social media in a variety of ways to reach out not only to customers but also to the over 1200 employees of Peter Piper. In addition to creating a Peter Piper presence on Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter, Mr. Brown directed the creation of a forum site for Peter Piper Employees to share best practices and good ideas. He has also created the Piper Idea Engine which is a quarterly contest for employees to come up with a new idea, present it to the executive committee, and receive awards. There is a robust social networking component of this initiative in a private FaceBook group that enables employees to bounce ideas off each other, schedule meetings and get-togethers, and share documents. Mr. Brown is also experimenting with a variety of “new media” initiatives including mobile advertising, mobile ordering, and extreme-targeted advertising on the Hulu platform.
Mr. Brown is a member of the ACM, IEEE – Computer Society, Mensa, Project Management Institute, CXO, and was a CRN Magazine Top-50 CIO of the West in 2009. He was a featured speaker at the Spark 2008 at Arizona State University, is on the 2009 and 2010 Advisory Committee of the Arizona IT Summit, and is on the Governing Body for the 2010 Arizona Technology Symposium. Mr. Brown is a Founding Director of the Association of Due Diligence Professionals, and is on the Board of Directors for the Novum Group of Companies (which includes the Novum Institute).