Sara Cullen
Senior Consultant

Sara Cullen is a Senior Consultant with Cutter Consortium's Sourcing & Vendor Relationships, Enterprise Risk Management & Governance, and Government & Public Sector practices. She is the Managing Director of The Cullen Group, a specialist organization offering consulting, training, and methodologies regarding commercial agreements. Dr. Cullen was a former national partner at Deloitte in Australia, where she ran the outsourcing consulting division. She has consulted to more than 125 private and public sector organizations, spanning 51 countries, in more than 150 outsourcing projects with contract values up to US $1.5 billion per year.

Her services include audits of providers, contracts, and arrangements; contract and SLA drafting; negotiation; design and implementation of contract management functions; due diligence; feasibility studies and business cases; design of scorecards and incentive/recourse schemes; market and provider assessments; sourcing strategies and approaches; pricing; relationship design, formation, and management; renegotiation and remediation; risk assessment, mitigation, and management; tender strategy, preparation, criteria, and evaluation; and transition (mobilization and/or disengagement) planning.

Dr. Cullen has facilitated contracts in a large variety of organizational areas, including call centers, claims management, construction, facilities management, finance, food services, HR, logistics, IT, maintenance, recreational services, sales, and security. She has designed partnering arrangements, franchise-type agreements, shared risk/reward structures, and incentive programs as well as traditional arrangements.

Dr. Cullen is a widely published author. Her publications include The Contract Scorecard, 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, University of Melbourne, Oxford University, and the University of 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 expertise is globally recognized, and she performs peer reviews of outsourcing research for Harvard Business Review, California Management Review, and European Conference on Information Systems. Dr. Cullen has lectured at many universities, including the University of Seoul, the University of Melbourne, the University of Monash, the University of Swinburne, Queensland University of Technology, and the Royal Melbourne University of Technology. Dr. Cullen earned a bachelor of science degree in accounting from St. Cloud State University (US), was awarded a master's of management (technology) degree from Melbourne Business School, and earned her PhD from the University of Melbourne. She is also a Chartered Accountant in the US. She can be reached at consulting@cutter.com.

Sara Cullen