Carl Johnson

• Less Practitioner Certified, 2017
• AWS Foundational, 2018
• ITIL v3 Foundation Certification
• Project Management, Pathways Program CIO Council
• Six Sigma Green Belt for IT

After completing my degree, I was invited to do a Ph.D. in Plymouth, England, working with the Royal Navy (the rest is classified). My one highlight was presenting a paper at the OCIES 1991 Conference in France, but doing this research ignited a passion for how much I enjoyed writing code so that it could solve real-world problems. I was actually using neural networks and machine learning back in 1992; fun fact: I was one of the first researchers to use the chemotaxis learning algorithm. This led to my over 25 years career in technology.

Now, you may ask why I am not called Dr. Johnson. Well, after two years, I really wanted to join a software company, which turned out to be JBA Software. The one fun achievement here is that I was on a project that, using their food and drinks software, calculated that a certain airline could save upwards of $5M per year by removing olives from the inflight meals.

After various consulting projects, I joined Columbia Pictures as a senior JDE Software Engineer, which enabled me to travel the world working on their Y2K Project, visiting Brazil, Belgium, Germany, the USA, Spain, and Holland. As part of this project, it was decided to upgrade JDE so a new feature could help finance reduce month end. Basically, I was challenged to customize the JDE batch journal creation process to do the journals using metadata attached to movies and TV series; this reduces the end of the month from 10 days to 2 days. I think this caught the eye of the new CIO, who quickly annexed me to the SAP project run out of Los Angeles, where I became CONVERSION & INTERFACE LEAD, SAP GLOBAL IMPLEMENTATION and moved to Los Angeles in 2005

Led the $100M JDE conversion to SAP, including integration with external vendor/customer systems globally and all modules utilized across 23 territories over 104 legal entities. JD Edwards's business process was translated into SAP terminology worldwide for AP, AR, and Purchasing.

After completing the SAP project, I became a manager in the Home Entertainment Division worldwide, fully responsible for all financial applications, including JDE ERP modules, custom in-house modules, SOX, audits, projects, and enhancements. I led the implementation of a pricing application that enabled AR to clear a $10M backlog in claims with a global retailer, increasing cash flow back to the business by $1M per month. I improved the support process and reduced the team's dependency on long-term contractors, saving over $300K in OPEX costs.

This led to my promotion to Director, and within this role, I was again challenged to reduce month-end Finance efforts. After researching a tool, we selected Insight Software (previously the GL Company) and reduced the finance effort by over 2.5 employees per year.

As part of my new role as executive director for Home Entertainment and Television, I led the outsourcing of the 2 highest revenue-generating departments into an offshore managed service model. Fully responsible for defining team roles and responsibilities. Drove process development for newly created application, development, and maintenance department and overall was part of a $20M saving in IT costs across SPE. I reduced onsite support from 50% to 15%, enabling onsite resources to focus on strategic capital projects to improve Home Entertainment and Television revenue.

In 2015, I was promoted to vice president and managed a departmental budget of $15M. My responsibilities in Television include Global Sales and Distribution Systems, Rights, Networks, Digital Media delivery to broadcast facilities, Global B2B Websites, and Finance systems. CORP LOB responsibilities include back-office systems, including Payroll, ITSM applications, Studio Operations systems (SEHS), and other key non-finance back-office systems. These systems were responsible for $6B in revenue.

In 2014, SPE experienced one of the worst cyber-attacks in modern times. At this point, I took on the lead responsibilities for the SPE Restoration effort, taking ownership of the White room and restoration process across all 450 applications restored over 9 months. Key applications were restored in under 3 months from bare metal, and I worked 18-hour days.

In 2018, I was asked to join the FNG group at FOX to ensure the $72.3B acquisition by Disney went smoothly. As FOX sold all its dated technologies and systems to Disney, I updated the systems to be DOJ-compliant in 9 months. I managed the Disney-provided transitional services (TSAs) for 24 months. All service levels were maintained throughout the TSAs until the final TSA exit in July 2021.

Asked to join the new FOX CORP to lead the following groups across all of FOX – End User Experience across all locations for all services, Operations and Technologies, Legal, Corporate Communications, EHS, ServiceNow platform for ITSM and Back Lot Production, Postproduction and Services including Food Services, Space Management, Facilities. Tasked to develop a modern technology strategy across groups with a major focus on using AI to aid and improve business unit performance based on a data-driven approach.

Led the team in integrating several M&As made by FOX, including Tubi, TMZ, Mar Vista Entertainment, Credible, and Bento Box into the FOX ecosystem. Developed and managed an automated centralized procurement for all employee devices across all divisions, including broadcast systems. Overall total spending per fiscal year is >$6M.

The first 24/7 service desk at FOX was deployed, supporting all divisions. FOX TV stations and FOX NEWS have never had a service desk previously. Using a nearshore company called Provalus that supports Veterans and advocates for diversity kept costs flat for the last 5 years with increased coverage, saving on average 2.75M per year. I implemented MOVEWORKS AI NLP Bot to improve ITSM services, taking fulfillment time from days to, in some cases, seconds, replacing, on average, 10 service desk agents per week. Currently, the Service Desk has an MTTR of under 4 hours for all tickets resolved.

I was the technology lead for the USFL for two seasons. I supported the back office and football operations technical support during games for any tech-related equipment used, either in the coach's booth or the iPads used for replays on the sideline and video equipment during training and team talks. Season 2 included building out four hubs from bare walls in under six weeks and supporting four stadiums for games.