Management Team

Richard Sherman - Founder
Richard Sherman is the founder of Athena IT Solutions. Rick has over twenty years of data warehousing and decision support systems experience. His work designing and implementing relational database for decision support systems began with Oracle in 1982. He has worked on over 50 data warehouse and data mart implementations across many industry groups, sourcing data from a variety of business applications.

Rick has been an expert instructor and speaker at numerous data warehousing conferences and seminars. In addition to teaching at industry conferences, he offers onsite data warehouse/business intelligence training, and teaches public courses in the Boston area. He also teaches data warehousing at Northeastern University's graduate school of engineering.

He has published articles in the data warehousing field in various industry publications, including a monthly column in DM Review called Data Integration Advisor. He has been quoted in Business Week, CFO Magazine, hp.com, and Microsoft Momentum. In addition to his articles, Rick writes for his blog The Data Doghouse, as well as Informatica's Enterprise Data Management blog.

Rick has performed marketing, industry and competitive analysis for several software firms in the data warehousing field.

Rick's background includes a unique mix of software engineering, IT, project management, people management, and consulting expertise. These varied perspectives have enabled him to view data warehousing from various sides of the table.

Rick enjoys working closely with customers to assess their needs and provide business solutions that improve their performance. Rick has been successful at building high performance teams and managing people towards achieving common goals.

Prior to starting Athena IT Solutions, Rick was a director at Pricewaterhouse Coopers. Previous employers include Digital Equipment Corporation, Project Software and Development (MRO Software), Norton, and Bristol Meyers Squibb. Rick has also been an independent consultant specializing in data warehousing. He has an MBA and a BA in Engineering from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and has completed most of the course work for a Masters degree in Computer Science.

Andrea Harris - Marketing Director
Andrea Harris is responsible for marketing at Athena IT Solutions. Her background includes marketing and communications roles at Compaq, Digital, and Honeywell. She has a BA in Management and Communications from Simmons College.