Dale Ward Email & Phone Number

West Des Moines, Ia, Us

Des Moines, Iowa Area

Principal Global Investors is a diversified global asset management firm and a member of the Principal Financial Group®. Our investment capabilities encompass a range of equity, fixed income and real estate investments, as well as specialized expertise in currency management, asset allocation, stable value management and other structured investment strategies. As part of the IT Management team, I lead the application development areas that support the investment boutiques Front Office capabilities. Front Office solutions are a combination of purchased solutions (e.g. Charles River, Bloomberg, Factset), custom built solutions for research, and customized solutions created in partnerships with external and internal resources. PGI IT assists with hosting, working on custom builds, and working with boutiques to achieve scale with vendors. Prior to joining Principal’s Global Investment business unit, I served in other IT leadership roles within Principal Financial Group in the Retirement Services area, and the central infrastructure area of the company. I’ve led application development teams leveraging Java and COBOL to support applications for 401(k) participants and administrators, and have led the shared infrastructure teams supporting our J2EE WebSphere application serving environment and our Web Infrastructure team.

Royco Hotels & Resorts in partnership with Chartwell Leisure managed 130 hotels in Canada and the United States. In January of 1997, the partners decided to relocate all of the head office administration for the hotel operations to Calgary. At that time they created the position of Director MIS to provide the strategy, implementation and operation of information systems for the Canadian and United States operations. In this role I supervised a staff of 14 located in two data centers, Calgary and San Diego. The technical environment included an AS/400 based system in the US, and a UNIX and WindowsNT environment in Canada. In May of 1998 the US portion of the company was sold to a US based property management firm. As a result, the strategy to consolidate operations in Calgary was changed. While my role was secure in leading the Canadian portion of the IT operations, I decided the scope was no longer the challenge I was looking for and decided to pursue opportunities in Iowa.

In this position I had overall responsibility for the leadership, strategy, design, and operation of the corporate information systems for the 16th largest city in Canada. My division provided central support to the program areas of the City, and included a staff of 43, with an operating budget of 3.3 million, and a 1.25 million dollar capital budget. To meet the business needs of the civic administration we operated a municipal area network of over 1,000 personal computers. The exciting challenge of this position was to deliver effective technology deployment and utilization for a large and diverse organization, in a limited funding and staffing situation. The specific technical environment at the City included; 7 IBM RS/6000 servers running Oracle, Informix and Ingres database platforms. The network operating systems included both Novell and WindowsNT.

SaskEnergy, and its subsidiary, TransGas, provide natural gas distribution, transportation and storage services for the Western Canadian market. As Manager Information Systems, I had responsibility for the technical support and development of the corporate computer infrastructure. My team developed a wide area network of over 600 personal computers connected in 20 different locations across the province. Utilizing key products such as WindowsNT, Microsoft Office, Lotus cc:Mail and Lotus Notes, our group provided an effective office automation environment. The key application systems platforms included an IBM AS/400 mid-range system, and UNIX based servers running Oracle and Sybase database applications. Specific projects at SaskEnergy included; implementation of the corporate electronic mail systems, a document imaging system, wireless communication links for remote local area network, Internet firewall, and participation on the corporate strategic planning committee.

Mba, Business Administration And Management, General

Bachelor Of Arts (B.A.), Business Administration And Management, General