ABOUT BostonCIO�S MIKE MCGONAGLE

Mike focuses on BostonCIO's CTO Practice, delivering senior-level technical and operations consulting services focused on companies producing complex, business critical internal and go to market software. Our client companies leverage Mike's 30+ years of experience in the commercial software industry to improve the performance of their existing technical teams by identifying and dealing with problems that are inhibiting them in the marketplace and/or limiting their ability to scale their solutions and grow their businesses. Working directly with a company's technical teams to locate lurking problems in the software and/or infrastructure and creating action plans to address those challenges, Mike is able to help company executives understand the path forward from their current state and lay out strategic goals and milestones. Mike's professional services include a variety of roles from serving as Shared-Basis CTO^SM as an interim/part-time Chief Technology Officer or VP of Engineering, to delivering targeted, project-based engagements and investor due diligence assessments.

Accomplishments:

• Led the development, from initial concept to full product operation, of the industry leading Campaign Management System which fueled the growth of the company from raw start-up to a valuation of greater than $1B. Led and grew the development team from 5 local programmers to 175, distributed across 5 locations in the US and India.
• Turned around a struggling offshore operation with poor productivity and an annual attrition rate of over 100% to a high performance operation that is currently 350 people, working across multiple products, and with an annual attrition rate of approximately 8% (versus an industry rate of 19%). This initiative included transitioning the group from a contracted, outsourced operation to a captive team.
• Led the development, from initial concept to full product operation, of the premier recruiting tool for the hourly hiring market.
• Led a company-wide "re-definition" project to transition from a multi-implementation, hosted environment to a true multi-tenant, SaaS product implementation.
• Introduced off-shoring to one of the largest software companies in New England, identifying pilot projects and establishing the mechanisms needed to run projects successfully in a distributed environment.

University of Massachusetts Lowell - Adjunct Professor of Computer Science and Software Engineering

Prior Experience:

ClickSquared, Boston, MA
2010 � 2013
Chief Technology Officer

Recruited to ClickSquared to lead the definition, architecture and development of the company�s new flagship Cross Channel Marketing product.

• Established Scrum-based processes to coordinate the development activities between teams in the US, India and Russia.
• Recruited and hired key members of the team: Chief Architect; Director of Quality Assurance, Director of Database Architecture. This provided the needed maturity to take ClickSquared�s development practices to the next level.
• Successfully released the Cross Channel Marketing product on a new architecture, including using an IBM/Netezza appliance as the primary database server. Based on this ClickSquared received a �Hottest Company in Boston� award from Lead411 as well as being recognized by Forrester and other industry groups.
• Took on responsibility for Client Engineering, a 40 person group providing implementation and retainer engineering services, primarily in the web development and database (modeling, ETL, custom SQL processing) areas. After reorganizing the group, and defining better project tracking and development practices the group�s output increased dramatically and the amount of re-work decreased to almost none.
• Responsible for SaaS Data Operations Center, hosting the company�s current product and the stacks for 3 legacy products, as well as corporate IT.

Kronos, Inc, Chelmsford, MA
2007 � 2010
VP � Engineering, Hiring Solutions Group

Kronos acquired Deploy Solutions to get access to the product and technology that Deploy had built, codenamed aTAO (architecture for Talent Acquisition and Optimization) Kronos had previously acquired Unicru, a competitor of Deploy and the leading company in the Hourly hiring space, but had found that Unicru�s technology was seriously deficient, especially in terms of scalability. With the Deploy acquisition Kronos brought the two companies together into a separate division (Hiring Solutions Group) with the intention of migrating all of the 70+ existing Unicru customers onto the aTAO platform. This goal was accomplished over a 3 year period.

• Successfully merged "Unicru" Engineering team, based in Beaverton, OR, with the Deploy Solutions team, based in Newton, MA and Noida, India.
• Adapted the Deploy development process to conform to the Kronos Scrum-based process.
• Responsible for growing the Noida operation from approximately 60 to 140+ people, including a move to a new, larger and more modern facility.
• Scaled the product across multiple application servers, growing the volume processed from ~1.5M applications in 2008 to ~68M applications in 2010.
• Expanded the Noida operation to include professional services and hosting for HSG, and began an aggressive build out to create an offshore capability for Kronos' core products.
• Implemented a rapid release process: biweekly service releases; feature releases every six months.

Deploy Solutions, Newton, MA
2003-2007
CTO & VP � Product Development

Recruited to Deploy Solutions to lead a turnaround effort for the company�s flagship product which was struggling in the market because of low quality and a high cost of implementation/ownership. Specific highlights and accomplishments of this effort were:

• Set up and chaired a summit meeting, including the product's original architecture team, to identify the key technical problem areas and assigned teams to thoroughly analyze each area. The end result of this analysis was that "fixing" the current product essentially involved a complete rewrite.
• Based on the above result, put together a new architecture team to define a new framework that would be the basis for a scalable, configurable multi-tenant SaaS product. Presented and received approval to proceed on this new architecture (aTAO) first from the rest of the Executive Team and then from the Board of Directors.
• Turned around the offshore team, located in Noida, India. Specific challenges were:
  • In 2002 turnover was, statistically, 95%. Based on salary and benefit surveys of key benchmark companies in the Noida area we redefined the salary grades and added medical insurance. Turnover over the past 2 years has been 7%, vs. the industry average of 18% for that same period.
  • The quality produced by the Noida team was sub-standard. This was addressed by process changes to create better collaboration and by changing the hiring practices to place more emphasis on hiring experienced individuals rather than �freshers�.
• In 2006 transitioned the Noida staff from contract to employee status.
• As a member of the executive team, was involved in all aspects of running the business, specifically including:
  • Changing the company and product strategy to move away from the salaried hiring market into the hourly hiring market where we could be more competitive.
  • As part of selling the company, leading the technical due diligence efforts that eventually led to a successful transaction with Kronos.
• Introduced agile methods and practices into the development process, adapted to work in a distributed environment.

Exchange Solutions, Waltham, MA; Toronto, Canada
2002-2003
CTO & SVP � Technology

Hired at Exchange Solutions to provide the technical and personnel leadership to stabilize the existing product suite and expand the product offerings into new markets.

• Reorganized the technology team to provide clearer roles and responsibilities, and to align groups around the value delivered to our clients, rather than along technological lines. This had to be done in a way that didn�t disrupt the groups� existing culture, and was sensitive to the existing staff.
• Redefined the roles and interactions on engineering project teams, both client and internal, to provide continuity, focus, and clear lines of authority for project success. Because of the impact on client projects, this activity had to be coordinated across the several organizations that shared client project responsibility.
• Recovered several failing projects and got them back �on track�, and provided leadership to insure that all new projects met their milestone and budget targets.
• Created an interactive �storyboard� as a basis for product direction and planning, and to foster discussion on those topics across the company.

Exchange Applications, Boston, MA
1994-2001
CTO & SVP - R&D

As co-founder of Exchange Applications, was involved in the executive operation of the company from its creation, based on technology and intellectual property acquired from MarketPulse. During six years of explosive growth we took the company through initial and secondary public offerings, did three acquisitions, and signed a major co-development agreement (with MicroStrategy). The company grew to over 500 employees and 250+ customers during my tenure there. Key personal accomplishments included:

• Maintaining Exchange's products in an industry leadership position by setting a clear technical and architectural roadmap to keep the products "current" during a period of extremely rapid technological evolution (i.e. client-server to internet, C++ to Java, RPC to EJB, inheritance to component-based, XML, etc.). This required staying current with the new technologies by reading, attending seminars, and even attending training sessions alongside the developers.
• Growing the R&D organization to 185 people in four development centers (Boston, Seattle, Dallas, Washington, D.C.), with additional offshore, contract QA and development personnel in India. In addition to these line organizations, each run by their own VP-Product Operations, a small cross-organizational research team that reported directly to me was responsible for fostering and nurturing new product, technology and architectural ideas and spinning them off to the product line groups. To ensure effective management and interaction among these distributed teams, established reporting mechanisms and a calendar of management and technical meetings.
• Establishing a release management organization to provide the coordination necessary to ensure on-time, high quality product deliveries and to manage the internal roll-out of new product releases. This group was also responsible for defining and collecting metrics, both external and internal, to monitor the organization's performance and assist in managing the trade-offs between new development and existing customer maintenance. One component of this was projecting life-cycle costs for key new development projects to establish ROI as input to the executive decision making process.
• Hands-on management and leadership of the R&D team on a day-to-day basis, including establishing personnel and technological mentoring and team-building programs, and the definition of appropriate development processes as the core system grew to over 1M lines of code.
• Creating and managing the company's Customer Advisory Board which met annually with follow-up conference calls held quarterly. This group, consisting of a select and representative set of active customers and partners, provided input and feedback on product direction. In addition to monitoring Customer Support activity and the annual Prognostics Customer Survey, the advisory board provided timely and very direct feedback on the state of the customer base and the balance that we were maintaining between new development and maintenance.

MarketPulse (division of CCA), Cambridge, MA
1993�1994
Vice President, Research & Development

• MarketPulse, a division of Computer Corp. of America (CCA), focused on building marketing applications using CCA�s core technology, the Model 204 database. Was recruited into this position from the parent company as part of the management �turnaround� team, established after a 3-year long project to create a next-generation, client-server marketing application had been canceled.
• In this role, improved morale within the development organization, rejuvenated the company�s core mainframe product, and worked with the executive team to establish a forward-looking product vision. As part of re-establishing the company�s credibility, met with customers individually and at the North American and European User Group meetings to explain changes and present vision for the future.

Computer Corp. of America (CCA), Cambridge, MA
1991�1993
Director, Client-Server Development

• Recruited into this position by the former VP of R&D at Atex to build a set of Windows-based tools to provide access to data stored in the mainframe Model 204 database that was CCA's primary product. This involved playing the role of lead programmer and architect to a five person team, as well as acting as a Client-Server and Windows evangelist in a mainframe software company. This effort culminated in a suite of products supporting DDE, OLE, and ODBC access to Model 204 data. One of the senior members of the team was the chairperson for the SQL Access Group (SAG) Technical Committee. He was also one of the primary authors of the SAG CLI specification, which was used by Microsoft as the basis for their ODBC standard.

Atex (a Division of Kodak), Billerica, MA
1990-1991
Director, Systems Programming

• Responsible for the development of the infrastructure (database, operating system and networking) required by Atex's new line of newspaper page layout products. As part of this role, was involved in negotiating deals with IBM to beta test and roll-out the RS/6000 as our primary platform, re-negotiating our contract with Ingres in order to improve our relationship with them, and monitoring the execution of the product at the Boston Globe. Given the lack of maturity of network software at the time, my networking team was responsible for developing IP-level software to support application messaging and signaling, as well as application and network level monitoring. This work was built to be portable across Sun, RS/6000 and Intel-based PC's.

Cullinet, Westwood, MA
1988-1990

• Cullinet acquired DMS primarily to add the latter�s Distribution Applications (i.e. Order Entry, Warehouse Management, etc.) and Expert System products to their product line. While at Cullinet, was first in the position of Director, Distribution Applications. In this role, was responsible for integrating DMS� Distribution Applications into the Cullinet suite and rolling the product out to Cullinet�s field organization. Later, took on the position of Lead Architect, Client-Server Computing. In this role, led Cullinet�s research into this emerging field, working with early versions of Microsoft Windows and OS/2. One of my key accomplishments in this latter role was the definition of a full-blown RPC protocol and implementation for Cullinet's diverse set of products, based on the RPC protocol originally specified by Apollo Computer.

DMS, Lexington, MA
1981-1988

Principal Software Engineer (1986-1988)

Working in assembler language on the Expert System development project, was responsible for developing systems level software, including an SQL-based, flat file access mechanism, and device drivers for several pieces of equipment.

Vice President, Product Development (1984-1986)

Was responsible for directing the Product Development organization in moving the company�s existing products from a proprietary language to a COBOL implementation, producing the company's first mainframe, CICS-based version, as well as creating a new product offering for Warehouse Management.

Senior Architect, Systems Engineering (1981-1984)

Was primarily responsible for performance benchmarking and tuning efforts, both baselining the products as well as working on customer problems.

Keydata Corp, Wellesley, MA
1976-1981

Principal Software Engineer (1979-1981)

Directed the company�s efforts in developing new applications for the Data General and HP mini-computers. These applications were intended to augment Keydata�s shrinking time-sharing business.

Software Developer (1976-1979)

Education
Sc.M., Mathematics
Brown University
Providence, RI
1973�1975

B.S., Mathematics
Lowell Technology Institute (now UMass-Lowell)
Lowell, MA
1970-1973

Publications
"Voice-Recognition and Voice-Response Systems", The McGraw-Hill Multimedia Handbook, Jessica Keyes, ed.; McGraw-Hill, Inc. 1994