Ron Lichty

155 Forest Side Avenue 415-564-2697

San Francisco, California 94127 RonLichty@sbcGlobal.net

Software Development Leader

Award-winning software engineering VP and published, patented technology leader in companies of all sizes.

Brought engineering discipline to product delivery in teams up to 50 at Razorfish, Fujitsu and Berkeley Systems. Led Charles Schwab to reengineer its software platform company-wide, leveraging new technologies like Web services and Java to deliver exceptional customer experience. Managed the UI of Apple’s Mac OS.

Passionate communicator of vision and industry leadership internally, as well as to analysts, media, and large conference audiences. Author: two programming books; three software patents.

PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE

AVENUE A | RAZORFISH, San Francisco, California 2004 - 2005

Director of Technology

Lead professional services staff of 50 technologists in San Francisco and Los Angeles to design, develop and deliver consumer and enterprise architecture and web applications for Fortune 500 clients.

§ Hired, trained and developed Technology consulting organization in California.

§ Manage and lead the selection, architecture and development of solutions for clients across integrated digital marketing and enterprise B2B applications.

§ Led technology assessment and created multi-year roadmap and architecture deliverables for Fortune 50 strategy engagement.

§ Initiated culture change in Technology organization from client responsiveness to client partnering.

PROJECT CONSULTANT, San Francisco, California 2002 - 2004

§ Adobe Systems: Reviewed and critiqued product plan and architecture for new software product.

§ Macromedia: Developed competitive analysis, wrote use cases, drafted white paper and evangelized IT-focused Flex rich client technology.

§ Logic Library & N8 Systems: Advisory Board member, software reuse & requirements modeling.

§ Prentice Hall: Technical Reviewer, Software by Numbers: Low-Risk, High-Return Development and Estimating Software-Intensive Systems.

CHARLES SCHWAB & CO., INC., San Francisco, California 1996 - 2002

Vice President, Java Object Services (JOS) 1999 - 2002

Created this 3-year initiative, recruited a staff of 25 and leveraged a $15 million budget to migrate applications development from multiple disparate languages to a single cost-effective Java platform company‑wide.

§ Led the transition to Java by providing infrastructure, consulting, training, mentoring, and an ever growing community and repository of shared knowledge, standards and best practices.

§ Created mission and vision and quickly gained support of developers to enable growth from 30 to 350 Java applications and from 40 to 500 Java developers in just three years.

§ Won Schwab the JavaOne Technical Achievement Award for moving the company to a single platform, reducing cost and time to market by 30%, and enabling rapid, frequent new-feature release cycles.

§ Led cross-company technology and methodology initiatives. Established communities of practice and standards and best practices for Corba, XML, and emerging Web Services APIs and tools.

§ Evangelized and launched company-wide component reuse initiative based on seven-month pilot’s net savings, reduced development times, easier maintenance, and more consistent customer experience.

§ Negotiated and managed vendor relationships with IBM, BEA, Borland, Sun, Togethersoft, Rational, and Logic Library. Maximized use of vendor resources and saved the company millions of dollars.

§ Awarded Schwab’s “CIO Technical Leader of the Year” for leading the successful Java migration.

Director of Advice Applications Development, Schwab.com 1998 - 1999

Reported to the VP of Web Trading to deliver industry-leading web-based investment-advice applications.

§ Led development of award-winning Retirement Planner and investor application suites combining powerful, complex computations with simple, straightforward interface designs.

§ Awarded “Excellence in Service” for industry and customer response to Retirement Planner innovation and for moving Schwab to #1 in financial planning rankings by industry-watched Gomez.

Director of Desktop Development, Schwab Electronic Brokerage Technology 1996 - 1998

Recruited by the line-of-business technical SVP to transition a $3 million Java-client research effort to delivery.

§ Pieced together highly interactive UI requirements and Java’s capabilities to create an industry-leading portfolio analysis application in just 3 months; won the team an “Excellence in Service” award.

§ Grew the team to a department of 30 client and server developers, project managers, and testers, with a $4.2 million budget, creating the foundation for Schwab’s Velocity active trader software.

§ Volunteered for six-month interim head of QA, adding 25 QA reports on top of development staff.

mFACTORY, Burlingame, California 1996

Director of Engineering

Led engineering and QA staff developing the innovative, award-winning mTropolis multimedia authoring tool.

§ Successfully moved team of 24 to completion of company’s first commercial product, and enabling major entertainment developers like Activision and Dolby to complete and deliver titles.

FUJITSU, Cultural Technologies Division, San Jose, California 1995 - 1996

Director of Development, WorldsAway Online Virtual Worlds

Led engineering department of 12 to turn around and deliver the long‑delayed, long-awaited product.

§ Provided technical leadership to rethink the product, then set and meet aggressive new target dates.

§ Negotiated budget, funding, release, and delivery date issues with Japan senior management.

BERKELEY SYSTEMS, Berkeley, California 1994 - 1995

Director of Engineering, Screen Savers and Games

Hired by the VP of Engineering to bring process and consistency to engineering After Dark (“Flying Toasters” and “Fish”) and licensed screen savers and to re-target the cross-platform engine and libraries to deliver games.

§ Led five product teams plus core technologies group to simultaneously deliver four new screen savers and a game, plus international and derivative versions and upgraded cross-platform libraries and engine.

§ Instituted design, code and post-delivery reviews, a detailed core technology plan, and a phase criteria and responsibilities process, leading to on-time, on-budget handoffs of high quality product code.

APPLE COMPUTER, Cupertino, California 1988 - 1994

Senior Manager, UI Development Engineering 1990 - 1994

§ Recruited to hire and lead a team of 14 engineers to extend and deliver new UI for the Macintosh OS and deliver new versions of the desktop, the installer, and utility applications.

§ Formed key task force to advance the Macintosh look and feel.

§ Led exploration and development of UI extensions to the Macintosh desktop.

§ Designed and coded significant enhancements to the Finder and Installer, led department-wide adoption and implementation of UI standards, and taught UI principles and prototyping to external developers.

Manager, Development Tools Product Management 1988 - 1989

§ Managed team of product managers to specify and guide design of Apple’s development environments, languages, and tools, as well as to ensure the continued success of third party toolmakers.

§ Designed product line strategies and devised new products to extend, enhance and strengthen development tools product lines, including compilers, development environments and frameworks.

SOFTWEST Consulting, Sunnyvale, California 1981 - 1988

Software Designer and Engineer

ADDENDUM

Speaker

Well-regarded speaker at IBM DeveloperWorks Conference 2002, JavaOne (2000, 2001, 2002), CityJava users group, Apple WorldWide Developer Conferences.

Author, Journalist

Author, technical books and articles, including:

Programming the 65816, Including the 6502, 65C02 and 65802, Brady

Programming the Apple IIGS in Assembly Language, Brady / Simon & Schuster

Freelance features for consumer electronics magazines

Author and Writer, general interest books, features and news, including:

132 Ways to Earn a Living Without Working for Someone Else, St. Martin's

The Do-It-Yourself Guide to Newspaper Publishing, Press Syndicate

Freelance news and features for Personal Computing, Zodiac Radio News, New York Press, MediaFile

Reporter / photographer for the Riverton Daily Ranger, Riverton, Wyoming

Advisory Boards

Startups: Logic Library, N8 Systems, YY Technologies

Conferences: Application Development Trends Conference

Nonprofits: SmartSilvers Alliance, GraceWorks

Community Leadership

East Bay IT Group (eBig): Collaborated in founding Best Practices / Software Architecture SIG

Software Developers Forum (SDF): Co-founder and co-chair, Software Architecture & Modeling SIG

Instructor

Taught seminars for developers—human interface design, prototyping, user testing

Taught seminars for writers—Publicity for Authors and Choosing a Word Processor

(University of California Extension, Media Alliance, SJ State University, SF State University)

Broad Language Experience

Java, Javascript, XML, C++, C, HTML, Pascal, Object Pascal, Visual Basic, AppleScript, MacApp

6502, 65816, 6800, 6809, 6805, and 8088/8086 assembly

Wrote a floating point source library emulation of the Intel 8087 floating point processor, in assembly

Patents and Affiliations

Software patent: compression of financial transaction data for smartcard storage (sole inventor)

Software patents (two): magnetic keycard electronic locking systems and protocols

Member: ACM, SIGCHI, BayCHI, Association for Software Design, SDForum, eBig

Representing Schwab's Technology Adoption and Leadership to the Press

"How Schwab Learned to Love Modeling Tools," August 2002 Baseline magazine:

"Two and a half years ago, we were barely using modeling tools," says Ron Lichty, Charles Schwab's vice president of Java object services.... That was then. Over the past two years, Lichty's team has embraced modeling as not just an architect's tool, but a way to accelerate development of Java applications. The time required to start new software projects has dropped dramatically, and Lichty's team handles more projects simultaneously. "We just started work on our 320th project in Java," says Lichty.

http://www.baselinemag.com/print_article/0,3668,a=29871,00.asp

"Schwab Plus Java... Building Best Practices and Community," July 2000 Sun Server magazine:

What's an organization to do? Early in 1999, a four-month analysis concluded the 2000 person IT division at Charles Schwab & Co. Inc., the nation's fourth-largest financial services company, and online broker, should embrace object-oriented programming and also transition its application domain to a technology that was maturing in realtime. The answer for Schwab's IT department was Java. But the solution required more than just a development language: Technology had to be married to a unique organizational and managerial solution for the entire company, which was experiencing unprecedented growth to meet the needs of its expanding customer base.

http://www.serverworldmagazine.com/sunserver/2000/07/jav_lichty.shtml