Krupal Swami
Founder & CEO
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Krupal founded Team SWAMI so she and her team can provide quality consulting services for clients. Her well-rounded background in strategy, vendor management and technology will provide immediate value to client engagements.
Most recently, she had both Technical and Architecture responsibilities associated with the Mainframe at State Farm. Over her career, she led infrastructure and application development teams, a workforce team responsible for strategy and an IT expansion into Phoenix, Dallas and Atlanta. She has extensive experience with large vendor contracts and led the Technology Labor Vendor Management office. Her extensive experience with business and IT strategy brings immediate value to client engagements.
She also spent more than 13 years in consulting for Fortune 500 insurance and financial services companies. An Illinois native, Krupal received two bachelor’s degrees from Eastern Illinois University and joint MBAs from UCLA Anderson’s School of Management and the National University of Singapore’s Business School. She also holds ChFC and CLU designations through the American College. She is also PMP certified through the Project Management Institute and CSQA and CSTE certified through the Quality Assurance Institute.
In addition to work responsibilities, Krupal is actively engaged on several Boards and spends her free time with family and friends. She’s an avid traveler and reader…she’s usually reading a couple of books at the same time and typically has one or two vacations in the works!
Karen Aplington
HR Manager
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Karen joined TeamSWAMI in November 2022 as the HR Manager. She grew up in LaSalle-Peru and moved to Bloomington-Normal to complete her Business Administration degree at Illinois State University. She worked for a local bank for several years and then joined State Farm. For most of her 31 years at State Farm, she worked in or supported Human Resources by implementing both systems and business solutions. She also spent some time as the HR Business Architect and taught enterprise classes on Business Architecture concepts and requirements gathering. She retired in April 2021.
In fall 2022 Karen met Krupal through friends and joined TeamSWAMI. She is excited to use her experience to assist Krupal with building an HR organization for her growing company. Outside of work, Karen spends time with her husband, daughters and their husbands, and grandchildren. She enjoys spending time in Florida at the beach or with Mickey and friends.
When she retired in 2021, Karen had no idea she would have the opportunity to be part of a small, growing company. She is thrilled to use her skills and experiences in this new chapter of life.
Kathy Johnson
Director of Operations
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Kathy (or KJ) joined TeamSWAMI in March 2024 as the Operations Director after retiring from a 38-year career working at State Farm Insurance Companies. She is a passionate professional with proven experience in leadership (both technical and business), product planning, relationship building, problem solving, risk management, customer service, and mentoring/coaching. Her most recent role was as senior director in Information Security. Her teams oversaw data security, encryption, data loss prevention, department budgeting, sourcing, risk management, among other things. Kathy has a passion for helping other people, and mentoring existing and upcoming leaders. She is a servant leader with a focus on ensuring folks have fun, while giving 110%. Kathy is excited to be part of this small, growing company. Outside work, she enjoys spending time with her family (husband, 2 daughters, 2 sons, 3 grandchildren); traveling; bowling; and scrapbooking.
Julie Baller
Principal Consultant
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With over 36 years of leadership experience at a Fortune 100 Company, Julie brings Operations and Agency, Property & Casualty and Financial Services experience with varying spans of control in both regional and corporate environments. She led large scale enterprise start up initiatives in Customer Response Centers and Financial Services, while selecting and developing high performing teams. Julie is passionate about connecting with people to discover what success looks like for both the individual and collective to achieve extraordinary outcomes. On a personal note, Julie enjoys spending time with her family, traveling, Hospice and Hospital volunteering and serving on two Boards, The Baby Fold and The Humane Society of Central Illinois.
Mark Moncelle
Principal Consultant
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Mark has spent more than 25 years engaging in Test Data & Test Environment management, DevOps adoption, and Test Architecture at a Fortune 50 company. Mark has experience at all levels of test data management, from hands-on implementations for single-application test data capture and provisioning, to being the lead architect for one of the largest successful test data privacy programs in the industry. He was the technical lead for the first large scale adoption of open-source DevOps for the mainframe in the industry. Mark has been a regular speaker at conferences, was designated 4 years as an IBM Champion, and nominated as DevOps Practitioner of the Year in 2019.
Larry Turilli
Principal Consultant
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Larry spent over 35 years as an IT Specialist with IBM. During
that time, he led many IBM, customer and multi-vendor teams.
He consulted with projects on the design and implementation of new functionality. He supported MVS, OS/390, z/OS and VSE systems and applications for over 40 years. Larry’s strong technical skills in CICS, CPSM, SOA, z/OS, PL/I, Assembler, COBOL, Db2/SQL, VSAM, REXX, MQSeries and z/OS JCL
ensure solutions delivered meet client needs. His strong diagnostic, analytical, leadership, communication and project management skills provide immediate value with client engagements.
