Who is Jacques Lignières ?
Jacques Lignières is an independent consultant in the field of IT.
He is delivering his services since March 2004, when he retired from Amadeus after forty years of experience in building efficient and complex systems in the airlines and banking industries.
His core expertise is to help CEOs and CIOs of large organisations when they have to think about their future organisation – both technical and human - and/or the architecture of their IT systems, especially when they have to decide some costly investments with strong business implications.
Too often, CEOs are alone when they have to operate the optimal synthesis between recommendations given by the business strategic analysts and the technical experts (often judge in their own cases !).
His professional career has allowed him to acquire this double experience: high level of technical competency and top level corporation management with a strong international exposure (and a knowned independence vis-à-vis the IT industry actors).
His very large experience allows him to audit projects very rapidly, to find the reasons of any problems (cost increase, schedule delayed, lack of functional coverage) and to propose correctives actions, and, of course, to perform due diligences of IT systems in case of company purchase.
Strong points of his carrier :
In 1998, he was appointed SVP Development, in charge of all developments activities (2000 peoples located in Sophia-Antipolis, London, Sydney, Boston, Francfort and Miami) as well as President of Amadeus sas (the local company in Sophia-Antipolis, close to 1800 heads) and, as such, sole legal responsible in front of French authorities.
Since 1995, he was in Amadeus – the largest reservation and IT solutions for the travel and tourism industry -, where he was establishing the guidelines for the modernization of the production systems (based on IBM-TPF and Unisys in 95, now mainly on modern technology).
Between 1988 and 1992, he was managing all telecommunications networks and technical infrastructures at Société Générale in Paris, and from 92 to 95 managing all branches IT activities, including application development, technical infrastructure, networks and deployment.
Between 1969 and 1988, he has been one of the key contributor to the IT of Air France.
In 1986-1988, he was the technical leader for Air France of the group of people who built Amadeus – especially, his strong technical knowledge allowed him to draw the basic concepts which has been key in the creation and the success of Amadeus.
Between 1978 and 1988, he was the main architect covering all decisions for the evolution of all IT systems of AF.
Between 1969 and 1978, he was the key people in charge of the real-time reservation operating system, which was built at home in 1971-1972 and is still in production after being ported over 6 or 7 generations of hardware (unique example in the world).
Before Air france, he spent two years in a small company (which became later on GFI), buiding scientific and operational research softwares.
He holds some degrees in mathematics and actuarial science (University of Lyon), is married, grand-father and also father of four boys and a girl. He likes sailing and mountain-skiing.