Robert A. "Rob" Strickland is a technology and mobile executive, currently a co-founder and investor of The Digital Nexus, a professional management consulting firm.

Career highlights

Frank Batten Frank Batten (February 11, 1927 – September 10, 2009) was a co-founder of the first nationwide, 24-hour cable weather channel, The Weather Channel. His media company, Landmark Media Enterprises, once owned nine daily newspapers, more t ...

and Jeffrey L. Cruikshank, in their book “The Weather Channel: the improbable rise of a media phenomenon” (Harvard Business Press; 1st edition (May 2, 2002) p. 206) referred to Rob's hire as a key event in determining the strategy and subsequent success of The Weather Channel as a major source of weather information on the

Internet The Internet (or internet) is the global system of interconnected computer networks that uses the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP) to communicate between networks and devices. It is a ''internetworking, network of networks'' that consists ...

: “we hired

n January 1998 N, or n, is the fourteenth letter in the Latin alphabet, used in the modern English alphabet, the alphabets of other western European languages and others worldwide. Its name in English is ''en'' (pronounced ), plural ''ens''. History ...

a chief information officer, Rob Strickland, who initiated a serious and successful push into the digital age.” At Echostar, Rob was involved in helping to automate

call center A call centre ( Commonwealth spelling) or call center ( American spelling; see spelling differences) is a managed capability that can be centralised or remote that is used for receiving or transmitting a large volume of enquiries by telephone ...

s by creating a voice recognition system. In addition, Rob renegotiated a large billing contract with CSG, Inc. for Echostar. While at T-Mobile USA, Rob led the effort to use

service-oriented architecture In software engineering, service-oriented architecture (SOA) is an architectural style that focuses on discrete services instead of a monolithic design. By consequence, it is also applied in the field of software design where services are provided ...

which enabled T-Mobile USA to revamp its

customer service Customer service is the assistance and advice provided by a company to those people who buy or use its products or services. Each industry requires different levels of customer service, but in the end, the idea of a well-performed service is that ...

experience. The project, dubbed “OpenSpan,” provided T-Mobile USA's customer service representatives with one view of all the underlying systems that are used to complete a transaction. With a convenient search feature, call center employees significantly improved the speed of access of information that they needed, without unnecessarily lengthening a service call. Call response times were reduced by 13.75 seconds across call centers, while new representatives trained on the integrated system had a call response time of up to 22 seconds better than reps trained on the previous system. The results were expected to save $260 million annually. As a consequence of this project, Rob and the T-Mobile USA IT department were honored with a CIO 100 Award in 2009. Robert Strickland, CIO of T-Mobile, which uses SAP and Business Objects applications and NetWeaver middleware, sees promise in the model. "If you can have a universal SOA layer that allows you to connect everyone to that common bus and defines how you expose those services," Strickland said, "that may ultimately give us the best flexibility. It would let us order things à la carte and connect them seamlessly." He continued, "such cloud computing efforts are becoming more practical as broadband speed and connectivity options improve."

Awards

# CIO 100 Award, 2009. # Computerworld CIO 100 Premier honoree, 2008. # Information Week Top 500, ranked #16, 2007. (Link Missing now) # CIO 100 Award, 2006. # Bachelor of Arts degree in mathematics from

Brandeis University Brandeis University is a Private university, private research university in Waltham, Massachusetts. Founded in 1948 as a nonsectarian, non-sectarian, coeducational institution sponsored by the Jews, Jewish community, Brandeis was established on t ...

.- A CIO before the CIO: A Profile of Robert A. Strickland, Senior VP and CIO of T-Mobile, USA (March 18, 2010)
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References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Strickland, Rob American businesspeople Living people Chief information officers Year of birth missing (living people)