About Dane Thomas

Career Biography (aka: The much longer version)

I'm an IT service management consultant and accredited course instructor with more than two decades of experience helping organizations in Sweden and internationally put best practices to work. I currently serve as Senior Management Consultant, International Business Coordinator, and Course Instructor at BiTA Service Management in Stockholm, where I combine strategic consulting with classroom instruction for clients ranging from growing businesses to large multinationals.

My work centers on IT Service Management, organizational change, process optimization, risk management, business continuity, and digital transformation. I'm as comfortable in a boardroom as in a classroom, and I deliver both consulting engagements and certification training in English and Swedish, backed by accreditations across ITIL, DevOps, and IT support frameworks.

At BiTA, I advise clients on how to absorb IT and operational change with minimal disruption, mentor stakeholders through best practice adoption, and build and deliver customized courses and workshops in English and Swedish drawn from more than 30 accredited certification programs. I've directed the development of IT Asset Management and Configuration Management guidelines for one of Sweden's largest insurance organizations, run an IT Support Customer Satisfaction Improvement project for a national housing provider, and launched the firm's English-language consulting and educational offerings, opening our work to organizations across the EU and beyond.

In addition to my work with BiTA, I deliver instruction and consulting through Amsonia AB. I hold accreditation with PeopleCert, HDI, DevOps Institute, DASA, and HIT Global, and Accredited Training Organizations such as Cornerstone, Learning Tree, and Peopleteam regularly engage me to deliver certification training. My certifications and accreditations are listed in full on the Credentials page. To date, I've taught more than 400 courses to over 4,500 participants from more than 300 organizations worldwide. Repeat engagements account for 93% of my course deliveries, and my average customer satisfaction is rated above 4.8 out of 5.

From 2012 to 2019, I was Senior Business Consultant at ELITS Global Group AB, leading IT infrastructure and digital transformation work for multinational clients in Sweden, Germany, the United States, China, and Canada. I improved the number of mitigated risks from 12% to 56% for one large multinational's risk management program, coordinated changes that consolidated enterprise data storage from 27 supplier-owned facilities down to three, and trained more than 300 people across eight R&D centers spanning 15 time zones during a global ITSM platform rollout.

As a side project, I co-founded Power Steering Consulting GmbH, planning and managing functional fitness competitions in 10 countries across Europe and the Middle East. Before that, I held IT service management and consulting roles at Olingo Consulting AB and Stockholm County Council, supporting a service desk that handled up to 10,000 cases a month and leading continual service improvement work.

I have lived in Sweden since 1998, and worked in many other countries besides. In most of them, I have been the outsider, the foreigner working with people in their own country, their own culture, and often their own language. Doing that well for more than two decades taught me to adapt to the room rather than expect the room to adapt to me, to read what a group actually needs and adjust, not just deliver the material. That is where my belief in open minds and a range of perspectives comes from. I did not adopt it as a value. I learned it as a necessity, and it made me better at the work.

Outside consulting and teaching, I'm a professional travel and event photographer. My father taught me the basics on his Pentax Spotmatic in California in the early 1970s, and I've had a camera with me ever since, from hitchhiking through Europe as a teenager to shooting events in ten countries. Some days I work at 40 frames per second; on others I slow down with a camera older than I am. Every photograph on this site is my own, and you'll find more at danethomasphotography.com.

My career actually started in healthcare. During the 1990s, I worked as Lead Physical Therapist at the Steadman Hawkins Clinic in Vail, Colorado, and upon moving to Sweden, I authored a meta-analysis of sports medicine research for the Swedish Olympic Committee before moving into research coordination at Karolinska Institute and then IT coordination at Astrid Lindgren's Children's Hospital.

I hold a Bachelor of Science in Physical Therapy from Loma Linda University, and I've built a portfolio of professional certifications since: ITIL Master, Strategic Leader, Managing Professional, Practice Manager, and accredited instructor (ITIL 4 and ITIL (Version 5), including AI Governance), DOI DevOps Foundation, DevSecOps Foundation, Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) Foundation, and DASA DevOps Fundamentals Accredited Instructor, HDI Support Center Analyst and Team Leader Instructor, and Certified Privacy Practitioner (GDPR), among others.