Mark Kozak-Holland

About the Lessons from History Author 

Mark is a Senior Consultant and certified in the Consultant Profession with 26 years of business experience, and 20 as a consultant. He specializes in helping organizations evaluate how emerging technologies can impact their business. Mark puts a different spin on complex business problems by applying lessons from history. He has written several books, as part of the Lessons-from-History series, which use relevant historical case studies to examine how projects and emerging technologies of the past solved complex problems. Mark is very passionate about history and believes it has great relevance in business today. A good analogy helps to simplify, frame and put today's complex projects into context. It builds up a better understanding and enhances reader retention.    Mark delivers seminars for project manager, business executives, and decision makers. Mark has been invited to speak (see short clips) to organizations, businesses, at major project management conferences including Project World, and PMI chapters. He has authored many white papers, writes magazine articles regularly.   Mark is very passionate about history and sees its potential use as an education tool in business today.  As a result, he has developed a “lesson-from-history” series, which is for organizations applying today's Information Technology (IT) to common business problems. It is written for primarily business and IT professionals looking for inspiration for their projects. It uses relevant historical case studies to examine how historical projects and emerging technologies of the past solved complex problems.   The series looks at historical projects and then draws comparisons to challenges encountered in today’s projects. It outlines the stages involved in delivering a complex project providing a step-by-step guide to the project deliverables. It vividly describes the crucial lessons from historical projects and complements these with some of today's best practices. It makes the whole learning experience more memorable. The series should inspire the reader as these historical projects were achieved with a less sophisticated emerging technology.

Influences The series was very much influenced by James Burke who advocated an alternative approach to using history in business. Mark published his first book titled "On-line, On-time, On-budget - Titanic lessons for the e-business executive" in 2002. The book explains in layman's terms how to deliver an Internet project successfully using Titanic as a case study. He has continued to publish every 18 months.    Resume Since 1990, as a consultant he has delivered hundreds of consulting engagements across major service industries (Finance/Insurance, Retail/Distribution, Telco, Government, Oil/Gas, and Healthcare). At a business level these engagements have included corporate strategic planning, visioning, organizational development, business transformation, re-engineering assessment, CRM, decision support (Business Intelligence), and business availability. At a functional level these have included scoping requirements for systems integration, solution assessment, management of change, application migrations, major implementations and operations management.   Awards and recognition  Received the Tandem Excellence award for the development of the corporate Business Availability Service, deployed globally. Winner at OCTAS, a competition honored by the Fédération de l'informatique du Québec for most innovative IT project. This is a major occasion in the province of Quebec: http://www.fiq.qc.ca/evenements.htm#laureats Compaq Services recognition for the development, evolution, and promotion of the Business Discovery program.    Education B.Sc. with Joint Honours degree in Computer Science and Statistics 1980-1983 (University of Salford, UK). Other Positions (Non-Profit Organization) Current President of Whitchurch-Stouffville Soccer club 2001- (membership 1200). Mark is also a certified level 4 referee, and has senior coaching certificates.

Career profile Mark has worked for HP, IBM, Compaq, Tandem and SHL Systemhouse.   HP Consulting and Integration Services (2005 - Present) Mark holds the position of Senior Business Architect/Consultant and is part of the Enterprise Application Services practice. His role is to helps organizations evaluate how enabling technologies, like portal or business intelligence solutions, could impact their business. He does this by developing a business case, justification, defining a vision and strategy, and creating a design. He has worked on the following major projects, namely:    Enterprise Corporate Portal for a Telco - he developed an enterprise business case across the organization’s business units. He identified primary wants and needs, value propositions for target audiences, and cost-justification. Enterprise Application Architecture Assessment for Government Ministry, including a strategy for application modernization for a cluster in a provincial government. A complex sales enhancing tool for a Furniture Manufacturer used for designing complex office configurations, and generating a BOM. The advanced parametric technology was based on a business rules engine and complex 3D graphics capability. He Gathered requirements to create a RFI and following vendor responses completed a business case to support a project to integrate the tool into the business environment. He managed the project through two implentation releases. For a major Canadian municipality led a team to deliver over 12 phase one business discoveries in a 3 year time span to various business units. All included collecting requirements and solution definition scanning the marketplace for alternatives. Over 75% of these were taken to phase 2 delivery and implementation of the solution (COTS and custom) into production. He developed User Adoption strategies with several projects inlcuding SETA which required a rollout across all 35 business units. He instigated a Management of Change methodology and approach to many of the projects.

IBM Global Services (2000-2005) Mark held the position of a Senior Certified Consultant and was part of the Portal and Content Management practice, and the Innovation Centre. He helped organizations evaluate how enabling portal and other e-business technologies could impact their business, developed a business case, defined a strategy, and enhanced existing business processes to the customer. He worked on the following phase one projects:   Enterprise Corporate Portal for a major Oil company. Developed a strategy and business case based on business opportunities spanning the upstream and downstream business. This provided executives with an alternate view and resulted in a Web redesign project to transition site to a true enterprise portal. Enterprise Employee Portal for a major Financial Institution. Developed a business case and strategy and the design of an on-demand dynamic workplace for employees. Framework for Portal Project for a Provincial Government. Lead for designing, developing and implementing a portal starter kit for ministries to use in the design, development and implementation of a ministry portal. e-business Portal Strategy for Provincial Government. Led a business discovery which developed a vision and strategy to link the wants/needs from 3 ministries and 4 depts down to business scenarios and profiles for target audiences. Led an e-business strategy for a Caribbean Island Government with the Prime Minister and Cabinet exploring business areas of opportunity enabled by e-business across the island nation state. Opportunities were qualified by economic and social value in terms of improving the quality of life, and government service provided. Corporate Employee Portal for a Canadian Fast-food Retailer. Led a discovery for defining a portal strategy and evolving a corporate Intranet portal along with an Extranet franchisee portal. Defined the business requirements for departments /franchisees, business processes impacted, and changes required. Identified organizational changes in roles, skills, and structure. A short business case was determined for payback. Research engagement for a Provincial Government Ministry to optimize the Ministry's strategy using Customer Value Management. The deliverables included a positioning paper highlighting the client's value proposition to small businesses in the province and recommended business strategy adjustments. Led a Business discovery of business opportunities for the Assembly of First Nations enabled by a high speed comms. infrastructure interconnecting 635 tribes across Canadian provinces and territories. Identified e-business opportunities, a business case and sustainability model for investments presented to the Federal Technology and Finance Ministers in Ottawa ahead of the Federal budget. Led a business discovery to redefine product/service offerings for a Corporate Travel company. Put forward a strategy to segment the client base and present multi-optional products customized accordingly. The strategy factored use of multiple channels to enhance a positive user experience. A short business case and score card was created. Led a Business Discovery for Electronic Data Presentment with a major Financial Institution. Responsibilities included determining whether the EDP strategic program was unique with no overlaps to similar projects within the bank, and ensuring the program met the bank's "brand promise" initiative and strategy of the Internet Banking Division. Led a business discovery to identify key business issues in strategic areas for a major Electronics Manufacturer. It established a value proposition and created a set of IT measures and processes including IT Baseline Service Levels and IT Operations Processes. This was followed by a Benefit Impact Analysis and a project for mapping processes and redefining workflow. Led a business discovery for a major Office Furniture Manufacturer to provide Fortune 500 clients with custom Internet sites for procuring furniture on-line. Defined a business case and requirements for departments by which functions /features were ranked. Changes in organization (roles, skills) and process were also identified.

Compaq Services (1997 - 2000) As part of a worldwide practice Mark was responsible for the business development of Business Exploration and Systems Integration projects across geographies. The program focused on working with corporations in defining business requirements, creating initiatives, and formulating projects for developing and integrating business solutions. It received high praise from customers and was used internally for strategic planning sessions.

	Program development - led it through its integration into the eBusiness roadmap. Mark assessed market opportunities and helped to develop specific campaigns. Collateral development – created service delivery kits, sales/marketing brochures, and industry frameworks for banking, and insurance; and horizontal solutions in Customer Relationship Management, Business Intelligence, and Supply chain. Sales – supported pre-sales initiatives ranging from RFP responses to direct customers sales and was involved in over 100 opportunities. Delivery – resourced and participated in many Business Exploration projects globally. He developed and managed a partner augmentation program for delivery. Education/training - set up/delivered for consultants (18 classes in 2 years). Covered As-is/To-be modeling, business cases, future scenario planning, and soft skills.
And  these projects
	Led a business discovery that developed a “direct-to-market e-business model” for the in-bound division of a major US Telemarketer. Determined an opportunity to allow the client to go direct to corporate clients with various marketing initiatives. Defined role of emerging technologies in the new business model which helped CSRs recognize in-bound callers and consolidated intelligence to make effective offers. Over a year showed a pay back of $20m in new revenues and $10m in profits. This was followed by a second business discovery with outbound. Led a consulting team for a leading European manufacturer of equipment and services to the professional farming community. Identified and scoped two e-business initiatives - “Effective interface to the customer”, and “Strategy for dealers”. These initiatives provided opportunities for up/cross selling customers, and increasing dealer dependency on the client through value based services presented through a data mart. A business payback to investments was identified at 50:1. Led a business discovery to define business opportunities related to the sharing of customers across subsidiaries for a major US Financial Institution. The objective was to understand how each interacted with its customer base through channels and touch points, and determining the current products offered. Opportunity areas were developed relative to new product/channel combinations and maintaining a consistent brand image across channels with a business case. Following implementation of a solution a ROI was realized within two years. Led a business discovery for agent analysis for a life division of a major US Insurer and exploring how the insurer could better leverage its agents against a growing competition of online Discount Brokers. This required completing a requirements exercise to examine questions like in which regions are agents the best producers, what are the leading practices, which products are cross sold, and what is the overall impact on retention figures. A short business case was determined for the initiative and a pilot was implemented to verify the findings.