ATX Advisory Services—a consulting firm that works collaboratively with mid-market businesses to define strategy and align people, processes, and technology—today announced the hiring of Mike Kennie as Chief Technology Officer. Kennie will lead the ATX Business Intelligence and Analytics Practice.
“As an experienced, senior business intelligence architect, Mike is perfectly aligned for this role,” says Mark DiGiovanni, a Founding Partner at ATX. “He brings over 20 years of experience designing, developing and implementing large, enterprise-scale transaction and analytical data platforms.
Brendan Abbott, also an ATX Founding Partner, comments on the hiring of Kennie by saying, “Mike will contribute greatly to helping us accomplish our mission, which ever since we launched ATX six years ago has always been focused on helping clients plan and deliver on their IT initiatives.”
Prior to joining ATX, Kennie was manager of data and analytics architecture for Amadeus Hospitality. He built and led teams of highly-motivated professionals responsible for the delivery of travel and hospitality-related data platforms for small independents as well as large fortune 500 companies, servicing thousands of users globally. ATX clients who are looking to achieve their business intelligence and analytics initiatives will benefit from Kennie’s in-depth knowledge and skills around building, deploying and operating data integration solutions that span a wide and varied landscape of application data sources.
ATX decided to launch the Business Intelligence and Analytics Practice and tap into Kennie’s expertise to help solve a prevailing challenge that many businesses face when it comes to BI: They simply have too much data to manage and lack the necessary tools required to analyze the data effectively.
True analysis requires extracting data from multiple systems and transforming disparate data into a single, common format. Businesses then need to load the data into a storage platform designed to simplify access and effectively scale to meet all standard and custom reporting needs. This in turn enables managers to make timely, better-informed, strategic decisions.
“Mike understands how to leverage leading technologies designed to bring siloed data together while assuring that effective quality assurance standards are being met,” DiGiovanni adds. “As a result, businesses get tighter management over departmental and project budgets as well as improved management over resource costs. By aggregating data from sources such as payroll, job-cost systems, inventory, IoT networks, and sales forecasts, managers can also project what they will need to fulfill future customer orders, what the costs will be, and the profit margins to expect.”
When integrated with back-end systems, BI solutions can deliver all this information in real time. That means managers can react to business results when there’s still time to correct problem situations—not one month later when it may be too late.
“BI also gives you the ability to establish benchmark metrics against which actual performance can be compared,” Kennie emphasizes. “That way, you can see if you actually moved the company in the right direction during the past month, quarter and year; you can also look ahead to forecast what will happen in the future.”
Another key benefit of the leading BI tools are dashboards that can be tailored according to the information needed by individual roles within a company. This includes views for the CEO and the CFO as well as business unit managers and project managers. The dashboards give each person their own unique view of high-level KPIs, providing actionable insights along with the ability to drill down into the details behind each KPI to investigate anomalies.
“The high-level and detailed dashboards are very easy to interpret in comparison to hard-to-read spreadsheets—where it’s difficult to discern what is important and often require end-user interaction to manipulate the information through sorting and other error-prone, manual routines,” Kennie says. “By contrast, dashboards handle all this behind the scenes while providing the self-service type of interactivity that gains you access to all the information you need—with just a couple of clicks.”
In evaluating the impact Kennie will have on ATX clients, Abbot says, “Our clients will find Mike to be an ‘all-around great guy’ who is easy to work with and a nice addition to our ATX team. Throughout his career, he has been a team player who helps everyone around him—from clients to colleagues and business partners. We’re confident Mike can help our clients too, with any business intelligence and analysis initiatives they may have.”
ATX was founded by Brendan Abbott and Mark DiGiovanni, two experienced management consultants looking to deliver high-value services to mid-sized businesses. By bringing together a comprehensive set of accounting, technology, and executive advisory services, ATX delivers a breadth of services typically only seen at large firms but which are managed directly by the partners of the firm. ATX serves clients in the Northeast through operations based out of Boston and Maine, and the company’s mission is to provide a comprehensive set of services to clients looking for business partners as part of their long-term evolution. ATX strives to help clients achieve greater efficiencies and productivity through leading operating practices, modern technology systems, and sound advice.
