Developed and strategically positioned “Business Technology” as a centralized global shared service center. Collaborated closely with CLevel to support the business case to increase IT maturity from level 2 (proactive) to level 3/4 (Services / Value) across the group. Centralized cost allocation and budget planning. Shifted priority from “run” to “grow and transform” (RGT model) to accelerate the business strategy. Reorganized the IT department into 4 subfunctions.Support:• Empowered the team to focus and implement employee self-service capabilities as a key priority.IT Business Partnering:• Recruited and upskilled senior project managers / analysts to build relationships with key functions to consult on automation possibilities and hold workshops to identify new initiatives.Tech Solutions:• Reorganized a team of professionals to foster close collaboration between Application Managers, Integration Engineers, and Infrastructure/DevOps to efficiently realize business requirements collected by the IT Business Partnering Team. Following ITIL Service Value chain best practices to Design, Obtain/Build, Deliver & Support in one process.• Significantly increased operational efficiency by optimizing e2e processes through close collaboration with stakeholders building automations & integrations between critical SaaS / cloud-based applications.• Led the evaluation, implementation, and maintenance of the Enterprise Application Landscape consisting of core systems like (SAP S/4hana Cloud, Coupa, Salesforce, Planful, DocuSign, Azure Entra, Google Workspace, Slack, LeanIX, Jira, Confluence, and many more).• Overseen the technical workstreams of 4 M&A projects from due diligence to integration and change management.Data / Insights: • Recruited Data Engineers to establish the foundation to drive data initiatives to empower decision makers across the group with reliable insights. First project successfully delivered was a BI Dashboard reflecting critical business KPIs.

Focused on increasing IT maturity in key areas from a software and people perspective.• Designed and implemented a comprehensive IT strategy encompassing governance, compliance, standardization, and quality in alignment with industry standard best practices like ITIL, Cobit, ISO.• Implemented SoPs and tools to significantly strengthen IT Security to handle 100+ applications and 1000+ endpoints.• Established companywide standards and best practices for Work Management. Lead the Change Management to educate on Scrum in business context and Atlassian Toolset (Confluence, Jira) to drive adoption.• Implemented clear roles, responsibilities, and KPIs for streamlined internal and cross-departmental workflows.• Fostered collaboration, transforming a toxic operation and development relationship into an effective DevOps culture.• In close collaboration with the Director Development led the lift and shift of ESLs online b2c business infrastructure from a co-located datacenter to IaaS on AWS.

• Managed IT activities of ESL. IT Event, IT Office and IT Online Operations.• Designed, developed, and maintained the IT Infrastructure for hosting all company online b2c products using open-source software.• Built a provisioning system to horizontally scale Debian based frontend diskless webserver tier using lvs, keepalived, nginx, a lot of bash scripting and puppet (later ansible, terraform).• Executed a disaster recovery of the online infrastructure after a complete loss of the iSCSI based SAN within 22hours from an offsite backup.• Managed and operated end-to-end processes of IT event related activities to deliver a flawless onsite and online experience (Anti-DDos, L2/L3 Networks)

Designed, built, and operated a “social network” for my hometown before Facebook became popular in Germany. Peaked at 25k MAU. Great learning experience about scaling infrastructure from a one-server monolith to a distributed system. Exit to a local newspaper.