About Onyx

The Onyx Story

Bridging the Gap between Business & Technology

Onyx was founded by Dan Blaney after he recognized a recurring theme in IT during his 20 plus years of working on technology projects and developing IT programs for Fortune 500 and insurance companies. He needed the flexibility that a fresh start, independent of the rigid, traditional corporate ownership offered so he resigned as President with his current technology organization and started a new company.

The repeating theme was that both the speed of technology improvements and the rapidly changing business environment far outpaced the ability of IT to deliver solutions that kept the company competitive with the marketplace. Companies are well aware of the issue and fund initiatives to address it, but fall short because they fail to address the underlying causes. In order to keep pace with what can be done technologically, companies must apply a solid decision making approach to what should be done to drive growth and improve the bottom line. This is often out of balance because neither the business units nor the IT department understands and appreciates the other. Competing business department agendas for scarce technology resources create evolutionary stagnation and unnecessary complexity.

To avoid the common pitfalls in updating the technology capabilities of the organization Onyx applies a consultative mentoring approach. Starting with a project team consisting of Onyx consultants and customer staff that are a mix of industry experienced business resources and technology resources, Onyx evaluates and determines improvements for each core building block (process, people, and technology), builds out the new operation, and then runs the new program alongside the customer until the customer is ready and able to run it independently.

In the early years, Dan worked on testing and refining the approach as he worked on several carrier and large hospital system implementations. In 2015, when the ground work was completed, the first cornerstone customer was signed and the organization built out to deliver on the original vision for Onyx.

Today, Onyx is headquartered in Cheyenne, Wyoming, with satellite offices in Denver, Colorado, Canton, Massachusetts and Omaha, Nebraska.

The Onyx Timeline

2016-2019 – Executing the Strategy

Onyx begins operations in Omaha, NE

Onyx begins operations in Canton, MA

2015 – Establishing the Foundation

Onyx is retained by Boston Mutual as the outsourced IT solution provider

Dan Blaney named Chief Information Officer of Boston Mutual

With the groundwork completed, Dan establishes a consulting practice and recruits industry experts in project management, program building, information security, and IT operations roles

Heads of Business Development and Administration are added to build out the core Onyx operating units

Onyx begins operations in Denver, CO

2012-2014 – Proving and Refining the Approach

With each project the Onyx methodology is refined and improved to provide maximum effectiveness and return

Operating as an independent consultant to the insurance industry, Dan provides guidance to senior management on approaches to revolutionize their most entrenched, aging, and costly IT programs