Professional experience and references

Career stations

• Audi AG · 27 yearsSystems planner, IT service owner, product owner, IT architect, enterprise architect
  Responsibility for IT services, products and architectures at a company of the Volkswagen Group – in an IT landscape with many hundreds of applications and international sites.
• England · 15 monthsIT architect on international assignment
• USA · 4 monthsIT architect on international assignment
• DatSoftCompany management and contract software development
• IndustriesAutomotive and pharmaceutical industry
• ConsultingCorporate planning and management, staff leadership, quality assurance, IT security
  as well as coaching for companies, teams and individuals.

What lies behind the job titles

Titles say little on their own, so here is briefly what each involved:

• IT service owner – responsible for making sure an IT service is reliably available: what it does, what it costs, who looks after it, what happens when it fails. That is IT service management in practice, not as a textbook chapter.
• Product owner – the link between what a business unit needs and what a development team can deliver. That is where I learned how often projects fail not because of the technology but because of unspoken expectations.
• IT architect and enterprise architect – the question of how business goals, processes, data and systems fit together, and what it costs when they do not. The 8-Level Model later grew out of this work.

Why corporate experience is useful for smaller companies

There is a fair objection: what use is someone from a corporation of tens of thousands to a business with forty employees? My answer: the problems are the same, only the scale differs – and in a large organisation they become visible earlier, because nothing works there by simply calling across the room any more.

When nobody in a small company can say exactly which software is for what and who maintains it, that is the same problem as in a corporation with a thousand applications – except that it can still be held in a few people's heads. Until those people leave. Methods such as architecture management and service management were developed for large organisations, but their core can be slimmed down considerably. That is precisely my work: not rolling out TOGAF in a mid-sized company, but picking out the two or three building blocks that genuinely help.

And what I cannot do

I take on no implementation work – I do not write your software and I do not run your systems. My work ends where your service provider or your own team begins. For decisions you have to make, I prepare the ground; making them is up to you. And coaching is not psychotherapy – where health is affected, professional help is the right route.

Employment references

References and other evidence are gladly available in connection with a concrete enquiry. That also keeps the data of former employers protected.

Client testimonials

I publish testimonials from my consulting and coaching work only with explicit consent. You will therefore find no invented or embellished references here – not even where they would flatter the website. On LinkedIn you will find further information about my career.

What you can examine instead, before engaging me: my free tools, the articles in the blog and the two papers under E-books. They tell you more about how I think and work than a quotation without context.