Sr. Director Technical Operations

? Leading IT Business Operations/Technology Business Management, Program Management Office, Sourcing, Procurement and Strategy in support of the IT infrastructure and >$200M of annual spend that runs EA's games.
? Transformation: Developed and implementing a Cloud First strategy to eliminate all physical data centers resulting in higher availability, limitless scaling, capacity risk mitigation, and self-provisioning. To date five data centers have been shut down over two years and the strategy has resulted in $24M of annual savings. At full ramp Cloud First will save more than $40M/year.
? Project Excellence: Reskilled and retooled the Program Management office with enterprise tools, processes and reporting resulting in +25% improvement in on-time delivery. Championed the planning and delivery of infrastructure for the launch of over 40 amazing titles.
? Chaos to Order: Built the Business Operations team, processes and tools responsible for financial planning, demand planning, capacity planning, cost allocations, and continually improving utilization and cost for EA's global game infrastructure.  The data and analytics from this function have resulted in more than $16M of annual savings in cloud and 3rd Party spending.   Negotiated numerous deals and contract renewals for key infrastructure products and services saving $26M annually. Established the Cloud Vendor Management team that oversees the relationships, capacity, negotiations, optimization, cost and usage with AWS, Google and Azure.

? Led the North American IT Infrastructure team consisting of +500 employees with an annual budget of $38MM OPEX and $52MM CAPEX supporting core infrastructure and user facing devices for 88 Amazon Fulfillment/Transportation Centers.
? Transformation: Led the team through huge growth that resulted in doubling IT headcount, sites, users and assets in less than 24 months.  Drove complete ownership of resources, expenses and results by centralizing control of 240 Support Technicians from the business into IT.   Transformed the leadership of the team by hiring and developing the best talent including the creation of a new regional management team consisting of 10 managers, four internally promoted and six hired.  Improved organizational health and productivity by redefining the entry-level role and right sizing the skill profile of the team with an optimal mix of Technicians and Engineers that resulted in a 25% reduction in Engineers.  Championed re-engineering the recruiting processes and developing the team's interviewing skills which resulted in improving interviewer accuracy from 18% to 30% on a base of over 3,000 interviews per year.
? Project Excellence: Directed the team through the successful completion of significant projects including planning and delivering IT Infrastructure and staffing for the construction of 26 new one million sq. ft. buildings, 28 building expansions and planning for 20 additional 2014 construction projects.  Executed technology refresh projects and preparation for two holiday peak periods.   Deployed and supported 21,000 cameras, 2,000 servers, and 16PB of storage in 20 sites for a digital surveillance and automation in 12 months.
? Chaos to Order: Championed the strategy, planning and execution of significant continuous improvement projects.  Standardized the incident management processes and operating procedures for Support Technicians worldwide.  Created a centralized Program Management Office (PMO) with standardized project management tools and processes.  Championed a program to identify and remove IT defects impacting internal customers which resulted in $8.8MM of annual ROI.   Implemented an Operational Excellence program to measure, track and continuously improve services that resulted in a 10% reduction in high severity tickets and a 20% reduction in ticket resolution time.

Head of Fulfillment IT N. America

? Led a global R&D IT team (infrastructure and applications) consisting of 165 employees and a $32MM budget.  Directed the formation of this team by consolidating the finances, teams, services and infrastructure of numerous fragmented departments spanning more than 20 locations and 10 countries into a single global organization. Transformed the team from a group of operators and systems administrators just keeping infrastructure running to a customer focused and collaborative team that understood the needs of R&D.
? Standardized, simplified and matured the infrastructure, processes, applications, tools and services of this high-performance compute and private cloud environment consisting of 4,000 Chip Designers, 1,000 Software Developers, 4,500 LINUX Servers, 1,500 Solaris Servers, 4,000 LINUX workstations and 1.5PB of storage.  Results include: the consolidation of 34 data centers to 12, 23 incident/trouble ticketing systems to one, 16 LINUX images to one, four Configuration Management tools to one, 13 Defect Tracking Systems to one, 23 Tool repositories to one, 23 NIS Security Domains to one and four Product Data Management/IP Catalog applications to one.
? Over four years consolidation and standardization programs yielded a 34% reduction in cost, 60% reduction in headcount, +50% improvement in user satisfaction and major improvements in system availability while increasing capacity by more than 500%.
? Championed additional transformation projects to standardize 1,000 R&D software developers on a common set of tools for source code management, bug tracking and requirements management.

Global R&D IT Director

? Led a global Business Unit IT team and aligned projects and services with the needs and strategy of a $2.3B global business.
? Led the development of an eBusiness/productivity plan targeted at "Making life easier for Customers and Employees".  Key deliverables included consolidating five Partner Extranet solutions to one, increasing electronic interfaces with customers/distributors, improving Partner Extranet/Internet functionality and usability per "Voice of Customer/Distribution", consolidated numerous R&D PDM systems into a single solution, and developed standardized digital asset life cycle management processes and procedures.

Sr. Manager IT Business Relationship Management

? Led a Regional IT team consisting of 175 employees in 12 European subsidiaries with combined sales in excess of $1B.
? Championed a Six Sigma project that reduced IT expenses $1.1MM or 40% in 12 months while improving communications, prioritization, user satisfaction, and IT credibility.
? Energized and led IT team to improve alignment with the business unit using a program termed "Know and Be Known". This program increased collaboration and information sharing between IT and the business and resulted in the creation of robust processes to analyze, define, prioritize and implement IT solutions that matched the business needs and strategy.
? Led a Western European Region productivity improvement initiative that exceeded Operating Income Targets by 24% and Cash Targets by 81% while decreasing regional IT spend 5% over the same period.
? Championed the delivery of key projects including: Regional IT SOX Compliance, Regional Euro Currency Conversion, Developed and implemented a Customer Scorecard, Pricing tool deployment in 12 countries, eight extranet sites, 10 CRM Implementations, six Procurement implementations, standardization of 2,200 PC's, rollout of regional Supply Chain solutions (demand, supply and manufacturing planning), IT integration for two acquisitions and three offshore Application Development outsourcing deals.

Sr. Regional IT Manager

Find out detailed information about Rick Burrell, Sr. Director Technical Operations in Austin, TX

Rick Burrell: Sr. Director Technical Operations in Austin, TX

Rick Burrell

Electronic Arts

Amazon.com

Freescale

3M

3M

Iowa State University

Secondary emphasis