Who Are We?
Black Oak Partners is a partner-owned company experienced with complex assignments in data collection, data management and data practices. The team has over 85 years Information Technology experience, including data, customer data integration, products and data applications.
Black Oak Partners is associated with the University of Arkansas at Little Rock (UALR) and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) for advanced application research in the areas of Information Quality, Information Sharing and Entity Resolution, allowing us to combine academic research with business insight.
Partners:
Rick McGraw – President and Chief Executive Officer
Rick’s experience is in the technology and financial services industries. He created, led and grew the global government practice for Acxiom Corporation and acquired companies to achieve strategic goals, including an international technology firm providing software tools for homeland defense and national security.
Rick developed industry-leading master data management/information-quality solutions integrating commercial technologies to solve complex challenges profitably and efficiently for the intelligence community.
He spent 13 years in the mortgage loan business, growing and divesting a $2B mortgage operation and serving as president and CEO of a commercial bank’s mortgage company.
Rick holds an ISA/TS clearance.
Larry Burks - Chief Administrative Officer and Chief Financial Officer
Larry is a partner with Friday, Eldredge & Clark, handling some of their largest financial and insurance clients, including banks, brokerages and trust companies. Previously, he worked as an attorney for the United States Securities & Exchange Commission. Larry also was with Ernst & Ernst (now Ernst & Young), working with a variety of Arkansas clients.
He is a registered investment advisor representative and is active with the Arkansas Bar Association, serving on several committees.
Larry Mougeot – Chief Operating Officer
Larry led Acxiom Corporation’s Industry Marketing organization and developed Acxiom’s partner marketing program. Larry was an advertising agency principal at Roberts, Smith, Mougeot and Weathersby and also headed an account service and creative team dedicated to a Fortune 500 telecommunications company for a large regional advertising agency. He is former Director of Creative Services at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences.
Jonathan Askins – Chief Information Officer
Jonathan built and managed the Government Services division for Acxiom Corporation, which led to revenue of over $20 million and a complete new line of products. He has also served as a Privacy and Compliance consultant to many of the nation’s top financial institutions, helping them develop new technology to meet changing regulations and using them to grow market share.
He has more than five years worth of experience on Capitol Hill and with Arkansas state government, helping to develop policy in economic development, transportation, finance and insurance.
Brian Kolo – Chief Technology Officer
Brian Kolo, Ph.D., has over fifteen years experience in the IT industry focusing on scientific modeling and artificial intelligence. Additionally, Dr. Kolo has several years of leadership experience on multi-million dollar projects in both the public and private sectors. His experience includes working for Zifian, Acxiom Corporation and the United States Patent and Trademark Office.
He received a doctorate in Physics concentrating on computational modeling and artificial intelligence. Dr. Kolo received his Bachelor of Science in Engineering Physics from the University of Illinois and his PhD in Computational Physics and Artificial Intelligence from the University of Virginia.