John Held, Technology Strategy.John Held is a Senior Director with Alvarez & Marsal Performance Improvement in Chicago, focused on technology strategy development and execution. John has led initiatives including carve-out, organizational assessment and cost-cutting, process redesign and standardization and technology re-engineering and re-platforming.His primary technology areas of concentration include implementing Agile processes within large organizations, benchmarking Digital capabilities, standardizing integration and data security processes and implementing capabilities such as APIs, reporting, analytics and cloud migrationWith more than 20 years of consulting, product management and analytics experience, Mr. Held has helped define and launch commercial enterprise software products, developed technology strategy for global organizations and helped lead implementation projects for BI, predictive analytics and real-time systems. Before joining A&M, he worked for IBM Global Services Advanced Analytics and Optimization in for North American healthcare and telecom companies. At IBM, John helped define integration and architecture for a real-time recommendation system for a major telecom's website and designed integration to advertising-exchange platforms. Additional work included conducting social network analysis pilots and evaluating Hadoop versus traditional analytic architectures.His prior experience includes senior product management roles applications such as IBM/SPSS Modeler, a predictive analytics workbench; Zilliant, a pricing science application and SAVO, a social platform for sales collaboration.Mr. Held earned a bachelor’s degree in Economics from Creighton University. He is a TOGAF-certified enterprise architect, holds a Pennebaker certificate direct marketing analytics and is a CFA Level III candidate. He also holds Amazon Web Services technical and business accreditations. John is a co-author on pending patents 20150163206 & 20150310188