Founder & Principal Advisor, OLS Consulting LLC Former Executive Vice President of DevOps Platforms at WPP

• Website: olsconsulting.co
• LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/opherl
• Email: opherl@olsconsulting.co
• Focus: Enterprise platform strategy, scale-up acceleration, AI governance and process guardrails

I've spent over 20 years leading enterprise platforms and technology transformation inside global, matrixed organizations.

The core of that work was architecting and scaling Uhub, WPP's centralized work management and DevOps SaaS platform, across 700+ agencies and 12,000+ active users.

Through OLS Consulting, I advise CEOs, CTOs, and PE operating partners on eliminating operational drag and executing AI roadmaps without slide-deck overhead.

• Global platform (Uhub)

  • Scaled unified work management across 700+ agency entities and 12,000+ active users.
  • Centralized and secured 1.8TB of code across 20,000+ repositories under consistent governance controls.
  • Delivered $3.5M in licensing and vendor savings through tooling consolidation.

• SaaS consolidation & security (Atlassian Guard rollout)

  • Cut Shadow IT Jira instances by 67% and Confluence instances by 42%.
  • Cut the user account footprint by 74%.
  • Generated $3.7M in direct licensing cost savings with a 22.5x ROI.

• ERP & compliance

  • Rebuilt Privileged Access Management (PAM) reviews, cutting monthly effort from 2 days to under 2 hours (over 90% reduction).
  • Built a single source of truth for audit evidence to directly support a multi-country ERP rollout.

• Delivery transformation

  • Replaced email and spreadsheet workflows across 40+ client projects with a tailored Atlassian toolset.
  • Processed 1,500+ service desk tickets in the first month post-launch.

Maps infrastructure dependencies and technical liabilities across an environment, and untangles tech stack fragmentation left by M&A.

Builds delivery discipline that captures the institutional "why" behind architecture and configuration choices, so teams don't hand off hidden context to the next shift.

Gateway middleware that decouples core business logic from specific AI model providers, protecting delivery speed and avoiding single-vendor lock-in.

• Decision Record Toolkit: A Claude Code plugin for capturing architectural decisions and the reasoning behind them directly in source control. Submitted to Anthropic's plugin directory, pending review.
• Field note: Compounding Cognitive Debt — how undocumented context creates invisible operational drag across technical organizations.

2025 – Present Advise on digital transformation, AI governance frameworks, cloud cost strategy, and enterprise platform architecture.

2005 – 2025 Led global work management platform development, cloud architecture modernization, and enterprise SaaS governance for a £14.7B, 130,000-employee global network.

• Global IT Business Partner & Director of Solution Architecture (Young & Rubicam Group / WPP): Built automated website security scanning portal for 700+ digital properties; increased project completion rates by 36%.
• Worldwide Systems Director (Young & Rubicam Group / WPP): Modernized legacy infrastructure for 100+ applications across global shared services; managed and mentored a team of 25+ technical professionals.

• State University of New York at Albany — BS in Business Administration, Minor in Management Information Systems (MIS)
• AWS Certified Solutions Architect
• Google Cloud Professional Cloud Architect
• Applied Generative AI (Google) & AWS AI Practitioner
• Machine Learning (DeepLearning.AI)