Howard Holben - Information Technology Professional

Howard has had a dynamic management and technical career leading multi-national world-class
organizations through large-scale and challenging technology solutions for over 23 years.

He is a technically sophisticated and business-savvy professional with a pioneering career reflecting strong leadership qualifications coupled with vision and dedicated leadership. His skills include the deployment of key IS/IT technologies including system design and integration, client server networks, desktop and database management systems, help desk architecture and data center management.

Howard has a diverse industry experience in both the private and public sectors that includes chemicals, manufacturing, publishing, entertainment, communications, banking, pharmaceuticals, financial, real estate, associations, non-profits and even The United Nations.

He has over sixteen years’ experience with a Fortune 100 company, IBM, plus another seven years with other industry leaders that includes Imperial Chemical Industries, Lucent Technologies, Rhone-Poulenc NA Chemicals, Schering-Plough, Astra Zeneca, First Manhattan Consulting, Time Warner and Merrill Lynch, among others.

Strategic & Tactical Planning: Howard partners with senior executives to design and plan complex global technology initiatives, project implementation strategies, organizational change management, communications, training programs, disaster recovery and business continuity programs.

Client Relations / Mediation & Consensus Building: He gains the customer’s confidence through extensive mediations between multiple layers of end users, management and board directors. In this way, he builds strong relationships throughout the organization to insure deliverables.

Team Development & Training: Howard is an accomplished leader experienced in building motivated and productive cross-functional information technology teams that can deliver multiple concurrent projects worldwide. He has proven his ability to drive focused teams to performance excellence within a rapidly changing industry.

Project Management: Howard has a superior record of delivering simultaneous large-scale, mission-critical projects on time and under budget consistent with company’s strategic plan. His extensive qualifications include all facets of project life-cycle management, from initial feasibility analysis and conceptual design through documentation, implementation, user training, quality review and enhancement.

Technology Initiatives: Howard is a creative and results-driven expert in the design, development and delivery of cost-effective,
high-performance technology solutions. He is an expert design architect and systems integrator with extensive experience building new systems, leading implementation and migrating information systems and applications.

He is widely recognized for his entrepreneurial spirit, integrity and strong commitment to corporate stability through attention to critical systems and processes impacted by technology.
He has excellent collaboration and presentation skills among executives, senior- and mid-level managers, customers and end users.
His strong leadership philosophy is clearly dedicated to cross-functional problem solving with an eye toward the accomplishment of enterprise-wide goals.
He has strong troubleshooting capabilities and has the experience and ability to reshape infrastructures, overhaul outdated processes or procedures, as well as promote new programs and concepts.
He is well known as a reliable, hard-working and tenacious hands-on leader committed to getting the job done. He maintains focus on achieving bottom-line results while formulating and implementing advanced technology and business solutions to meet a diversity of needs.
Howard is a results-oriented, analytical troubleshooter and problem solver that has a unique blend of technical expertise, business acumen and inter-personal people skills.

Howard began his career as an entrepreneur promoting records for several major record labels. During this venture he quickly gravitated toward the technology aspects of the business. In 1988 he decided to pursue a career in technology and left the record industry. After attending night school for 18 months, he progressed rapidly through a series of increasingly complex and large-scale projects with increased responsibilities.

Over the past nineteen years, he has been a contractor/consultant for IBM and their clients, and has been given full autonomy as project manager – a position rarely held by a contractor. IBM has entrusted him to manage global initiatives for their major clients, and he has consistently been recognized for his diplomacy and unique ability to collaborate across all lines of the organization to resolve technology implementation issues, as well as political and inter-personal conflicts.

He successfully executed $70 million North American Global Standardization Initiative for IBM’s customer, Imperial Chemical Industries (ICI), comprised of 5 distinct corporations with 38 sites throughout the US, Canada, Mexico and Puerto Rico.
He led a critical Y2K migration initiative for one of ICI’s corporations with 13 locations throughout the US, Canada and Mexico within an extremely limited timeframe.
He mediated contractual technology support issues between Lucent and IBM.
He led due diligence on over 6500 Lucent servers worldwide and proposed remediations, testing and contingency plans for all Lucent’s locations.
Subsequent to termination of Rhone-Poulenc NA Chemicals customer support contract with IBM, Howard was asked to lead the transition back to a Rhone-Poulenc in-house technology management system.
As Senior Network Systems Engineer and Data Center Manager, oversaw Rhone-Poulenc’s $13 million customer support operation.
Led $10M project that hardened IBM Headquarters Data Center to CA2 Level.