Doug O’Keefe was born and raised in a metropolis called Troy, Ohio. His parents had moved there from Pittsburgh PA years before. He grew up an avid sports fan and participated in any sport his parents would allow him to play.
An odd child, Doug enjoyed school as well as the sports he played. He decided that his career would consist of teaching high school math and coaching baseball (or hockey, golf, soccer – well, any sport that he could). When the time to choose a college rolled around, the University of Dayton had just advanced to the NCAA Elite 8 in basketball so he felt that would be a good fit (and he could still bring his dirty clothes home for Mom to wash on the weekends).
Doug soon found that UD was kind of pricey school to attend so he found a summer job in 1985 writing dBase III code for a local manufacturing company. He hadn’t really written much code but liked it. That, coupled with some intense research around how much income teachers/baseball coaches really made, led him to change his major to System Analysis his sophomore year.
Tuition continued to rise at UD, so his junior year Doug accepted a full-time programming job at the same company and was rewarded with the first 20MB (that’s “M” as in “mega”) hard drive the company had purchased (at a cost of around $2000 – how times have changed). He remained there working his way through the ranks of programmer from dBase to RPG to Progress 4GL to ASP, helping develop the company’s first intranet web site. In the late 1990s he found his passion when he talked the company into purchasing and implementing a wild and crazy OLAP tool called Essbase.
After a couple of years developing business intelligence solutions with Essbase, Doug discovered that there was a vast world that he needed to tackle: consulting. Doug was confident he knew enough about Essbase that he could help a lot of different companies implement analytic systems to provide answers to questions they hadn’t even thought of yet.
Doug spent the next few years traveling the country, racking up Marriott Rewards points and Delta Skymiles implementing Essbase, Hyperion Planning, and business intelligence solutions for banking, healthcare, financial services, insurance, public utilities and any other company that wanted to “see the light.” His passion for using technology to enable business solutions enabled him to gain a wealth of knowledge across a wide range of vertical industries.
After a move to Nashville and a return to the Ohio area (Northern Kentucky), Doug joined Crown in 2007 to help grow a new practice area for Crown, Enterprise Performance Management, as the EPM Services Director. Doug worked to grow the practice assembling a seasoned team of professionals with similar values and desires.
Doug remains an avid sports fan even though his Pittsburgh-bred father isn’t all that excited about his admitted passion for the Cincinnati Reds. He remains loyal to UD basketball, the 6-time Super Bowl Champion Pittsburgh Steelers, and the Pittsburgh Penguins however.
“The players make the manager, it’s never the other way.” –Sparky Anderson, Manager of the Big Red Machine “Never mistake motion for action. Never confuse effort with results.”