Operating Model Design
Process and organization reengineering, decision rights, and governance that aligns to business, risk, and technology objectives.
Operating Model · Platforms · Applied AI
Closing the gap between strategy and adoption.
Boutique advisory for senior leaders responsible for consumer and commercial lending transformation — at the intersection of lending modernization, applied AI, and operating model design.
Founded by former Managing Director at JPMorgan Chase and Wells Fargo. Three decades of enterprise transformation, delivered.
The Transformation Trap
The technology arrives. The organization isn't ready.
80%+of employees use AI at surface level only — “like Google”
<36%of regulated enterprises have centralized AI governance
20 / 8020% of effort builds the agent; 80% is enterprise plumbing
<1 in 5CIOs satisfied with depth of AI adoption across their workforce
Structural Performance Drag Taxing the Organization
The statistics on enterprise digital transformation are, at this point, well-documented and consistently below expectations. McKinsey Global Institute estimates that fewer than 30 percent of enterprise transformations fully achieve their stated objectives.
There is a particular kind of organizational excitement that greets every major technology wave. It happened with enterprise resource planning software in the 1990s. It happened with Customer Relationship Management platforms in the early 2000s. It happened with the cloud migration era that followed. And it is happening right now with artificial intelligence.
The pattern is consistent across thirty years of enterprise technology transformation: the tools arrive before the organizations are ready to absorb them. The gap between tool availability and organizational readiness — between what technology can do and what people actually do with it — is not a technology problem. It is a human problem. A change management problem. An adoption problem. A governance problem. A leadership problem.
Enterprises don't lack technology tools. They lack people who have deployed technology at scale, navigated adoption barriers, built governance infrastructure, and measured success in business outcomes.
Advisory Focus
Closing the gap between strategy and adoption.
Core Lending Modernization
End-to-end transformation of wholesale and commercial lending — from intake and underwriting through booking, servicing, and portfolio management.
Applied & Agentic AI
Operationalizing AI and machine learning at enterprise scale, including credit memo automation, financial spreading, and decisioning platforms.
Product Management
Rationalizing boundaries into integrated ecosystems, designing operating model and governance that delivers quality on time at scale.
Product Organization & Investment Governance
Outcome-based investment planning, value tracking, and KPI-driven funding models that connect capital to measurable business results.
Emerging Technology Adoption
Bringing new technologies into the enterprise with the change management, controls, and adoption discipline required to realize value.
Structural Value Creation
Applied Practice Intelligence helps institutions turn transformation strategy into operational execution.
We combine operating model redesign, product management discipline, platform modernization, and applied AI to help enterprises realize measurable business outcomes — not isolated technology deployments. Our approach aligns leadership, governance, funding, workflows, data, and product delivery into a coordinated execution model capable of scaling change across the institution.
We redesign fragmented organizations into integrated product ecosystems, modernize core lending and servicing platforms, embed AI directly into operational workflows, and establish the governance structures required to sustain adoption and continuous improvement. The result is faster cycle times, improved control effectiveness, higher delivery predictability, better client experiences, and stronger return on technology investment.
Whether modernizing wholesale lending, operationalizing agentic AI, restructuring product organizations, or establishing KPI-driven investment governance, we help enterprises build the institutional capabilities required to execute transformation repeatedly, efficiently, and at scale.
Results
Three decades of enterprise transformation, delivered.
$1.5B+Five-year benefits realized from AI/ML deployments
42%Reduction in commercial lending cycle times
60%Productivity gain
25×Emerging technology sales growth at scale
Three decades of enterprise transformation across banking, enterprise technology, AI/ML platforms, telecommunications, and product commercialization have shaped a consistent point of view: transformation succeeds when strategy, operating model, technology, governance, and adoption move together.
Applied Practice Intelligence is built on practical execution experience leading large-scale modernization efforts inside highly regulated, operationally complex institutions — not theoretical frameworks developed outside the business.
Enterprise Transformation at Scale
Led large-scale transformation programs across commercial banking, corporate & investment banking, consumer banking, AI/ML platforms, analytics ecosystems, telecommunications, and enterprise software organizations — often under conditions of regulatory pressure, fragmented operating models, budget constraints, and complex stakeholder environments.
Representative outcomes include:
- ·Reduced lending cycle times by redesigning workflows, standardizing processes, expanding platform interoperability, and embedding automation into underwriting and servicing operations
- ·Improved delivery throughput while reducing organizational complexity through operating model redesign, governance modernization, and leadership restructuring
- ·Built enterprise AI/ML and analytics platforms supporting real-time fraud detection, credit decisioning, regulatory reporting, and advanced analytics at scale
- ·Operationalized AI-driven decisioning infrastructure supporting hundreds of millions of daily transactions and enterprise-scale risk platforms
- ·Modernized legacy analytics environments into cloud-native and Python-based ecosystems to improve scalability, developer productivity, and speed-to-market
- ·Established product-aligned operating models integrating business, technology, operations, risk, and finance around measurable business outcomes
- ·Built governance and investment frameworks connecting capital allocation to KPI-driven value realization and execution accountability
- ·Designed API-led and domain-based integration architectures that reduced manual handoffs, improved data quality, and strengthened control effectiveness
- ·Created repeatable delivery, testing, release governance, and production support operating models capable of supporting high-risk enterprise platforms at scale
Leadership Across Technology Cycles
Career experience spans multiple enterprise technology waves — networking infrastructure, VoIP, enterprise software, cloud modernization, AI/ML, and now applied and agentic AI.
That experience provides pattern recognition many organizations lack during transformation:
- ·Technology adoption challenges repeat
- ·Organizational friction compounds at scale
- ·Governance models often lag modernization efforts
- ·Value realization depends on operational integration, not technology implementation alone
The result is an execution-oriented advisory model grounded in what actually works inside large institutions.
Operating at the Intersection of Business and Technology
The most effective transformation leaders understand both institutional economics and enterprise technology execution.
Over the course of 30 years, responsibilities have included:
- ·Enterprise product management
- ·Operating model redesign
- ·AI/ML platform modernization
- ·Commercial and wholesale lending transformation
- ·Investment governance and financial management
- ·Product commercialization and go-to-market execution
- ·Organizational restructuring and leadership transformation
- ·Regulatory and control alignment
- ·Executive stakeholder management across business, technology, operations, finance, and risk
This combination enables transformation efforts to move beyond isolated initiatives into coordinated enterprise execution.
Transformation That Produces Measurable Outcomes
The focus is not innovation theater. It is measurable institutional improvement:
- ·Faster client delivery
- ·Higher productivity
- ·Lower operational friction
- ·Better control effectiveness
- ·Improved technology investment efficiency
- ·Greater organizational alignment
- ·Sustainable adoption of emerging technologies
- ·Stronger execution predictability at enterprise scale
Applied Practice Intelligence exists to help institutions build the operational capability required to continuously adapt, modernize, and execute in increasingly complex environments.
Founder & Managing Principal
About
Eric Strauss
"Closing the gap between strategy and adoption."
Eric Strauss is a senior banking and technology executive with three decades of experience leading enterprise-scale transformation across global financial institutions and emerging technology companies. He has served as Managing Director at both JPMorgan Chase and Wells Fargo, where he held full accountability for strategy, delivery, and outcomes across large-scale AI and machine learning platforms, wholesale lending modernization, and data and analytics infrastructure spanning millions of customers and thousands of users.
Earlier in his career, Eric focused on bringing emerging technologies to market and driving adoption at scale — commercializing enterprise networking, metropolitan Ethernet, and VoIP solutions through channel ecosystems, carrier partnerships, and reseller networks across North America at companies including 3Com, Yipes Communications, and Avaya.
Eric holds an MBA from Columbia Business School and a Bachelor of Business Administration from James Madison University.
Contact
Driving alignment. Accelerating transformation. Delivering results.
Phone
Office
268 Post Rd, Suite 200 #905038, Fairfield, CT 06824
Web
appliedpracticeintelligence.com