OK Computer

When Howard Melnick graduated college in 1983, the IBM-PC was a toddler, a few pioneers posted text messages to the Internet and “Wargames” taught us never to give a mainframe the keys to your nuclear arsenal.

It could be said that Melnick lived in a culture that generally looked on the future of computing with everything from indifference to trepidation.

“When I graduated, there weren’t many PCs around,” Melnick said. “Computers were the last thing on my mind.”

Melnick followed what he calls the traditional CPA path: earning his certification in 1986, working for a smaller firm before joining what would become Deloitte and Touche, then riding the shockwave of an information technology explosion. Marrying his experience as an auditor to the incipient boom of workstations, servers and enterprise-size networks opened Melnick’s imagination. Today, Melnick is senior vice president of application services for hotel-giant Marriott International.

“I started to see how much you could do,” he said. “I started to see how PCs were putting power into the hands of the user and I saw a lot of opportunity there.”

Establishing a foundation in accounting was the first step.

Booting Up

Melnick graduated from SUNY Binghamton with a bachelor’s of science degree in accounting before heading to Fordham University where he eventually earned a master’s of business administration degree in finance. The New York native took a position with a firm in the city where he got his feet wet in audits and reviews.

Hungry to build his experience, he sought a job with Deloitte, Haskel and Sells, soon to be Deloitte and Touche, where he worked through the summer of 1990.

It was at Deloitte where Melnick worked on a project that required financial modeling with in-house software, sparking his interest in information technology and spurring him to seek training.

“It was much easier for me to learn the technology piece than it would be for a technologist to learn the financial piece,” he said. “You get a lot of skills that are easily transferable. Audits always have deadlines; you have to manage a team of people; now I had to transfer those skills, to help implement systems. I supplemented my work with on-the-job and off-the-job training to get into those technical things. Deloitte had some great training programs.”

The Pepsi Challenge and Beyond

In 1990, a recruiter approached Melnick about taking a job with The Pepsi Company, which was expanding around the world.

“They said Pepsi needed a distributed architecture, putting financial systems in-place across multiple countries,” Melnick said. “That hit my sweet spot. I was out to get even more technical training. I knew a lot about finances, so it was a matter of building financial systems. That grew into other areas.”

Melnick’s career skyrocketed from there. He stayed with Pepsi until 1996, just as the World Wide Web was building momentum, and the company was looking for better ways to wrangle various computer systems that reached across Marriott’s 2,600 properties in 66 countries. They built a “shared-services process center,” Melnick said, to process all the functions that used to take place separately in all their hotels. They also had to convert from their older mainframe computer systems to a client-server architecture.

“The fundamentals took me back to: how do I manage a team? How do I manage a process? That all goes back to being a CPA,” he said.

Today, Melnick is responsible for application development for Marriott’s sales, accounting, management and loyalty systems. He gets into work on any given day at about 7:30 in the morning, reads reports on the activity of the night before, then conducts meetings with teams working on various projects.

On some days, he may spend the morning at his office in Washington, D.C., then fly off to visit one of Marriott’s properties to get a glimpse of how the technology works “in motion.”

“You have to have passion for what you want to do,” Melnick said. “I’m passionate about using technology to create business change to create value for shareholders.

“The CPA credential really opens up options, so you can take jumps into things like technology. In any function, the nice thing about that background is at the end of the day you always have to know how to manage a budget. My background made it so much easier for me to understand how cost flows through a system, how a company makes money. I think there’s a great advantage to the CPA credential.”