Hi I’m Travis Knutson.

I’ve been in IT for over 30 years. However, I have never gotten my degree, so here I am going for it in the flex program at University of Wisconsin Milwaukee. It is a difficult journey, but if it’s not difficult is it worth it? Over the years I have encounter so many different people. While working for a furniture company, they made a promise to provide a delivery process to the stores in two months. The holidays were coming and the needed to sell more, well in two months me and another developer came through with a delivery function for the point of sale solution. There were multiple other projects, clean up of multiple versions of the software, support for multiple issues and interaction with the client for new functionality. The furniture company decided it was time to expand into Asia, they had manufacturing there why not retail stores.

During the next year I worked directly with a consulting company to create a sales system that could go from manufacturing to delivery in China. The process was highly detailed and required deep understanding of the people, environment and culture. Approximately two months before the store opened, I traveled with my team to China and spend 9 weeks getting all of the equipment setup, software install, configured and customized. The day the store opened it was an amazing celebration. The furniture was slim, compact and very Asian. It was exactly what was needed, but not really. Even though many people spend hours, days and months preparing, they didn’t capture what was needed. In this case the brand was American and that is what was expected. Even though the furniture company was trying to appeal to the culture that was not what they wanted. The lesson was learned and fixed with American style furniture and it sold like hot cakes.

Professionally, I have worked for a crop insurance companies, in the banking industry, retail and health insurance. All of the time I have been deeply engaged in IT, development, reporting, database design, infrastructure and architecture. Always looking for the best way to help the customer achieve their goals.