Kurt Stump’s Resume / CV

kurt • 19th Jan 2012 • Professional

Kurt Stump
San Diego, CA

IT Executive looking to provide thought leadership and strategic vision for an organization seeking energy, drive, technical solutions, and control in their technology discipline.

Overview:

I’m a driven and passionate IT professional looking to provide Executive leadership, direction, and mentoring to an organization seeking to provide technical solutions to solve complex business problems.  I am a change agent.  I have hardware, software, networking, and strategy backgrounds with a focus on the Portfolio, Program, and Project Management to successfully deliver these solutions, on-schedule and on-budget.  I have experiences in Insurance, Financial Services, Automotive, Software, and Manufacturing.  I am PMP-certified and a Six Sigma Black Belt.  I am a member of Mensa.  I seek to use my technology background as a complement to your business.  I view myself less as a technologist and more as a technology-focused business consultant.  I wish to leverage my IT background as a toolbox, with each technology discipline and experience being a tool designed to drive value for your business, either from growth or contraction.  I have led successful, enterprise-wide SAP ERP implementations, solutions to modernize sales paradigms, industry-first analytics, U.S. Patented software implementations using Grid and Cloud Computing, modern architectures, significant cost-cutting initiatives, and best-in-class voice/data/video WAN provisioning for a worldwide bank – to name a few key, strategic wins.  However, my true passion is collaborating with business partners to develop comprehensive strategies that inspire and truly drive value from technology that shows itself on your bottom line.

Work Experience:

2011 –                     Independent Consulting              San Diego, CA
Management Consultant, Architect

§    Freelance consulting in Business Justification, Internal Sales, SOW Creation, Application Architecture, and Software Development.

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2007 – 2011    ICW Group – Insurance Company of the West    San Diego, CA
Director of Strategic Initiatives, Enterprise Architect

§    Owned the technology partnership with the Workers’ Compensation and Special Property Catastrophe (DIC) business units and managed the technology relationships with the Chief Operating Officer, Chief Financial Officer, Chief Actuary, VP of Workers’ Compensation, VP of Special Property, and the VP of Enterprise Risk Management.
§    Owned all things technology for my partners including strategy creation, strategic initiatives, projects, and production support.  I developed a high-performance team with a strict focus on effective and efficient project delivery to deliver maximum value.
§    Developed comprehensive strategic roadmaps for all of my partners, including the tools required to measure progress.
§    Conceived of, designed, and architected Snap, a web-based collaborative workstation for insurance underwriting professionals, support staff, and agents (customers) to seamlessly work together on insurance proposals.  This platform effectively changed the way Workers’ Compensation and Catastrophe Insurance is sold in the United States.  Gone are the days of selling commercial insurance in a customer’s board room on an easel, we brought commercial insurance onto the Internet.  We integrated with agency management systems and provided mechanisms to seamlessly upload application data.  This allowed our customers to spend less time on each application and in the long run send us more business.  We scaled the Workers’ Compensation policy count by 400% while reducing headcount and increased operating revenue by 250%.  ICW was then able to move into the more lucrative and higher-retention Small Comp marketplace with our newfound efficiencies.  Catastrophe increased the number of applications they processed by 350% with the same headcount, allowing them to be more selective with the risks in their fixed portfolio and resulted in an operating profit increase of 28%.
§    Provided the technology framework for and subsequently delivered an automated loss development program that served as a rating engine for Workers’ Compensation Insurance pricing and quoting.  Previously all quoting was done manually and the company was only ever as strong as their weakest underwriter.  I prepared the architecture for an electronic pricing engine that used backward and forward-looking indicators and used our pricing and claims experience history combined with industry analytics to develop intelligent pricing based on expected losses.  Our goal was to assign the appropriate price to all risks, not simply chase our competitors’ prices as the insurance market softens and hardens.  My team successfully delivered and integrated this approach and it has resulted in ICW’s 400% policy count increase. We held our pricing structures as our competitors had to raise their rates to cover their losses from poorly-priced past risks.  An additional benefit is our ability to now predict our expected losses and plan our financials accordingly.
§    Conceived of, provided the design for, and delivered an industry-first, real-time catastrophe modeling engine.  Historically, DIC (Earthquake) insurance was done manually by looking at soil and building compositions.  We designed a solution to base our pricing on backward and forward-looking indicators; we did this through the assembly of multiple models to predict soil, building, and earthquake zone conditions.  A custom final model was built to compile and shape the modeling results.  This resulted in quantifiable Earthquake Insurance pricing based on expected outcomes.  This led to better loss ratios and better profit margins.  However, the original solution operated in batches with actuaries on standby.  We then worked with the modeling vendors and our internal development to construct a real-time interface to deliver modeling and pricing results in minutes instead of hours or days.  This, combined with our Snap workstation, allowed us to turn around quotes within the hour while our competitors still typically return quotes in 14 days.  This resulted in better relationships with our wholesaling brokers, a 350% application increase, and a 28% operating profit increase.
§    Developed a comprehensive Internet strategy for marketing and servicing the entire sales process.  Details included insured portals with self service, policy management, and bill payment, etc., agent portals with self service, policy information, marketing materials, SAP access, etc., and intranet portals with system access and viewable support roles.  Each segment of the strategic roadmap is digestible separately across a single, robust architecture.  This means that each line of business could select which functions they desired and in what order they would receive them.  The implementation of these could then occur in the prioritized order of value to the customers, e.g. after the single-sign-on process was developed, portlets could be produced without dependencies and then embedded within the holistic portal.  Developing this strategy netted over $1.4M of ROI in the first year and allowed the highest priority features to be implemented first, allowing an additional $55M of new business to come into the organization due to these newly-available features.
§    Corrected two historically troubled applications and their associated troubled vendor relationships.  These applications had a history of low availability, troubled maintenance and enhancements, and poor relationships with the providers.  Through partnerships with the vendor, controlled processes, clear definitions of roles and responsibilities, articulated test plans, and acceptance criteria, both applications were improved to highly-available (99.97%+) with fully-functional vendor relationships.
§    Partnered with the Workers’ Compensation LOB to locate 400 viable, new agents in a new territory utilizing data mining techniques against publicly-available, proprietary, and procured data sources.
§    Awarded 2 ACORD awards: the 2008 ACORD Innovative Implementation Award for the Snap Underwriting Workstation and the 2010 ACORD Property & Casualty Early Adopter Award for Integrating Agency Management Systems to Snap via XML to eliminate the manual entry and duplication of application data.
§    Managed a division of 115; owned a portfolio of over 40 projects per year and >$70M in budgets and strategies for all lines of business, and a production support portfolio of 48 applications, including large-scale policy and claims administration systems.
Interim Chief Information Officer (CIO)
§    Owned all operations and strategy for the 250 person IT department while the CIO was on an extended leave in Q3 2009.
§    Continued all business and technology initiatives and initiated 3 additional approach changes to simplify IT processes and improve the services levels for our business partners.
§    Performed independent audits, oversaw complete 2010 budget planning process, kicked-off 7 new projects, oversaw total portfolio of 48 projects, oversaw data center transformation, completed 2010 Executive Strategic Planning, etc.

SAP ERP Program Director

§    Owned and directed the day-to-day activities on an integrated business process transformation that reached all departments and how they conduct their business, focusing on the implementation of SAP Financials (FICO), SAP Claims (CM), SAP Collections and Disbursements (CD), SAP Commissions (ICM), SAP NetWeaver Business Intelligence (BI), SAP NetWeaver PI/XI, a Services-Oriented Architecture (SOA)-based integration bus, the decommissioning of legacy policy administration systems, complete data conversion and cleansing effort from source to abstraction layer to destination, and the integration and final provisioning of a new comprehensive policy administration approach.
§    Included a $67M budget with a peak onsite team size of 105 (FTEs, consultants, contractors, and SI), 40 nearshore in Mexico, and 25 offshore in India.  The team consisted of a fixed-bid partner System Integrator and 4 other consulting partners to augment our business and technical teams.  I was responsible to and reported status directly to the COO and Board of Directors.
§    The Program delivered a complete Corporate transformation of the back office and financials, including comprehensive workflow management with full integration to document imaging via Electronic Content Management (ECM), resulting in a highly-efficient, scalable, and automated system poised to grow and support ICW’s planned growth from $280M to $1B plus.

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2003 – 2007    Allstate Insurance Company – Allstate Financial    Northbrook, IL
Risk Management Technology Director, Infrastructure Architect

§    Owned the technology partnership with Allstate Investments and managed the relationships with the Chief Risk Officer and VP of Asset/Liability Management (ALM); I was installed by the CIO to build a risk management technology discipline and carve out a high-performance team.
§    Program Manager for the Modeling Improvement Initiative, a risk management analytics transformation program that successfully automated, Grid-enabled, and scaled ALM risk analytics, fair value metrics, and sensitivity analyses from 8 scenarios in weeks to 10,000’s of scenarios in hours in order to better manage Allstate Financial’s $81B asset portfolio.
§    Managed and architected the creation of new Earnings at Risk (EaR), Value at Risk (VaR), asset portfolio optimization, alpha, beta, corporate utility, economic capital, and risk line hedging stochastic Monte Carlo models on a common framework.
§    Developed and managed a co-development modeling effort with an outside software firm to provide a next-generation, holistic modeling platform that combined our successful Life modeling framework with Property/Casualty and asset modeling.
§    Designed, implemented, and managed the Insurance Industry’s largest Grid Computing infrastructure.
§    Developed business, data, marketing, and technology strategies while seeding a culture change toward agile methodologies.
§    Managed a division of actuaries, analysts, architects, developers, infrastructure engineers, project managers, and testers.
§    Awarded 2 Celent Model Carrier Awards in 2007: the first for Grid Computing for Annuity Valuation and the second for Rules-Based Automated Underwriting.
§    Pending US Patent 11/847,089 for Earnings-at-Risk innovation via Grid Computing.

Algorithmics ERP Program Director

§    Owned and directed the day-to-day activities of Allstate Financial on an integrated business process transformation that replaced Allstate Investments’ asset, trading, and financials systems, focusing on the Algorithmics investment platform.
§    Allstate Financial integrates directly with Allstate Investments for the management of its $81B asset portfolio.
§    Owned and implemented the external data conversion within Algorithmics, the internal data conversion within all Finance and ALM systems, and the comprehensive integration with the ALM models that pull data directly from asset and liability systems in order to model the corporate balance sheet forecasts and risk factors.
§    Accountable for the $38M AF budget and a team of 42 analysts, developers, testers, actuaries, and financial engineers.
§    The Program resulted in a new integrated trading platform that allowed for real-time trade decisioning on par with major brokerages, complete with real-time analytics and decision support metrics for the trade desk based on ALM policies.

SAP ERP Implementation Director

§    Department stakeholder and technology owner of the Finance and ALM departments within Allstate Financial on an integrated business process transformation, focusing on the implementation of SAP Financials (FICO), SAP Collections and Disbursements (CD), SAP NetWeaver Business Intelligence (BI), a Services-Oriented Architecture (SOA)-based integration bus, the decommissioning of key functionality within legacy policy administration systems, complete data conversion and cleansing effort from source to destination, and the integration of this new financials system with the ALM modeling activities.
§    The Program resulted in an Enterprise migration to SAP for the consolidation of budgeting, financials, and billing.
§    Certifications: Six Sigma Black Belt, PMP

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2002 – 2003    S3CO – Warehouse Management Solutions    San Diego, CA
Application Architect, Developer (Consultant)

§    Developed application, network, and system architectures for a web-based, J2EE warehouse management system ASP.
§    Architected stochastic warehouse modeling techniques for inventory replenishment and picking / put away strategies.
§    Resulted in an industry-first solution that centralized warehouse management in a cost model affordable to all warehousers.

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2001 – 2002    Robertson Stephens – Investment Bankers    San Francisco, CA
WAN Manager, Network Engineer

§    Managed and re-engineered a global, dynamically re-routable data, voice, and video IGX WAN to service a 14 site growth.
§    Engineered IP/ATM network changes, consolidations, and upgrades among WAN switches and Cisco/Foundry routers.
§    Managed and implemented network monitoring, security, and telecommunications support tools to achieve a 99.97% uptime.
§    Consulted on the design and implementation of an Electronic Trading System (ETS) with real-time market integration and stochastic equity and bond trade modeling utilizing a multi-site distributed computing infrastructure.
§    Network administration, budgeting, disaster recovery planning, documentation, inventory, and resource management.
§    Certifications: CCNA, CCNP

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2000    Ford Motor Company – FordStar/VSAT Satellite Systems    Dearborn, MI
WAN Engineer, Network Engineer

§    Managed the data broadcast segment of one of the world’s largest data and video wide area networks.
§    Investigated and evaluated the technologies of IP via Satellite, as well as its role in non-standardized network integrations.
§    Recommended a corporate solution to connect 7,500+ dealerships with high speed internet access, regardless of location.
§    Implemented a 100-site nationwide pilot to test the feasibility of a transport-independent internet access VPN architecture.

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1999    Delphi Automotive – Delco Electronics Systems    Kokomo, IN
Systems/Software Engineer, Embedded Systems Test Engineer

§    Completed MACE Blackbox automated testing, code verification, and revision for embedded systems production releases.
§    Created code-generating parser to translate Bridgepoint Finite State Models to user-definable source code.
§    Contributor to US Patents 6323487 and 6298311, resulting in pending US Patents 10/125,946, 10/065,447, and 11/130,978.

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1998    Ingersoll-Rand Company    Shippensburg, PA
Systems Analyst, Warehousing

§    Acquired working knowledge of enterprise-level ERP, database management, wireless and RF networking, mobile computing, invoicing, part order organization, report organization, price quoting, shipping, vendor management, and warehousing.

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1994 – 1999    DataCorp Computers    Chambersburg, PA
Owner, Sales, Engineer

§    DataCorp Computers specialized in custom PC connectivity, sales, and support.
§    Possessed sole accountability for all areas of the business: accounting, advertising, billing, business development, engineering, finance, hiring, purchasing, sales, taxes, technical support, warehousing, and all other business responsibilities.

Education:

1997 – 2001    Pennsylvania State University    State College, PA
Computer Science / Software Engineering – Bachelor of Science  •  University Scholars’ Program  •  Schreyer Honors College Scholar

Technology Proficiency:

Software:     J2EE; Java; .NET; C#; C++; C; HTML; JSF; JSP; XML; SQL; Oracle; SQL Server; PostgreSQL; Ab Initio; Informatica; Tibco DataSynapse GridServer; FirstBest UMS; Lexis/Nexis Commercial Intellisys; SAP; NetWeaver; OpenText LiveLink; Algorithmics; SAS; Client & Server-Side Scripting; Network/Firewall Management Software; Windows; MS-DOS; Linux; Solaris; AS/400; MATLAB; MS-Office; MS-Project; MS-Visio…

Hardware:     NAS; SAN; Routing, Switching, Load Balancing; Wintel Farms; Cisco IGX / VoIP; LAN/MAN/WAN (IP, ATM, Wireless, RF, Satellite)…

Full Text Version of Kurt Stump’s Resume Cover Letter