Patricio Tillard

I was responsible for moving the entire American Airlines account IT operations team to Cordoba, Argentina. The team was originally only present in Tulsa, Oklahoma, US. Myself and a co-worker were sent to a 2-weeks knowledge transfer workshop in which we spent time with different operations agents. Since the operations were 24/7, we had sessions at other times in order to accommodate both day and night shifts.

Once we finished KT and documentation generated as an output, we were responsible for training 10 new agents based in Cordoba, Argentina, entitled to run the operations entirely within a month's time frame.

The project timeline was reduced by one week. After three weeks of training, two teams of five members, divided into day and night shifts, supported American Airlines and managed infrastructure without causing any disruption to the operation.

By the time the outsourcing effort was completed, the new team was handling around 2,500 servers, running around 150 applications, and monitoring around three million events.

To achieve 85% reductions in the events and incidents generation from American Airlines managed infrastructure the first step was to collect information on which incidents were recurring. Once having the reports we were able to clean up 100% of events that were actually false positives and no action were required by the support team, they were simply ignored. The next action was to configure accurately monitoring for events that were triggered during maintenance windows and were expected to alert and solve. Finally, we attacked errors and misleading events coming from customer application logs achieving a 75% reduction in Priority 1 outages which impacted positively in the accomplishment of SLAs.

In order for this project to achieve its outstanding goals, a lot of coordination was required between internal and external teams, such as the client's team as well as other providers. I performed as the project owner as well as a member of the support team responsible for applying configuration and technical changes to reduce 3 million monthly events to roughly 750,000 monthly events.

As a result of the separation between American Airlines and Sabre Holdings, many tools used in daily operations were needed to be migrated to new defined platforms. In this case, the target was the knowledge management system used to understand the entire Infrastructure managed for American Airlines, which contain information of over ~300 applications and their dependency along with support contact information and steps needed to keep the airline running without flaws.

The challenging part was to clean up inaccurate data since the platform remained had no owner for several years causing a huge amount of information outdated. In order to sort this out, a lot of coordination and sessions were held with the different client application owners with the goal of updating escalation support processes and troubleshooting steps that allowed our first level of support to be capable of resolving the majority of the issues with immediate actions.

As a result, the number of applications actually still being supported and running were reduced to ~200 and the count of documents was also reduced in over 65%, reflected in Mean-Time-To-Resolution time and missed escalations reduced considerably.

Hewlett-Packard and American Airlines contract was coming to an end by 2020. Being this was one of the top 3 major accounts for the company, a good deal of efforts were done to assure a renewal. For this, I was selected as the chief architect for designing and implementing a suite of integrated solutions that would allow faster IT to business. The platform consisted of several HP solutions working together to support IT operations management, service asset and configuration management, and release and portfolio management all under a high complex automation engine. Before this integrated solution, delivering a server to our customer could take between 2 to 3 weeks. After 6 months of connecting all the dots, we were delivering servers in less than 2 hours without any human intervention.

With these results, the contract renewal was signed 6 months prior to the end date for which I was awarded Tech Honors fellow prize.

In 2013, American Airlines and US Airways received approval for airlines merger. This meant a lot of work ahead, especially in the technology aspect since both airlines were operating under their own systems. The first rock to face was unifying the passenger reservation system which would officially make a single new airline arise. Hewlett-Packard was a strategic partner for both airlines, mostly for American since the majority of the infrastructure is hosted and managed by HP. I was selected as a representative for all midrange teams worldwide in order to make this system merge possible. This involved over 300 employees supporting more than 5000 systems. In the history of airline mergers, this exercise was never successfully performed. The coordination of this effort took over 1 year but it was, for first time in history, perfectly achieved with no impact to the entire airline operations. American Airlines CIO, Maya Liebman, especially thank our team for making this happen, for which without whom it wouldn't be possible to accomplish.

In the journey of consolidating American Airlines and US Airways as one new airline after the merger, another challenge was to be faced. With the passenger system merger successfully accomplished, all eyes were watching the outcome of this exercise. In order for all aircraft to be handled under the same system, Hewlett-Packard was one of the partners to perform due to the number of systems under its management. I was assigned as the responsible for coordinating all HP teams that were involved in the impacted systems. After 6 months of planning, both systems were consolidated on a single FOS. This milestone meant that now both airlines had become one forever.

The coordination under my control had multiple assignments like meetings, change management for system integrations and collaboration across teams from different providers distributed around the globe.

One of the biggest challenges faced today for universities across the world is keeping the students throughout their education life cycle up to achieving degrees.

In order to be able to understand student behavior and provide the business with strategies to mitigate the chances of students abandoning their studies, a huge amount of data from various sources were collected, cleaned, and prepared. Once the data was prepared, it was processed using machine learning algorithms and artificial intelligence techniques that allowed to not only predict a probability of churn for each student but also understand the ranking of variables that were considered by these students on their decision, such as amount of exams approved in the past 6 months or other demographic data like age, gender and more.

After a 3 month proof of concept project, the university was able to successfully retain 60% more students than the previous year despite big economic changes suffered in Argentina.

The customers are specialized in providing services to users like roadside assistance, home services such as plumbing and locksmith, nautical assistance, and more. In order to provide high-quality support to their users, the customer was willing to build a service management platform that enables affected users to submit service requests, then those services need to allocate a provider who will take care of the assistance and finally manage billing and invoicing.

The first module was to build a solution that allows agents to receive the requests following a standardized process, the solution provides workflow configuration to adapt for business rules, making the agent onboarding to be reduced to just 2 hours instead of months. The second module consists of service logistics with a back-end intelligent automated assignment system that makes decisions on which is the best provider to fulfill the service, taking into count several variables in order to find the most efficient while optimizing time and costs.

Finally, the third module automates most of the billing and invoicing processes reducing conflicts between providers and the company. The platform was build using C#, .Net, and AngularJS connected to Oracle databases.

The team is formed by two back-end software engineers, one front-end software engineer, and two software engineers in the test. Altogether, the resources work in a team within the customer on projects related to the integration of the EHR platform to various electronic vouchers providers that allow patients to benefit from different offers when purchasing their medication.

The back-end is built using C#, and the UI is built using EmberJS. All code is tested using automation frameworks.

One of the major banks in North America hired our big data, machine learning, and AI services in order to come up with a solution that allows them to identify which is the best product to recommend to a customer, using a personalized speech and through the best channel available.

We were able to provide with high accuracy the best product to be offered to an existing bank customer. The sale process also benefited from a personalized script that would take into count the recommended product and the customer's profile in order to make emphasis on the benefits that would attract more that particular person. Besides that, we were able to reduce marketing operational costs by identifying the appropriate channel to reach the lead, whether it was direct mail, email, or contact center as well as the time and content of those communications.

As part of the digital transformation roadmap proposed to our customer, one big rock needed to tackle was the CMDB migration to allow asset and configuration management process to enable business process modeling which allowed the customer to understand their infrastructure and dependencies among different services that run the operations, in this case an airline. For this transformation, a complete migration from a legacy custom system was performed. The destination platform was UCMDB, HP Configuration Management system solution. I designed both architectures, one in client's network and another in our internal infrastructure. Both CMDBs were federated and kept synchronized when any of the assets or service models changed. Then, this solution was then integrated with ServiceNow CMDB, a cloud-based platform for SACM. This transformation also allowed the integration with various IT Operations management tools which provided real-time monitoring of assets and configuration items, giving a 360 view of the complete operation health status.
We worked with an infrastructure consisting of 6000+ servers, 400+ applications which meant 5M+ configuration items. All of them onboarded with agent-based and agentless techniques.

As chief operations officer, I was responsible for keeping the company's overall financial and operational processes running and coached the technology team Agile to deliver consistent increments that added value to the users.