Sara Cullen Senior Consultant

Sara Cullen is a Senior Consultant with Cutter Consortium's Sourcing & Vendor Relationships and Enterprise Risk Management & Governance practices. She is a former national partner at Deloitte in Australia, where she enjoys a leading profile and is one of the nation's most experienced practitioners. Dr. Cullen specializes in commercial agreements. These include audits of suppliers, contracts and arrangements; cost and service level baselining; contract drafting, negotiation, and reviews; design of contract management function; due diligence; feasibility studies and business cases; KPIs and incentive/recourse schemes; market and supplier assessments; outsourcing strategies and approaches; pricing; project management; relationship design, formation and management; re-negotiation and remediation; risk assessment, mitigation and management; service level agreements (internal and commercial); selection and scoping of activities to be outsourced; tender strategy, preparation, criteria and evaluation; transition planning.

Dr. Cullen has consulted to 94 private and public-sector organizations spanning 51 countries. She has worked in a large variety of organizational areas including call centres, claims management, construction, facilities management, finance, food services, HR, logistics, IT, maintenance, property, recreational services, sales, and security. She has designed partnering arrangements, franchise-type agreements, shared risk/reward structures and incentive programs in addition to traditional arrangements.

Dr. Cullen is a widely published author. Her publications include Intelligent IT Outsourcing, Outsourcing: Exploding the Myths, Contract Management Better Practice Guide, Best Practices in ITO, Lessons Learnt in Outsourcing, Service Provider Management, Outsourcing Guidelines and Outsourcing: What Auditors Need to Know, in addition to research with various universities since 1994 including the London School of Economics, Melbourne, Oxford, and Warwick. She has been featured in such publications as Australian Financial Review, Business Review Weekly, Computerworld, Directions in Government, European Journal of Information Systems, Information Economics Journal, Journal of Strategic Information Systems, Information Technology Report, Insurance Directions, Oxford Handbook, MIS, and MISQ Executive. Her outsourcing research has been reviewed by Harvard Business Review, California Management Review, and the European Conference on Information Systems. Dr. Cullen has lectured at Melbourne, Monash, QUT, and RMIT Universities.

Dr. Cullen earned a BS in Accounting from St. Cloud State University in the US; she was awarded a Masters of Management from Melbourne Business School, and earned her PhD from University of Melbourne. She is also a Chartered Accountant in the US. She can be reached at consulting@cutter.com.

For more by Sara Cullen:

• Service-Level Agreements: Articulating What Will Make a Successful Deal
• The 40 Fundamental Clauses in an Outsourcing Contract