Ms. Rowe has over twenty-five years' experience in information technology, including responsibility for planning, leading, organizing, and controlling all major systems and technology functions for a Fortune 500 company.

In her consulting role, Ms. Rowe has delivered and managed client engagements of varying size and complexity for government organizations, health care, diversified service associations, financial institutions, and commercial clients. Typical engagements addressed business objectives, organizational functions, strategic planning for information technology, and program management of enterprise-wide systems implementations.

Ms. Rowe has extensive experience in the selection and implementation of financial and operational systems. Engagements of this nature include such components as scope definition, implementation planning, project management, data conversions, acceptance testing, user procedures development, and transition to the new system.

Ms. Rowe has organized and managed large-scale, cross-functional and organizational boundaries, multi-million dollar projects. She has established program offices and implemented standardized project management techniques. The project management processes and techniques that she has established provide structure, focus, flexibility, and visibility necessary to guide the project teams.

Ms. Rowe also has significant knowledge and training in formal systems development methods and practices. She has managed all phased of the systems development life cycle, including concept definition, requirements analysis, specifications, programming, testing, user training, and implementation of systems.

Representative engagements:

• Led the Information Technology component at a no-load mutual fund investment company in a $18 million project to outsource the transfer agency functions. The program touched all parts of the business. Foremost in this work was the establishment of a Program Office. This work required her to:
  • Establish standardized project plans with agreed milestones
  • Consolidate, formalize, and make visible project reporting
  • Develop Program Maps to communicate interrelationships and dependencies and project status to all levels of the organization
  • Conduct formal, periodic project assessments and take corrective action when actuals did not support the plan
  • Monitor actual work and quality
  • Identify, document, and consciously manage program risk and issues
  • Define and implement project change management
  • Conduct weekly individual project status review meetings with project leads.
  As a result of this effort, the project was implemented on time with eight million customer accounts successfully converted.
• Managed a program to implement a web-based financial advice tool for a large mutual fund company. Established a cross-business functional Program Office to manage the implementation. Established project management techniques for the project. Recommended the use of a "Model Office" for testing and validating the system prior to implementation.
• Defined the technology architecture for a major mutual fund financial institution. The work encompassed defining a life cycle process whereby the architecture would be defined, documenting the "as-built" as a baseline, defining the "to-be" as the envisioned architecture, and identifying gaps, the path forward, opportunities and solutions. Technical, human, and organizational issues were addressed throughout the engagement.
• Improved the processes by which applications are developed and managed. Helped to define the life cycle processes for traditional waterfall development, object-oriented, purchased/packaged solutions, maintenance/enhancement, and emergency and legislated fixes.

Representative engagements:

• Managed the engagement for the implementation of JD Edwards financials and property management for a Real Estate Investment Trust (REIT). The system was successfully implemented in 5 months and within budget.
• Performed financial quality assurance oversight for an ERP implementation of JD Edwards for a Fortune 100 manufacturer of power systems. The specific objective was to validate the integrity of all financial transactions encompassing extensive interfaces to legacy systems.

• Selection and implementation of the JD Edwards financial and home builder applications
• Procurement, configuration and installation of the IBM AS/400
• Providing the field with appropriate hardware and software to access the AS/400
• Selection and installation of AT&T frame relay for the Wide Area Network.

Representative Engagements:

• Participated in an executive consulting engagement for a nation-wide home builder to define the information necessary to support the business functions of the organization. This was accomplished by:
• Identifying and documenting the business goals and strategies
• Identifying the information necessary to support the goals
• Assessing the effectiveness and efficiency of current systems
• Defining the system necessary to support the business strategies.

• Conducted an engagement for a residential mortgage lender to define the data required at the corporate level, which would be the foundation of an executive information system. Her approach to accomplish this objective included:
• Developing a context-level diagram of mortgage lending, which encompassed the primary and secondary markets, and the warehouse bank
• Building a life-cycle model of the business (using Jackson diagrams)
• Identifying the data that occurs throughout the life cycle.

Coopers & Lybrand, Manager, Management Consulting Services, 1986 to 1991.

Representative Engagements:

• Led a project team for a large government-sponsored enterprise to define systems requirements for a mortgage-backed securities information system that was developed and implemented within five months for a cost of approximately one million dollars. Her engagement activities included modeling process and data requirements, documenting system specifications, and analyzing solution alternatives. CASE tools were used throughout the development effort.

• Conducted a post-implementation systems review for the United States Postal Service to assess the effectiveness of the current portfolio of automated systems which support the settlement of international accounts with foreign postal administrations and carriers of US mail. She also evaluated systems for consistency and compatibility of their operating characteristics.

• Led a project team for the Federal Home Loan Bank Board (FHLBB) to develop system requirements and functional system design for a nation-wide asset tracking system. The system objective was to better predict insolvency of savings and loan institutions based on asset valuation. The project scope included the twelve district banks, as well as both the Federal Savings and Loan Insurance Corporations (FSLIC) and Federal Asset Disposition Association (FADA).

Ms. Rowe received a bachelor of Science degree from Columbia Union College, Takoma Park, Maryland, in Business Administration and an Associate of Arts degree in Accounting.

Ms. Rowe's key skills include project management, package selection and implementation, systems development methods and tools

• Project Management

• Package Selection
• Package Implementation

• Large Scale System Integration
• Systems Development Methods and Tools

• User and developer training