Steve Morgan

Steven L. Morgan is the Chief Technology Officer for Bella Pictures – the largest and only national provider of wedding photography and videography, where he supervises the day-to-day operations of the Information Technology and Software Engineering & Development groups. He has led the development and strategy around ecommerce and multi-brand development using Drupal at Bella http://bellapictures.com, http://studioblue.com, http://sabelstudio.com.

He is responsible for overseeing all technology at Bella, including the IT operations and software development departments. As head of technology, he works closely with all the production teams to create next generation products and services as well as run the day-to-day technology operations of the company. With over 20 years of experience in the technology business - on both the creative and management sides of the business - Morgan has developed expertise in CRM and SAAS technologies, IT, production, media, project management and software development, as well as internet & ecommerce technologies.

Prior to Bella Pictures, Morgan was the head of technology for Simon & Schuster’s (a CBS company) digital division. In this role, Steve was instrumental in implementing Agile/SCRUM practices division-wide resulting in the launch of a whole new website in nine months on SimonandSchuster.com in Ruby on Rails (ROR).

Before Simon, Morgan spent nearly 9 years with Oxygen Media (an NBCU company) purchased at the end of 2007 for just shy of $1B. As CTO of Oxygen he was responsible for all technology operations and development. In order to balance the priorities of a rapidly expanding media company with the priorities of a successful and profitable television business along with other emergent trends such as internet and mobile, Morgan took the lead at expanding the use of Agile [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agile_software_development] and SCRUM [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scrum_(development)] practices across the entire business. These techniques were embraced by the executive team as well as other creative and operations teams at Oxygen to help prioritize and self organize around the top missions and priorities of the company. These practices led to the expansion of new product lines such as Ript, a direct to consumer software product for the women’s market – http://ript.com

Morgan joined Oxygen as part of an acquisition of the Intype Internet Publishing Company in 1999, where he was Director of Software Development for the publishing platform. During his tenure at Intype, Morgan focused on all aspects of architecting and pioneering new web publishing techniques as well as day-to-day operations of many exciting parenting websites such as babynamer.com®. Morgan successfully led the consolidation effort in 2000 to integrate Intype’s technical resources then located in Seattle, Washington into a single consolidated platform and team located in NYC.

Between 1986 and 1993, Morgan held several key positions at US West Communications (now known as Qwest Communications) one of the seven regional telephone companies. In these roles Morgan focused on operational and engineering excellence as well as project management. From 1993 to 1997, Morgan was Director of Software Engineering for a startup ISV called Alki Software that produced shrink-wrap software products in the commercial market place. Many of these products were licensed and distributed by Microsoft as part of its successful Office product suite.

Morgan graduated with a BS in Electrical Engineering in 1986 from Washington State University. He currently resides in San Ramon, California with his wife, daughter and son.