Stéphane-Robert Langer

“Management Accountant with robust information management skills and a proven ability to deliver effective decision support solutions in both manufacturing and financial services industries”

I spent my undergraduate business school years in another era, graduating in 1994 as Mosaic was barely reaching v2.0. It would be another 3 years before Clayton M. Christensen would write The Innovator’s Dilemma, and Jeff Bezos had just barely founded Amazon.com.

The next year – spent as a graduate student in international management – allowed me to build bridges between a passion for information technology and my recent experience as a business student. Among other things, this involved MIS classes at Babson College near Boston. I also undertook an internship with a – now defunct – telecommunications company and wrote a research paper in which I investigated potential strategies for telecommunication carriers in an internet-driven environment.

Information technology quickly became a driving force in my professional choices which led me to apply with SGI (previously known as Silicon Graphics, Inc.) right out of graduate school. They took me on board and gave me responsibilities first in production scheduling, then in material requirements planning (MRP). Seeing the potential gains from shared, centralized information, I delved into database and web technologies in order to design and deploy an online Decision Support System (DSS). This paved the way for more IT-related work in Sales Force Automation (SFA) and Customer Relationship Management (CRM). The latter kept me busy not only in Switzerland and around Europe but also for a year at SGI’s headquarter in Mountain View, CA.

Fascinated by the IT industry’s rapid evolution, I’ve become enthusiastic about the possibilities of using technical tools to solve business problems. Since all sectors of the economy present such challenges, I took a turn into a new territory by joining a leading financial institution as a member of their data warehousing team.

Thanks to the experience gleaned from tight collaboration with multiple functions in the organization I came full circle and now operate in Finance as a Management Accountant helping make sense of large amounts of data via multidimensional modeling & analysis, cost allocation, profitability analysis and online dashboards. This is a fascinating position where challenging business problems meet the complexity of the technical solutions designed to meet these challenges. Some of that comes under the generic umbrella of what is nowadays commonly referred to as Business Intelligence (BI).