Mark Laws, Mba. Email & Phone Number

As CIO of Carlson Marketing Solution, I am accountable for the successful separation post-acquisition by CORA which includes a full technology retooling and stand-up across both client facing and internal technology services.

Toronto, Ontario, Ca

During my time as CIO for Kognitiv I successfully lead the delivery of a truly global transformation programme that saw the creation of a Centre Of Excellence in Sri Lanka, almost from the ground up, which allowed us to successfully insource both Client Engineering & Service Delivery, relocate Development Centers from North & South America and establish our internal SecOps capabilities. This transformation was achieved on top of the day job of being accountable for the full technology delivery of our platforms to live clients located from Auckland to Seattle, execution of our ambitious product roadmap both functionally and non-functionally and finally, the provisioning of Corporate IT functions that allows the organisation to operate smoothly and efficiently.Additionally, during the first half of 2024 I lead the Technology function in a major divesture that saw the Kognitiv Enterprise Loyalty capability successfully acquired by CORA Group and become Carlson Marketing Solutions.

Toronto, Ontario, Ca

Post-merger strategic reviews promoted to SVP and accountable for technology delivery of the organization PaaS vision for Loyalty, Rewards and Data. This technology delivery scope includes Architecture, Engineering, DevOps and QA which means I am strategically accountable for the Designing, Building and Certification of Kognitiv’s PaaS capabilities for Loyalty, Rewards and Data. Leading a distributed team of 100+ across UK, USA, Canada, India, Sri Lanka and Argentina to orchestrate a team that is consistently doing the basics brilliantly and driving continuous simplification and improvements.

Toronto, Ontario, Ca

Following the merger between Aimia and Kognitiv I continue as in the role as Global VP Architecture, Engineering & IT Services. Post merger I am additionally accountable for the strategic creation and execution of the organisations convergence and simplification programmes aligned the PaaS vision in Loyalty and Rewards product sets.

Toronto, Ontario, Ca

In August 2017 building upon both the responsibilities and scope of my role as Global VP of Engineering & IT Services I added accountability of Aimia’s Architecture function along with Aimia’s Analytical Insights engineering function to the role. This meant the scope of role increase significantly to include the leadership of the Architecture team and the accountable to ensure Aimia’ s product set, including both Loyalty and Insights platforms, aligned to TOGAF principals and had strong and considered target architectures aligned to critical business outcomes.The addition of the Analytical & Insights Engineering function saw the engineering practice grow by another 5 scrums teams at the peak of development as I lead the execution of the Aimia flagship engineering investment program to replace its legacy big-data retail analytical solution to a new market leading platform that delivers an outstanding experience and pace to insight critical in this market place. This critically delivered in Jan 2018 when the first legacy successfully migrated to the new platform with high client satisfaction and a 100% increase in adoption since launch. Execution of the product road map continues to support the full migration of the legacy client and additional critical market differentiating features and functions whilst ensure ease of serviceability via non-functional requirements delivery.

Toronto, Ontario, Ca

Primary responsible for the empowering AIMIA’s Global Product strategy by providing strategic leadership and direction in both Engineering and IT Service Management capabilities to drive the quality, experience and value for money delivery across and the Global Product set which are deployed to 35 clients in 15 different countries from the east coast of Australia to the west cost of USA.This is achieved by leading, managing and coaching a large distributed and diverse team, circa 150, of technical reports consisting of permanent, contractor staff and strategic partners with a budget in excess of £20m.From an Engineering point of view: Responsible for the full systems development life cycle management of Aimia's global products by designing and formalising the engineering and production processes. From an IT Service Management point of view: Responsible for the Strategic design, definition and orchestration of the full Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) Service Management functions for Aimia's global products.

Toronto, Ontario, Ca

Leadership of a global Services & Operations team of over 50 people across Application, Infrastructure and Testing services. Responsible for the full ITIL v3 lifecycle of Aimia’s global product set from Service Strategy, Design, and Transition through to Operations and Continuous Service Improvement. These global products support Aimia’s expertise’s in Customer Loyalty Management, Analytics & Insights and Customer Engagement. Clients of these global products come from Grocery Retail, Fashion Retail, Banking, Telecom and Car Rental industries who operate in markets from New Zealand to the west coast of the USA. In 2015 successfully delivered the Services Turnaround transformation programme within the Analytics and Insight product. This programme saw the client’s service experience increase 70% from December 2014 through to December 2015 and the volume of P1 service incidents reduced by 48% in 2015. This was achieved by focusing on strong ITIL Problem Management to eliminate repeat events and proactive health management, enhanced monitoring and alerting, improved services transitioning processes coupled with strong service governance that ensured focus within the team and clients.Additionally in 2015 successfully orchestrated the service strategy, design and launch of Aimia’s loyalty management and customer engagement product’s in North American and Asia Pacific. All launches where execute to a high level of quality and positive client experiences. Positive launches were based upon implementation of a mature “Acceptance into Service” process which has also supported the embedding a strong service culture.

London, England, Gb

For just over 6 years, in addition to my day job, I was active member of the Advisory Board for the Corporate IT Forum. This role supported the drive to increased experience and value of membership within the Corporate IT Forum (www.corporateitforum.com) who provide a confidential, vendor-free environment in which IT professionals could exchange practical and strategic intelligence across a membership exceeding 150 large corporate businesses with over €1,000 billion in revenue, €35 billion annual expenditure on IT products and services and who collectively employ 100,000 people in IT.

London, Gb

Reporting to the CIO and responsible for the:Service Management of DMG::Media’s 75 line of business applications across Editorial, Publishing, Advertising, CRM, Direct to Consumer and Back Office business functions across both print and digital publication channels. These applications support the production of 31 individual newspapers in a week as well as recently deployed direct to consumer applications.Implemented Service Transformation vision and strategy for Application Services and delivered against resulting in:- Clear governance models from Customers to Vendors.- Proactive Health Management of critical services leading to controlled and confident service execution in high stress business events reducing in crisis situations.- Delivery of a “Service2Operations” capability for smoother transition of projects into steady state service.- Outstanding Demand management capabilities ensuring that the high value commercial and service enhancing request are executed.- Enhanced Incident Management with a 75% reduction in volume 60% reduction time to resolution driven by strong Knowledge Management & Empowerment of upstream service functions as well as a real Problem focus culture taking out true root causes.Leadership of the IT wide customer experience and simplification programme, called “make IT easy”. This 2012 objective delivered:- Real enhancement to the Remote Access Services where 8 different entry points were reduced to one customer focused portal.- Increased coverage of Single Sign On across the most used business applications.- A “make IT easy” portal delivering advice and guidance on getting the best out the IT investment.- Enhanced Self-Service capabilities with a single implementation (Spam Management) eliminating 1000 request from the helpdesk.True Contract management across 40 vendors to a value of £4m.Career Development for a team of 38 FTE’s.

Brentford, Middlesex, Gb

I was responsible for leading Commercial IT’s Application Remediation Programme, from inception and establishing the strategic direction through to development and execution of the individual supporting projects. This programme was created in October 2009 to support GSK enterprise migration from Lotus Notes Mail and Collaboration environments to the Microsoft BPOS service. The scope of this programme specifically includes remediation of 1421 individual applications in 62 global markets in the following regions: Asia Pacific, Europe, MENA/SSA and Latina American. The programme is also focused on delivering strong simplification and standardisation and is targeted to achieve a 95% simplification rating by reducing the application portfolio from 1421 to around 75. To execute this remediation 16 individual projects have been defined that remediate the 1421 applications within the portfolio. These projects align to the strategic intentions in order of preference of Retirement, Archiving, leveraging Enterprise & Global Standards, new functionality delivered by SharePoint and finally Recoding.As of December 2010 - The programme had exceeded the simplification target with the application portfolio forecasted to reduced by 95.5% and had remediated 371 applications.

Brentford, Middlesex, Gb

Responsible for the:Full ITIL Service Management of 250 applications that support GSK’s mission critical financial business processes from the generation of End of Year financial reports, to daily treasury transactions of £350m, to payment of over 600,000 invoices annually to GSK’s UK suppliers, to ensuring Sarbanes Oxley compliance. Delivery of application development across the 250 applications leading to an increase in the number of incident free implementations from 82% in 2007 to 95% in 2008 and also a reduction in implementations delivered late.Leadership and career development of 20 full time employees resulting in the transformation of a team of average operational analysts to a team of empowered proactive service focused analysts.Management and enhancement of off-shore support capabilities via 4 off-shore contracts, with 2 separate vendors to the value of £1m, who support 74 applications with 40 off-shore full time partners. This is an increase to capability and coverage from only 3 applications supported off-shore in 2006.Proactive value management of 67 support contracts, totalling £2m annually, leading to an increased service performance in incident management and reduction in contract costs (down £400k from 2006).ITIL, Six Sigma and Behavioural Change programme externally recognised by the Corporate Infrastructure Forum (www.tif.co.uk) in their 2008 Real IT Awards program within the Service Improvement category.

Brentford, Middlesex, Gb

Responsible for the development of strategic vision, intent and execution plans of GSK’s global communications services including Voice, Collaboration, Conferencing and Business to Business (B2B). Successfully delivered CIO endorsed strategies for Voice over IP (VoIP), Voicemail and Business to Business.Successfully achieved Six Sigma Green Belt certification via exam and project. Six Sigma project increased Quality (from an average score of 40% to 87%) and reduced variation for the Incident Management communications to stakeholders process.

Brentford, Middlesex, Gb

Performed as Senior Project Manager to the Collaboration Champions initiative which drove the implementation and uptake of collaboration tools cross the global corporation. Success included the delivery of a Collaboration marketing campaign(from mail drops to exhibition stand), which was successfully showcased at the 2004 GSK Leadership Conference. Drove & coordinated service improvements programs identified by the customer board ensuring that both business needs and technical capabilities were aligned and able to run as a standard service. Drove adoption of collaborative tools (Sametime, QuickPlace, ConnectWare and Groove) as well as the Audio, Video and Web Conferencing from 5,000 globally to 60,000 globally, via strong actionable metrics.

Brentford, Middlesex, Gb

Performed as Problem Manager for Global Infrastructure incidents from occurrence through to service restoration and ultimately root cause elimination.Delivered a Service Prediction Model. Model applied against the implementation of strategic global manufacturing solution and identified problem sections of the service chain and infrastructure improvements based on their value to the organisation.Implemented a "Global Infrastructure Performance Metric Reporting" process enabling twelve departments of Global Services to record key performance and volumetric indicators in a single recording and reporting website.

Brentford, Middlesex, Gb

Head Developer and Project Manager - UK wide client server database development project for facilitation of the Back Up Media Management for 400 UK servers, across 14 geographical locations with a user base of 50. The project completed within schedule and improved the success rate of back-ups by 6%. Project Manager - GlaxoWellcome Operational Maturity Model Improvement Project. This project was based around Accenture’s Maturity Model. I managed a project team of 6 direct reports. Scope targeted Back Up and Recovery, Change Control, Performance Management, Release Management and System Monitoring. Significant improvements delivered across all areas.

Mba

Ba Hons, Business Computing