Rick Thorp is a former Cub Scout leader and a long time Information Systems expert who is convinced that if Lancet employees take care of their personal lives, their work life will flourish. Like his fellow Flounders – and a good Scout Master -- Thorp sees the benefits of allowing individual strengths to be pooled for the collective good of clients and finally the company. As Lancet’s Vice President of Research & Development, Thorp’s title is really more for legal reasons. Like Niccum, Holtan, Plante and others at the burgeoning software and consulting company, he plays many roles in the long range and day-to-day operations both in-house and off-site as the company continues to win new business and service current clients.
In the field, Thorp is focused these days on the Best Buy account where he and his team of Lancet workers and Best Buy staff have devised a backend analytical system powered by MicroStrategy that relies on a custom user interface designed by Lancet. It allows Best Buy employees to access business information they need with greater ease and confidence. In the Internet age, heavy users manuals are history, while single portal delivery of corporate information for all users is golden.
A large corporation such as Best Buy benefits greatly from the ability of its staff to run different reports without sacrificing consistency. So Lancet provided the company with the opportunity to work with similar screens that are better streamlined for visual and intuitive navigation. Today business information can flow faster and be better-managed and analyzed for greater operating efficiencies and profit margins.
Thorp’s senior level experience at companies such as Best Buy is the result of more than 20 years in the Information Systems arena. He initiated his computer studies for two years at the University of Minnesota’s where he also studied Math and Astronomy. Following a nine-month course in Data Processing at the Minneapolis Technical Institute, Thorp moved to the real world in 1981 where he worked in the University’s Department of Medicine, programming and rewriting billing software. In 1983, he joined Hennepin Faculty Associates where he worked for five years as a data processing manager, eventually growing the department and overseeing a staff of seven and more than 200 operations.
The next two years were Thorp’s first taste of entrepreneurship with his own company where he did consulting and some software development before joining David Mitchell & Associates in 1990 “to break into a new field, working with new technology and systems.” While at Mitchell, Thorp worked with 3M (where he met Plante and Holtan), Pillsbury and others, developing prototype information systems. At Pillsbury, he also helped develop a package design system and general support systems for sales and marketing.
In 1995, Thorp left for LifeRate where he became its IS Director. While he worked in the healthcare area, he also received a good education “in how not to handle people or do fund raising.” Looking back on that genesis period for Lancet, Thorp says the Flounders decided then that any company they might want to work for should be less about the technology and hierarchy and more about how to run a genuinely good company where a variety of experiences could make a difference in that company.
Thorp’s areas of expertise include web development and design, tools MS SQL Server, Oracle, Sybase, MS Internet Information Server, Active Server Pages, Java, JavaScript, Dynamic HTML, MS Visual Basic, MicroStrategy DSS, API, IBI, Focus, MS Windows 95 and NT. An advocate for telecommuting, Thorp works often from his home in Stacy, Minnesota.
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