Contact details
Daniel Breston
Curriculum Vitae
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Greenwich, London, UK
daniel.breston@qriosity-managingit.com
+44 7795546928
uk:linkedin.com/in/danielbreston
@ITCoachspeaker
IT Service Strategy, Transformation, Delivery and Management Improvement
I believe that IT generates no business value until IT goes live, and to maximise this value we must support customers
and suppliers, enable the solution of business challenges, surpass targets and improve services 24x7x365.
I am a consultant, coach, mentor and a proven leader at creating IT Service Support, Infrastructure, Service Delivery
and IT Management that never says “Good is Good Enough”. My industry experience and technical application is
international and diverse. I am ITILv3, COBIT5 and Business Continuity certified, an advocate of DevOPS and Lean IT,
and regularly invited to speak on these topics.
Career Highlights
• Within 6 months identified savings of €50m on the current IT infrastructure capacity facilitating reinvestment for
new product and service creation.
• Reduced meeting time of senior managers by 30%; reduced time to provide IT for new staff from 9 days to 1,
decreased time to create servers from 10 days to 45 minutes, decreased Change Approval Board from 2 hours to
20 minutes considering over 100 major requests weekly.
• New IT target organization models improving collaboration, communication and perception to business within first
45 days. Empowered IT Service teams with new role profiles, processes and the use of Lean or DevOPS techniques.
• Management and coaching of all non-Development IT roles CIO to Service Desk. Direct management of data
centre, applications support, infrastructure engineers, and Service Desk of over 100 in diverse locations.
• Designed and managed 11 data centres in US, Bahamas, UK, Hungary and Germany; virtual – cloud environments,
IaaS/SaaS/PaaS, AS/400, servers, storage, networks, ITSM tools.
• Controlled annual budgets of £10m: people, process, technology and vendors.
Career History
November 2004 – present Qriosity Limited (was Breston-IT):
Consultant, Coach, Mentor, Trainer, Interim Management UK and EU. Client assignments include:
August 2012 – June 2013 Jupiter Asset Management: Interim IT Service and Operations Manager.
Accountable for all Service Management, Service Desk, Data Centre and infrastructure personnel, processes, tools and
vendors. Managed staff of 18 delivering 24 by 7.
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Senior advisor and stakeholder for IaaS & Private Cloud programme: total refresh of infrastructure, outsourced
aging data centre, new target operating Service Management and Support model to be delivered within 10
months and inside £6 million budget.
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IT Operations risk and audit: reduced outstanding issues from 75 to 11 in 5 months enabling passing of 2013 audit
with no major issue for first time in 3 years.
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Business customer satisfaction of IT services and support increase from 78% to 94% within 4 months.
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Disaster Recovery Manager; coached and delivered most successful DR test of last 5 years.
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Vendor management: Charles River, Bloomberg, Reuters, LineData, SunGard, CISCO, VISION, Fusion-BMC, and
Kelway.
August 2010 – March 2012 KBC Bank, Belgium: with Celerant Consulting – Lead IT Service Management Consultant
Lean IT Implementation: top-down reorganisation, skill, process and tool improvement impacting 3500 IT staff in
Belgium, Hungary, Poland and Czech Republic delivered over 18 months.
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Mentored IT Service Management director and team in Hungary managing 2 new Tier3 data centres servicing all of
KBC: Lean-ITIL stakeholder and team collaboration, SLA creation, financial and capacity management.
 Trusted advisor to CIOs in Hungary, Poland & Belgium and CTO of Belgium in creation of Business to IT strategy.
 €50m savings in new infrastructure via re-use or virtualisation of servers, storage and network.
 Converted Service Desks in Poland, Hungary and Belgium into Face-of-IT and centres resulting in customer
satisfaction improvement via reduction of incidents by 30%.
 Trained IT management to reduce meetings by 30% and use time for mentoring or customer engagement.
 Reduced server creation time from days to 45 minutes.
 Assessed and coached creation of ITIL or COBIT.
Coached new or role changing employee process impacting over 5000 staff in 4 countries. New staff arrival had IT via
Role-based catalogue from Day1 while role changers were serviced within 4 hours. Norm was 5-7 days.
January – June 2010 Credit Suisse: with Virtual Clarity - Lead IT Service Management Consultant.
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Mentor creation of Global-IT Target Operating Model for virtual and cloud services with SLAs, new processes,
roles and RACI, KPIs and visual management using ITIL and Lean IT practices.
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Integrated IaaS provisioning, configuration & capacity management processes into dispersed team (Asia, UK,
Switzerland and USA). Result was environment creation via Technical Service Catalogue of 20 minutes from 9
days.
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Facilitated a strategy moving to a virtual platform replacing 80% of current infrastructure, saving $20m.
June – December 2009 SPE (EDF) Luminus: with Celerant Consulting- Lead IT Service Management Consultant.
Save a failing IT Organisation and Service Improvement initiative and support a firm-wide SAP programme.
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Realised £1.2m in efficiency, capacity, service level and partner relationship savings (no headcount loss).
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Mentored CIO, Head of Applications, Head of Services and Head Enterprise Architect: created new role profiles,
governance meetings, business interaction coaching, business to IT KPI trees and performance reporting.
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Decreased number of major incidents by 50% with a redesigned change, release, problem and incident processes.
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Reduced percentage of late programmes from 24% to 3% in 6 months.
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Aligned use of ATOS Service Desk use reducing cost by 20% annually.
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Coached and trained ITILv3 and Lean IT practices.
January – March 2009 Abu Dhabi Aircraft Technologies Interim CTO.
Mentor local director and his team on IT Service, Applications, Data Centre, Service Desk and Network management
best practices for company performing airplane maintenance for Etihad, UAE military and privately owned jets.
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Changed the whole business’ perception of the role of IT from a cost centre to a partner in a month.
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Successfully managed a budget of $7m, and reorganised IT, saving 20%.
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Enabled new, complex architecture replacement programme, and a service desk re-organisation.
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Facilitated a new relationship with ADAT customers Etihad and Emirates airlines for ADAT to see IT services.
May – August 2008 BT: Lead IT Service Management Consultant.
Working with Hewlett-Packard to address the question of “When is good, good enough?” for BT-IT services.
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Mentored HP’s development of a service strategy, RACI, tools and processes for a new BT virtualised cloud
environment servicing external customers such as the NHS based on ITIL.
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Facilitated the increase of BT’s ROI by restructuring support streams and automating functions.
February – April 2007 iSOFT: IT Service Management consultant,
Improve image of IT Service Desk via robust incident and problem management within one month.
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Using Lean Root cause analysis (Kaizen burst), turned around the company’s failing IT service desk.
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Swiftly assessed more than 21,000 adverse IT incidents and their underlying issues closing 90%.
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Successfully advocated and trained new problem solving procedures resulting in service improvements.
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Created a plan for procurement of a new service management tool.
March – November 2006 Clifford Chance and Land Securities: with PTS Consulting - IT Service Management
consultant.
Coach and facilitate IT improvement initiatives.
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Facilitated an improved IT Change, Test, Release and Acceptance process to reduce product time to market.
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Delivered a new Target Operating Model for IT: Roles, RACI, KPIs, process, tools and training.
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Provided a methodology of sustainable cultural change within IT and to their business customers.
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Exhibited how they could save 10% on IT costs in the first year alone with no headcount loss.
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Improved reputation of the service desk via negotiating of a realistic SLA.
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Trained Land Securities in ITIL: CIO down to Service Desk and mentored Change and Problem Managers.
1999-2004 UBS Wealth Management Europe for UBS - Director Deputy Head of ICT Production & Service
Management
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Created a high-performance IT service delivery, application support, infrastructure and data centre management
team 100+ based in UK, Italy, Spain, France and Germany.
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Senior member of European Wealth Management initiative impacting both business process and the underlying
IT for every UBS Wealth Management user and customer outside of Switzerland.
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Controlled annual budget of £10m.
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Cut £2m from the budget in 18 months without reducing headcount.
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Co-led a programme that designed and built two new datacentres allowing closure of 5.
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Negotiated and managed contracts with major IT vendors, securing top-class service.
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Mentored my replacement in Switzerland and transferred all support roles on time and budget.
Earlier Career
Starting in Houston with Texas Commerce Bank (now part of JP Morgan) as Deputy CTO, I was subsequently the
Interim CTO, IT Operations and Service Delivery Director for Chemical Bank’s operation in the Bahamas.
Associate Director for IT Services: Equities and Commodities, for Bear Stearns, based in Chicago. Supporting 20,000
users making 10 million daily transactions contributing $100 million to the bottom line, I managed a team of 40 in
multiple US and UK sites. My achievements include building two “lights-out” datacentres using a mixture of UNIX,
Wintel and iSeries (Power) servers, and cutting 10% from both the cost and delivery time of IT services by using ITIL to
create an integrated Change to Release to Service Level way of working.
Education, Professional Training and Professional Memberships
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LeanIT and DevOPS Practitioner and speaker.
ITIL Managers v2 and v3 Certified (Red Badge and Expert level), ex-examiner, trainer.
BS 25999 Business Continuity Management Certified, IT Service Continuity Specialist (MBCI).
Prince2 Practitioner.
COBIT5 trainer and practitioner.
ISO/IEC 20000 Certified Consultant.
Distinguished Professional in Service Management (DPSM).
Interim Management (MIMA).
BSc Business Technology Management, University of Houston.
Conference Speaker
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itSMF Hungary Oct. 2012: Opening speaker – Value of ITIL in Hungary to help revive the economy.
LeanIT Hungary Nov 2012: Service Desk and the power of LeanIT.
European LeanIT 2013: Lean your Service Desk to enable your IT and your business.
DevOPSDays London Nov. 2013: DevOPS Culture in a room