Allan I

Allan Levy
Mr. Levy is accomplished in the areas of business process reengineering, systems performance, quality management, and software engineering. He has extensive experience in a) strategic systems planning at the Board-room level, b) systems design and implementation, c) program management, d) performance measurement, capacity modeling, benchmarking, and e) operations management. He has significant experience in telecommunications, financial services, and the intelligence and venture capital community.. Mr. Levy has served as an expert witness on several precedent setting cases of information technology cost/benefit, risk management, performance and operations. He has also developed strategic systems plans for business mergers including major telecommunications firms and banking institutions.

Employment History

Business Performance Management, Inc, President
Renaissance Solutions Corp. VP, Performance Management Practice
International Systems Services Corporation, CIO & VP, Rapid Development Center
Fannie Mae, Director
Software Performance Engineering, Consultant
BGS Systems, Consultant

Professional and
Business Experience

Was contracted to develop a business and operations plan for the start up of a one-of-a-kind venture capital company sponsored by the Director of the Intelligence Community. The firm links Silicon Valley top tier venture capitalists and advanced technology entrepreneurs, to the priority technology requirements of the CIA in such domains as information security, knowledge management and e-collaboration. Wrote the business plan for the firm. Worked with board members of the firm to operationalize the plan. Managed several of the firm's technology programs.

For a major telecommunications firm was responsible for the risk management audit of a $1Billion systems development effort including billing, provisioning, order management, preventative maintenance, customer care and workforce automation. Scope included technical design, measurement of operational controls, performance, availability and quality. Subsequently, was chartered by the President of the firm to develop a strategic systems plan for the company, including development of surviving systems and transition plans for the integration of its merger partner, together forming a $26 Billion Teleco. Was also chartered to lead a performance certification project to benchmark the firm’s strategic billing and customer care systems to assure their performance, scalability and operational reliability.

Provided business process reengineering services to the strategic planning committee of a multinational Fortune 100 company. Facilitated process improvements in the areas of strategic planning for the I/T services function. Achieved several process breakthroughs expected by the firm to yield order of magnitude improvements in the operation of the strategic planning function.

For a major Telecommunications company, conducted a best practices benchmark of Internet Operations and Infrastructure Management. Formulated models of best practices in Internet reliability design, scalability, and responsiveness to change. Surveyed many of the largest e-commerce businesses to develop the best practice models, including, FannieMae, Verizon, Bell Atlantic Mobile, CISCO, eBAY, AOL, Electronic Arts and others.

For a major provider of long-distance service, conducted a performance and capacity capabilities analysis of Customer Billing Systems. Was responsible for identifying operational performance improvements leading to $20 million savings annually. Such improvements were based on processor consolidations, operations automation, redefinition/reprioritization of workflow and work demand balancing. In addition, was responsible for developing new operational processes in the areas of performance and capacity management, workload forecasting, and equipment inventory acquisition.

Was contracted by the world’s third largest financial institution, as a systems integration manager for a client/server Sybase- based trade accounting systems development. Managed a team of technical staff and user personnel to design/develop the system. Directed the project management, planning, performance and quality assurance programs. Was directly responsible for order of magnitude performance improvements in the design which led to breakthrough results in client productivity and business throughput ($50 million annually). Additionally, developed a program management process that was so comprehensive in its methods and metrics that it was subsequently adopted as the model for all projects at the firm.

Provided litigation support and expert witness services to several leading law firms, in the areas of IT cost/benefit analysis, computer configuration and performance. Conducted in-depth analysis of systems integration failures for root cause and damage assessment in six different cases, including one landmark $1.4 Billion precedent setting case in best value law. Provided expert witness testimony in the US Courts in areas of cost/benefit, risk management, benchmarking, performance, and configuration selection. Responsible for managing teams of technical and legal specialists in order to support litigation.

Program manager for a $10 million network communications project. Designed a network system generation procedure to compete with a functionally equivalent application through an order of magnitude improvement in run time. Achieved a design that proved to be 20 times faster, assuring market penetration of the product. Also, as acting director of quality assurance for the project, designed statistical quality control procedures to prove the system adhered to high reliability requirements. Developed automated development and test strategies which resulted in savings of $2 million.

For a major computer vendor, conducted computer configuration, measurement and benchmarking studies to support a proposal for 250 computer installations nationwide. Was provided complete responsibility for managing a specialized benchmark team of ten of the client's senior technical engineers. Conducted controlled benchmark measurements to certify performance capabilities of proposed configurations under conditions of projected and stressed loads. Also conducted analyses and testing to support optimization of the relational data base design.

Provided quality management on several major systems integration projects for a large-scale financial service and product company. Interfaced with senior management to develop TQM programs. Set up programs for business process reengineering, statistical quality control, and test automation. Developed breakthrough performance innovations in test coverage analysis, software reliability, and cost estimation modeling.

Performed business process reengineering on the design of order entry workflow procedures for a multinational manufacturing firm. Developed process improvements which resulted in breakthrough improvements in product shipment time to market, as well as incremental improvement in workload management and staff efficiencies.

Conducted an I/T operations process improvement project for a major financial services firm. The scope included analysis of all aspects of client/ server and network operations. The objective of the project was to define an implementation plan to yield a factor of two reduction in production failures, with commensurate reductions in operational cost, risk, and breadth of failure impact. The project successfully isolated root causes for large segments of failures across the breadth of operations and management domains including network management, change controls, disaster recovery, backup/archiving, fault-tolerant architecture design, desktop management standards, production readiness verification, client/server technology, quality assurance, test lab operations, and other related domains. Client has reported the innovative approaches based on ARC (actionable root cause) has produced a factor of 5 improvement in systems reliability over 3 years.

Provided business process reengineering for a multinational computer company in the area of competitive analysis. Developed breakthrough methodologies to evaluate performance of computer applications across competitive vendor systems, based on process models of business applications and related systems. The client has adopted the methodologies to support its sales and marketing functions.

Conducted a performance analysis of a SUN/SYBASE-based system for mortgage-backed security trading. The analysis including instrumenting the SUN servers for performance measurement and translating the measurements into operational capacity forecasts, equipment acquisition plans, economic return-on-investment analyses and production schedules.

Conducted a long-range automation plan for the back office of a major trading exchange. The project designed the architecture of post-trade systems for efficiency and suitability for expansion. Other projects for the same client included benchmark testing and assessing the capabilities of the systems to (a) withstand periods of peak volume processing, (b) support global trading, and (c) support 24-hour trading. Another significant component was to assess the efficiency and effectiveness of the post trade host and network computer configurations.

Conducted an effectiveness review of a real time equity trading system for a major stock exchange. The environment consisted of a large number of Tandem VLX processors under the Guardian operating system. Scope, on behalf of the SEC and GAO, included (a) measurement and analysis of performance data to certify the capability of the system to withstand excessive trading volumes (i.e., "the billion share day"), and (b) developing capacity models to analyze alternative configurations, business process scenarios and related economic impacts (i.e., "circuit breaker" designs).

Developed standards for systems development and management in a distributed UNIX environment for a major financial company. In particular, developed the firm’s practice models for product release, version control, reliability management and process for baselining and progressing change.

Conducted an analysis and benchmark of a systems environment consisting of 100 SUN/SOLARIS/SYBASE servers. The analysis focused upon the production operation of the environment from a capacity and performance perspective. Instrumented the system using SUN NET MANAGER, VMSTAT, and other SUN performance tools. Identified sources of contention leading to breakthrough performance improvement.

Publications and
Presentations

Levy A.I., and Clark L. "Managing Innovation in the Development of e-Commerce Applications", invited speaker on behalf of Cisco, 2000
Levy, A.I., Presentation to the Board of Directors at In-Q-Tel, a venture capital company sponsored by the Intelligence Community, "Start up Operations Requirements and Business Plan" , 1999
Levy., A.I. "Best Practices in Internet Infrastructure Design and Operations Management", Special Presentations to/for Bell Atlantic, HP, Fannie Mae, AOL, Cisco, and others, NY, Colorado, San Francisco, Washington, DC, 1998-99
Levy, A. "Strategic Systems Planning and Re-engineering", Special Facilitated Worksession for the IT Strategic Planning Group of Mobil Corporation, 1996
Levy, A.I., "Software Quality Management: A Critical Ingredient to Technology Success," Technology Speaker Series, Washington, DC, 1995.
Levy, A.I., "Configuring an Image System: How Can You Be Sure It Will Work," Imaging '91 Conference, Sponsored by Boston University, Boston, MA, 1992.
Levy, A.I., "Downsizing: Moving to LANs," Live Television Broadcast on the Computer Channel, 1991.
Levy, A.I., and Duquette, F., "Downsizing: Capitalizing on the Price/Performance of Client/Server Computing," Conference on Enterprise of the Future Today, Tampa, FL, February 1991.
Levy, A.I., "Downsizing: Promise and Practice," Society for Information Management, NY, 1990.
Levy, A.I., "Capacity Analysis of UNIX Systems, "UniForum 1991.
Levy, A.I., "Performance Evaluation and Configuration Planning for UNIX Systems, "UniForum 1990.
Levy, A.I., "Intelligent Workstations and Distributed Systems Design," OMICRON Conference on I/T Strategy, Tampa, FL, 1989.
Levy, A.I., "Capacity Planning for Distributed Architectures", I/S Performance Management Conference, Arizona, March 1989.
Levy, A.I., "Expert Systems in the Data Center", CA User Conference, New Orleans, 1987.
Levy, A.I., "Performance Engineering", New England Computer Measurement Group, NY, 1987.
Levy, A.I. and Soder, V., "Performance Analysis During Applications Design," Proceedings of the Computer Measurement Group", Las Vegas, 1986. (Also selected for publication in the CMG Transactions Special Issue on Performance Management, Issue 58, 1987).
Levy, A and Vincent, D. "Software Engineering Economics: How to Plan, Manage, and Cost Large Scale Systems Development Projects" Institute of Software Engineering Tutorial, San Francisco, 1985.
Levy, A.I., "Applying Expert Systems ", Institute for Information Management Monterey, CA, 1986.
Levy, A.I., and Allen K.S., "The Role of Performance Engineering in Applications Development", Proceedings of the International Conference on Information Management", New Orleans, April 1985.
Levy, A.I., and Allen K.S., "A Case Study in Software Performance Engineering", Proceedings of the International Conference on Information Management", April 1984.
Levy, A.I., Buzen, Jeff., "Operational Analysis: an MVS Performance Perspective", Proceeding of the Computer Measurement Group, 1983
Levy, A.I., "Case Study in Workload Characterization", Proceedings of the Computer Measurement Users Group, Boston, 1982 (best paper award)

Education

MSc, Computer Science, University of Toronto, 1977
BSc, Applied Mathematics, McGill University (with Great Distinction), 1975

Allan Levy	Mr. Levy is accomplished in the areas of business process reengineering, systems performance, quality management, and software engineering. He has extensive experience in a) strategic systems planning at the Board-room level, b) systems design and implementation, c) program management, d) performance measurement, capacity modeling, benchmarking, and e) operations management. He has significant experience in telecommunications, financial services, and the intelligence and venture capital community.. Mr. Levy has served as an expert witness on several precedent setting cases of information technology cost/benefit, risk management, performance and operations. He has also developed strategic systems plans for business mergers including major telecommunications firms and banking institutions.
Employment History	Business Performance Management, Inc, President Renaissance Solutions Corp. VP, Performance Management Practice International Systems Services Corporation, CIO & VP, Rapid Development Center Fannie Mae, Director Software Performance Engineering, Consultant BGS Systems, Consultant
Professional and Business Experience	Was contracted to develop a business and operations plan for the start up of a one-of-a-kind venture capital company sponsored by the Director of the Intelligence Community. The firm links Silicon Valley top tier venture capitalists and advanced technology entrepreneurs, to the priority technology requirements of the CIA in such domains as information security, knowledge management and e-collaboration. Wrote the business plan for the firm. Worked with board members of the firm to operationalize the plan. Managed several of the firm's technology programs. For a major telecommunications firm was responsible for the risk management audit of a $1Billion systems development effort including billing, provisioning, order management, preventative maintenance, customer care and workforce automation. Scope included technical design, measurement of operational controls, performance, availability and quality. Subsequently, was chartered by the President of the firm to develop a strategic systems plan for the company, including development of surviving systems and transition plans for the integration of its merger partner, together forming a $26 Billion Teleco. Was also chartered to lead a performance certification project to benchmark the firm’s strategic billing and customer care systems to assure their performance, scalability and operational reliability. Provided business process reengineering services to the strategic planning committee of a multinational Fortune 100 company. Facilitated process improvements in the areas of strategic planning for the I/T services function. Achieved several process breakthroughs expected by the firm to yield order of magnitude improvements in the operation of the strategic planning function. For a major Telecommunications company, conducted a best practices benchmark of Internet Operations and Infrastructure Management. Formulated models of best practices in Internet reliability design, scalability, and responsiveness to change. Surveyed many of the largest e-commerce businesses to develop the best practice models, including, FannieMae, Verizon, Bell Atlantic Mobile, CISCO, eBAY, AOL, Electronic Arts and others. For a major provider of long-distance service, conducted a performance and capacity capabilities analysis of Customer Billing Systems. Was responsible for identifying operational performance improvements leading to $20 million savings annually. Such improvements were based on processor consolidations, operations automation, redefinition/reprioritization of workflow and work demand balancing. In addition, was responsible for developing new operational processes in the areas of performance and capacity management, workload forecasting, and equipment inventory acquisition. Was contracted by the world’s third largest financial institution, as a systems integration manager for a client/server Sybase- based trade accounting systems development. Managed a team of technical staff and user personnel to design/develop the system. Directed the project management, planning, performance and quality assurance programs. Was directly responsible for order of magnitude performance improvements in the design which led to breakthrough results in client productivity and business throughput ($50 million annually). Additionally, developed a program management process that was so comprehensive in its methods and metrics that it was subsequently adopted as the model for all projects at the firm. Provided litigation support and expert witness services to several leading law firms, in the areas of IT cost/benefit analysis, computer configuration and performance. Conducted in-depth analysis of systems integration failures for root cause and damage assessment in six different cases, including one landmark $1.4 Billion precedent setting case in best value law. Provided expert witness testimony in the US Courts in areas of cost/benefit, risk management, benchmarking, performance, and configuration selection. Responsible for managing teams of technical and legal specialists in order to support litigation. Program manager for a $10 million network communications project. Designed a network system generation procedure to compete with a functionally equivalent application through an order of magnitude improvement in run time. Achieved a design that proved to be 20 times faster, assuring market penetration of the product. Also, as acting director of quality assurance for the project, designed statistical quality control procedures to prove the system adhered to high reliability requirements. Developed automated development and test strategies which resulted in savings of $2 million. For a major computer vendor, conducted computer configuration, measurement and benchmarking studies to support a proposal for 250 computer installations nationwide. Was provided complete responsibility for managing a specialized benchmark team of ten of the client's senior technical engineers. Conducted controlled benchmark measurements to certify performance capabilities of proposed configurations under conditions of projected and stressed loads. Also conducted analyses and testing to support optimization of the relational data base design. Provided quality management on several major systems integration projects for a large-scale financial service and product company. Interfaced with senior management to develop TQM programs. Set up programs for business process reengineering, statistical quality control, and test automation. Developed breakthrough performance innovations in test coverage analysis, software reliability, and cost estimation modeling. Performed business process reengineering on the design of order entry workflow procedures for a multinational manufacturing firm. Developed process improvements which resulted in breakthrough improvements in product shipment time to market, as well as incremental improvement in workload management and staff efficiencies. Conducted an I/T operations process improvement project for a major financial services firm. The scope included analysis of all aspects of client/ server and network operations. The objective of the project was to define an implementation plan to yield a factor of two reduction in production failures, with commensurate reductions in operational cost, risk, and breadth of failure impact. The project successfully isolated root causes for large segments of failures across the breadth of operations and management domains including network management, change controls, disaster recovery, backup/archiving, fault-tolerant architecture design, desktop management standards, production readiness verification, client/server technology, quality assurance, test lab operations, and other related domains. Client has reported the innovative approaches based on ARC (actionable root cause) has produced a factor of 5 improvement in systems reliability over 3 years. Provided business process reengineering for a multinational computer company in the area of competitive analysis. Developed breakthrough methodologies to evaluate performance of computer applications across competitive vendor systems, based on process models of business applications and related systems. The client has adopted the methodologies to support its sales and marketing functions. Conducted a performance analysis of a SUN/SYBASE-based system for mortgage-backed security trading. The analysis including instrumenting the SUN servers for performance measurement and translating the measurements into operational capacity forecasts, equipment acquisition plans, economic return-on-investment analyses and production schedules. Conducted a long-range automation plan for the back office of a major trading exchange. The project designed the architecture of post-trade systems for efficiency and suitability for expansion. Other projects for the same client included benchmark testing and assessing the capabilities of the systems to (a) withstand periods of peak volume processing, (b) support global trading, and (c) support 24-hour trading. Another significant component was to assess the efficiency and effectiveness of the post trade host and network computer configurations. Conducted an effectiveness review of a real time equity trading system for a major stock exchange. The environment consisted of a large number of Tandem VLX processors under the Guardian operating system. Scope, on behalf of the SEC and GAO, included (a) measurement and analysis of performance data to certify the capability of the system to withstand excessive trading volumes (i.e., "the billion share day"), and (b) developing capacity models to analyze alternative configurations, business process scenarios and related economic impacts (i.e., "circuit breaker" designs). Developed standards for systems development and management in a distributed UNIX environment for a major financial company. In particular, developed the firm’s practice models for product release, version control, reliability management and process for baselining and progressing change. Conducted an analysis and benchmark of a systems environment consisting of 100 SUN/SOLARIS/SYBASE servers. The analysis focused upon the production operation of the environment from a capacity and performance perspective. Instrumented the system using SUN NET MANAGER, VMSTAT, and other SUN performance tools. Identified sources of contention leading to breakthrough performance improvement.
Publications and Presentations	Levy A.I., and Clark L. "Managing Innovation in the Development of e-Commerce Applications", invited speaker on behalf of Cisco, 2000 Levy, A.I., Presentation to the Board of Directors at In-Q-Tel, a venture capital company sponsored by the Intelligence Community, "Start up Operations Requirements and Business Plan" , 1999 Levy., A.I. "Best Practices in Internet Infrastructure Design and Operations Management", Special Presentations to/for Bell Atlantic, HP, Fannie Mae, AOL, Cisco, and others, NY, Colorado, San Francisco, Washington, DC, 1998-99 Levy, A. "Strategic Systems Planning and Re-engineering", Special Facilitated Worksession for the IT Strategic Planning Group of Mobil Corporation, 1996 Levy, A.I., "Software Quality Management: A Critical Ingredient to Technology Success," Technology Speaker Series, Washington, DC, 1995. Levy, A.I., "Configuring an Image System: How Can You Be Sure It Will Work," Imaging '91 Conference, Sponsored by Boston University, Boston, MA, 1992. Levy, A.I., "Downsizing: Moving to LANs," Live Television Broadcast on the Computer Channel, 1991. Levy, A.I., and Duquette, F., "Downsizing: Capitalizing on the Price/Performance of Client/Server Computing," Conference on Enterprise of the Future Today, Tampa, FL, February 1991. Levy, A.I., "Downsizing: Promise and Practice," Society for Information Management, NY, 1990. Levy, A.I., "Capacity Analysis of UNIX Systems, "UniForum 1991. Levy, A.I., "Performance Evaluation and Configuration Planning for UNIX Systems, "UniForum 1990. Levy, A.I., "Intelligent Workstations and Distributed Systems Design," OMICRON Conference on I/T Strategy, Tampa, FL, 1989. Levy, A.I., "Capacity Planning for Distributed Architectures", I/S Performance Management Conference, Arizona, March 1989. Levy, A.I., "Expert Systems in the Data Center", CA User Conference, New Orleans, 1987. Levy, A.I., "Performance Engineering", New England Computer Measurement Group, NY, 1987. Levy, A.I. and Soder, V., "Performance Analysis During Applications Design," Proceedings of the Computer Measurement Group", Las Vegas, 1986. (Also selected for publication in the CMG Transactions Special Issue on Performance Management, Issue 58, 1987). Levy, A and Vincent, D. "Software Engineering Economics: How to Plan, Manage, and Cost Large Scale Systems Development Projects" Institute of Software Engineering Tutorial, San Francisco, 1985. Levy, A.I., "Applying Expert Systems ", Institute for Information Management Monterey, CA, 1986. Levy, A.I., and Allen K.S., "The Role of Performance Engineering in Applications Development", Proceedings of the International Conference on Information Management", New Orleans, April 1985. Levy, A.I., and Allen K.S., "A Case Study in Software Performance Engineering", Proceedings of the International Conference on Information Management", April 1984. Levy, A.I., Buzen, Jeff., "Operational Analysis: an MVS Performance Perspective", Proceeding of the Computer Measurement Group, 1983 Levy, A.I., "Case Study in Workload Characterization", Proceedings of the Computer Measurement Users Group, Boston, 1982 (best paper award)
Education	MSc, Computer Science, University of Toronto, 1977 BSc, Applied Mathematics, McGill University (with Great Distinction), 1975