Mark Berns offers a unique blend of strategy and technology expertise and an understanding of what makes organizations tick. He is a former CIO with 30 years’ experience leading digital innovation and transformations and helping organizations adapt to change, whether choosing technology, integrating acquisitions, improving business processes, or simply ensuring that projects get done on time
and on budget.

Mark holds a master’s degree in Positive Organization Development and Change, and approaches each new challenge with the firm belief that success comes from engaging stakeholders to discover what things would look like if they’re going right – and then to make it happen.

As a CIO, Mark built systems and a tech team of 65 people supporting the rapid growth of Jupitermedia Corp. from startup to a $320 million global B2B marketing and information company engaged in trade shows, online publishing, digital media, and advisory services. He also integrated and led the creative and operations teams of a dozen acquisitions that became the world’s No. 3 stock media agency.

At The Associated Press, Mark was a reporter and editor who oversaw global news operations before launching AP’s first online news service.

Below are examples of Mark’s consulting work.

Process Improvement: Higher Ed IT
A university’s IT department needed a better way to prioritize requests from the university’s 22 schools that didn’t fit the annual budget process. Frustrated school “CIOs” worked around what process did exist, further challenging central IT. Ready About worked with IT and stakeholders to design a customer-focused approach assigning “account managers” to the schools to advocate, coordinate and improve two-way communication.

Technology Refresh: Higher Education
A college that provides highly individualized programs needed to replace three 10-year-old Access databases. Rather than just a tech refresh, Ready About conducted extensive stakeholder interviews to determine what new processes were needed to support new ways to engage students, then did a market scan for available options and developed a plan to use Salesforce as the foundation for improved student and faculty experience.

Interim Leadership: Media
A producer of journals, events, and education for healthcare professionals needed help with digital transformation. As interim CIO, Mark restructured the IT team and company systems to streamline and support print-to-digital transition. As interim SVP of Operations and Product, he implemented a “central services” organizational model for technology, product and project management, marketing, and communications.

Strategy & Organization Design: Media
A $3.6 billion owner of radio stations needed better coordination between national, regional and local ad sales team to serve customers better and improve efficiency. Based on analysis of revenue from thousands of customers across hundreds of sellers, Mark developed plans to restructure media sales and sales operations aligned with a strategy that focused on customer needs instead of products to be sold and allocating the most resources toward the best revenue opportunities.

Strategy, M&A: Technology
An $800 million global provider of mobile phone backbone and roaming services wanted to diversify beyond infrastructure and looked to leverage its technology and expertise to build out a B2B marketing service. Mark’s team assessed the company’s marketplace position, culture and current capabilities and developed a strategy that included acquiring and integrating an existing mobile marketing provider. He then conducted diligence on possible acquisitions.

Technology Strategy: Media
A consortium of eight large US broadcast companies was working to enable data-driven, targeted local TV advertising to take advantage of the broader growth in ad targeting on digital platforms. Mark and his team worked with the consortium and its leaders to build support and to manage an RFP process for data automation and data management platform providers that could support the effort.

Project & Product Management: Tech Startup
A groundbreaking content marketplace/syndication platform needed someone to lead product development and manage a project to customize its technology on behalf of a major financial services and news organization. In the role of VP of Platform Services, Mark developed a product road map, marketing strategy and implementation plans for the startup.