Experience
Oct 2018 | Present
VP, Principal Manager Unified Communications
Directs enterprise Voice/Telephony, Contact-Center, Unified Communications, and Audio-Visual teams, steering strategy, architecture, and regulatory compliance for 6,000+ employees across 250+ locations. Oversees a high-performing staff of 11 engineers and AV specialists, manages a $2.5M annual budget, and partners with C-suite executives and vendors to deliver cloud collaboration services with 99.999% uptime while safeguarding customer PII data.
Oct 2014 | Oct 2017
IT Manager – Voice & Global Collaboration (UC&C)
Global owner of voice, e-mail, IM, video-conferencing and collaboration services, guiding a 7-person engineering team and a $4.5M budget to modernize CDK’s enterprise communications stack. Drove Cisco WebEx/Jabber adoption, strengthened vendor partnerships, and embedded monitoring standards that delivered 99.999% uptime while generating seven-figure annual savings.
Sep 2011 | Oct 2014
IT Manager, Voice Engineering (UC)
Global owner of voice, instant-messaging, video-conferencing, and collaboration services, guiding an 8-person engineering team and a $2M budget to standardize Cisco Unified Communications across the enterprise. Charged with global architecture design, vendor governance, and cost-optimization for 90+ offices on 5 continents.
Sep 2005 | Sep 2011
Voice Engineering Supervisor | Telecom Engineer
Managed day-to-day telephony operations, billing, and MACD work while serving as technical lead for PBX upgrades and contact-center software deployments.
Results
Modernizing Enterprise Collaboration
Led a $7M Cisco Webex Cloud UCaaS/CCaaS rollout for 5500+ users/1000 agents across 200+ sites, integrating 8 critical systems, modernizing their 20-year-old legacy voice services.
Scaling High-Impact Teams & Governance
Built an 11-person, 4-tier UC/AV organization, instituted white-glove support and conference-room standards, and deployed 40 Teams-enabled rooms in one-year, while slashing support tickets and boosting adoption.
Driving Cost & Efficiency Gains
Negotiated telecom, licensing, and maintenance contracts to realize $500–600K telecom savings, by cancelling 35 legacy agreements, and achieved $1.13M annual run-rate reductions post-migration.
Expertise
Unified Communications Leadership
Global Infrastructure Road-mapping
Vendor & Contract Negotiation
Budget & P&L Oversight
Cross-Functional Stakeholder Engagement
3 & 5 year Strategy Plans
Change Management
Merger & Acquisition Integration
Team Development & Coaching
UCaaS & CCaaS Architecture
Contact-Center Technology
AV & Conference-Room Standards
99.999% Uptime Assurance
RFP Creation & Evaluation
Onboarding & User Adoption
Time Management
Education
(BS) Bachelor of Science
Iowa State University
Meet Dee
Q & A
Why did you choose your profession?
At the beginning of my career, I thought phones are everywhere and will never go away. This could be a career that would allow growth and provide job opportunities anywhere. Once I started, I quickly found tech work came easy to me. I enjoyed working with people, listening to their needs and delivering tools that enable them to do their day to day job easier or more efficiently. As telecom changed through the years, I loved becoming the change agent and influencer to bring the new tech (chat, video conferencing, mobile, AV, etc.) to corporations.
Who are your main influences?
My Dad has always been a major influence for work ethic, the importance of process and bringing integrity to all you do. I had an amazing mentor early on in my career who helped me determine career path, taught me budgets, strategy, and presentation skills. Most recently, I have been inspired by Matthew McConaughey’s book Green Lights which then turned into a partnership with Mastermind and launched his ‘Art of Livin’ Roadtrip – the Highway to More‘; where he has partnered with Dean Graziosi and Tony Robbins.
What is your greatest accomplishment?
I used to try to pick one of my largest projects and declare that as my greatest accomplishment. However, I realize now, my greatest accomplishment is my continued journey of self-improvement and career progress. Every year I challenge myself to be a better version of me than the year before. When I started my first job at a small telecommunications company, I never imagined it would become a lifelong career. Evolving my career from billing specialist to Vice President running Unified Communications for medium to large Corporations is truly the greatest accomplishment to date. Learning to lead, not follow; learning patience, not rushing; learning strategy vs. reaction; and bringing passion to all I do are all tasks I have learned to achieve my goals.
What tools do you use?
My primary tools that keep my days running smoothly, are Outlook calendar and my daily planner. Planning my day/week/month in advance keeps me, therefore the team, projects, and initiatives on track. I use calendar for meetings as well as reminders to follow up on items, or of upcoming due dates, or generally tracking team members. Additionally, MS Office is critical to my day. Teams for messaging and meetings, Word for documentation, Excel for budgets and task lists, and PowerPoint for presentations. I have used Concur as well as Workday for expensing and invoice payments. Service Now for tracking work request. Workday for goal setting and workforce management. Solarwinds for monitoring infrastructure services up/down.
What advice would you give to someone just starting out in your profession?
Stay curious, always raise your hand for new assignments/projects and never hesitate to ask for help. Curiosity will help you embrace change. Taking on new assignments allows you to grow and try different things to better define the path you want to take in your career journey. Asking for help opens you to mentors, opportunities and shows passion for learning and wanting to do the job right the first time.
Interests
Reading
Walking
Interior Decorating
Testimonials
“Personally, I have seen Dee’s knowledge and experience come through in the project meetings and client conversations. Dee has breadth and depth in both the Audio-Visual and Telephony areas, the two components of the Unified Communications team. Dee is adept at asking the probing questions needed and is willing to appropriately challenge others.
Dee exhibits poise and capabilities in meetings, driving for mutual success.
Dee can be counted on to have difficult conversations with our vendor partners, to hold them accountable for what they promise. She has forged relationships across the organization to help ‘market’ internally and can have effective conversations with her peers.”
Bill Eisenstot, SVP & Director of Enterprise Operations, Wintrust Financial Corporation
“Dee has the ability to evaluate the “big picture” and utilize the proper resource to expedite the need for change. There have been frequent scenarios where I have personally proposed a challenge within the Customer Contact Center and Dee has a formulated change to implement and resolve.
Dee maintains the ability to manage a vast number of projects at once. It is truly a strength to identify and then properly implement best practices across the many contact centers of Wintrust.
Dee leads by example, sets the tone of every project is critical and works to ensure everyone works together. She has the ability to identify the right skill set needed for the job, maintain accountability for each project and encourage participation from everyone to get the best results.
During our rollout {3rd party vendor to assist with calls} discussions, Dee provided multiple potential issues AND solutions to ensure that we were able to properly measure the vendor. These proactive solutions ensured we were able to move and shift as needed to produce minimum wait times, reduced costs and provided an outstanding customer experience!”
Ray Reilly, SVP Customer Contact Center, Wintrust Financial Corporation
“Dee has several strengths. The first is strong background and experience in the technologies she leads. The second is the ability to hire and retain talent. Dee has done a great job retaining talent on her team and when needed, hired strong talented individuals. The third is managing a large complex project like the phone system replacement project. She did an excellent job pulling all the data around various potential vendors into an easy-to-understand matrix which helped educate everyone and drive the final decision on the vendor to select.
Dee has taken a lead role in the build out and now the eventual implementation of the new phone systems. This is a very complex project that is going very smooth due to her leadership. Dee successfully manages two major domains. The first being Unified Communications covering the phone system, Contact Center support and MS Teams along with other major communications technologies. The second is the Audio Visual covering conference room technologies along with the other key services required by the business.”
Rob Michuda, Deputy Director Enterprise Operations, Wintrust Financial Corporation
“Dee represented Enterprise Operations very well during the interview process and showed her exceptional leadership qualities with well thought out questions, on the fly follow ups and compassion during each interview. We would follow up the interviews with a quick discussion to compare notes and Dee always provided keen insight on the candidates.
I have also had experience with Dee as a technologist. She blends a deep knowledge of the technology she is accountable for with outstanding customer service to ensure high quality for her team. We have multiple interactions that Dee always approaches with urgency and collaboration to ensure a positive outcome.
She is confident, concise and clear in her updates and leaves the audience with a solid understanding of status, success and challenges.”
Mike Jachim, Principal Manager, Server (M365) Team, Wintrust Financial Corporation