Ernst & Young Appoints David Nichols as Americas CIO Services Leader

NEW YORK, Aug. 23, 2011 /PRNewswire/ -- Ernst & Young LLP announced today the appointment of David Nichols as Americas CIO Services Leader for its Advisory practice. Based in the firm's Chicago office, Nichols will be responsible for its "CIO Services" practice, where he will work with clients to improve the performance and flexibility of their technology strategy and platforms.

"The on-going challenge for today's CIOs is to align their organizations' technologies more tightly to their businesses while they drive increasing levels of performance efficiency and effectiveness. Under David's proven leadership, we will bring deep experience and broad and innovative thinking to our clients," said Bob Sydow, Americas IT Advisory Leader for Ernst & Young LLP. "We believe this diverse technology capability combined with our broad experience in industry and business process will deliver significant value to our clients."

"CIO's are under pressure to cut unnecessary cost in IT while working to exploit new game-changing technologies. David brings an outstanding track record of successfully driving differential value from leading edge technologies," said Chell Smith, Advisory Markets Leader for Ernst & Young LLP. "While Nichols will be focused on the Americas, he will align closely with Mal Postings, Ernst & Young's Global Chief Technology Officer, to offer clients advice on how they can apply new technologies like mobile and cloud computing to enhance their business performance."

Nichols brings more than 20 years of technical and business experience in enterprise application integration technologies and Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) implementations. Prior to joining Ernst & Young, he was the Global Managing Partner for Accenture's Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) practice where he held global responsibility for resource growth, financial growth, marketing, strategy, capability development, delivery-asset development and both internal and external communications. He was recognized by IDC, Forrester, Gartner and several others as one of the key thought leaders in the SOA and service-based computing disciplines. Earlier, Nichols was the North America lead for Accenture's Enterprise Integration practice.

Nichols attended Northwestern University, where he earned a Bachelor of Computer Science Engineering from McCormick School of Engineering and completed the Advanced Business Management Program at Northwestern's Kellogg Graduate School of Management.

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SOURCE Ernst & Young