Mr. Pickering is an innovative expert in data warehouse, business intelligence and data integration. His extensive global experience includes leadership roles such as Big Data Architect on many high profile initiatives. Mr. Pickering earned his Certification as a Business Intelligence Professional (CBIP) with a specialization in Leadership and Management from The Data Warehousing Institute (TDWI) in 2011.

Experience Summary

·                     10+ years of IT leadership, including Program and Project Management, architecture and technical team leadership, and staff management

·                     3+ years of big data architecture, including Hadoop (Cloudera, Hortonworks, MapR, Pivotal HD), Hive, and MPP databases (Pivotal Greenplum, IBM Netezza, SAP HANA)

·                     5+ years of database and data warehouse architecture, including Oracle, IBM DB2 and Redbrick Warehouse

·                     5+ years of data modeling (including relational/normalized and dimensional)

·                     2+ years of BI and data strategy and roadmap development

·                     5+ years of ETL architecture experience, including IBM InfoSphere DataStage, Talend Open Studio, and Informatica

·                     5+ years of ETL development experience, including IBM InfoSphere DataStage and Talend Open Studio

·                     2+ years of data governance, data quality & profiling, and metadata (including IBM InfoSphere Foundation Tools)

·                     2+ years of BI tools, including IBM Cognos, SAP Business Objects, MicroStrategy, and Oracle

·                     3+ years of Agile project experience, including Scrum Master and Product Owner

·                     1 year of MDM architecture & implementation experience

·                     Significant experience at formal training (including content development and delivery) as well as mentoring of more junior team members

Professional Experience

2013 - present

AbstractIntelligence

Chief Abstraction Architect

Mr. Pickering launched this company to revolutionize the Agile delivery of BI and big data projects by leveraging development lifecycle and automation tools, including emerging and open-source offerings. In this role he defined worked on client assignments such as:

Currently engaged as a Solution Architect at HSBC, Mr. Pickering is leading a project to transform the Retail Risk global BI platform by implementing a new Collections BI solution in the cloud.

Working as Project Manager at Loblaw, Mr. Pickering led two infrastructure projects to successful completion. Both included outsourced project teams working in an onshore/offshore model. One project required upgrading the company's Enterprise Service Bus to use the latest version of IBM Websphere Message Broker, the other moved the company's ETL infrastructure to the current version of SAP Business Objects Data Services. Total combined project budget was more than $3 million.

Working as part of a team from Cognilytics Inc., Mr. Pickering was assigned as Lead Architect on a Big Data Architecture project at Fannie Mae in Herndon, VA. At that time, the project was in distress and it failed an internal project quality audit. Mr. Pickering assumed management of an underperforming and dysfunctional project team of subcontractors that had missed key deliverable deadlines. Under his leadership, the team successfully produced several critical deliverables and he was able to negotiate a project Change Order to extend the project. By the conclusion of the project, the team produced a recommendation for a solution architecture for building a Finance Data Repository including SAP HANA for online data storage and Hadoop for near-line data storage. This system is expected to process and load over 300 TB of data including residential mortgage loans and securities information.

Working in partnership with the client, Pernod Ricard North America, a global leader in the wine and spirits industry, he worked as a Data Architect to create a Big Data Strategy. This included meeting with business and I.T. stakeholders to investigate potential use cases, such as in support of a Consumer Engagement initiative. It also included meeting with new and incumbent systems vendors in the "Big Data" space such as Oracle, Pivotal, MapR, and Tableau.

Mr. Pickering served as ETL Lead for an IBM InfoSphere MDM Server v10 implementation project for ICBC in Vancouver, B.C. In this role he worked with the client to define and document data migration requirements, and designed and developed integration processes using IBM InfoSphere Information Server DataStage and QualityStage v8.5. This included installing and configuring the supplied QualityStage standardization routines as Web Services for use by MDM Server.

2012 - 2013

Stream Integration

Senior Technical Architect

As a Senior Technical Architect in the Information Quality Management practice, Mr. Pickering increased his experience with Data Profiling and Data Governance tools and technologies, with a focus on the IBM InfoSphere Information Server suite, especially Information Analyzer, QualityStage, Metadata Workbench, and Business Glossary. He created the company's Agile implementation methodology, StreamLine. He also completed several successful client assignments such as the ones listed below:

Ontario Ministry of Health and Long Term Care: Working as part of an IBM consulting team, Mr. Pickering was the Solution Architect responsible for delivering a data migration strategy that covered migrating data from a legacy distributed application into the Panorama application, which represents the strategic direction for centralized health surveillance within Ontario.

Broadcast Music, Incorporated (Nashville, TN, USA): Mr. Pickering was assigned as Project Manager for an Agile Data Governance and Data Modeling/Replication project for this client in the music rights management business. In this challenging role, he joined an existing six person consulting team that had missed a critical development milestone and was not performing to client expectations. He worked with the client to regain their confidence and lead the team back on track, positioning the project for its successful completion. He also worked with the client to define key metrics for implementation as part of their Data Quality Management initiative, which leveraged Stream Quality Manager as the foundation for a custom data quality dashboard.

Ontario Ministry of Transportation: Mr. Pickering served as the Program Manager for the Road User Safety Modernization Project (RUSMP) / Road User Safety Solutions Branch (RUSSB) Integration Program. RUSMP is an approximately half billion dollar multi-year program to migrate RUSSB off of legacy and 'at risk' technology platforms and onto sound, modern, supportable applications and infrastructure. As Program Manager, he was responsible for planning, tracking, and co-ordinating the work to be done by more than twenty assigned Branch resources over the course of the Project. In addition to this role, Mr. Pickering worked with the Head of RUSSB to define a Data Warehouse Strategy, Roadmap, and Business Case and provide guidance to BI/DW projects within the Branch. This included the evaluation of leading and emerging database appliance technology.

2000 - 2012

Cohesion Systems Consulting

Principal Consultant

Further details on some of the successful client assignments he's completed while working in this role are listed below:

The Bank of New York (New York City): Mr. Pickering defined the application and database architecture for a reporting system for the Bank’s securities accounting outsourcing business. He also participated in the ETL and BI tool selection process and advised the client’s senior IT management on Data Warehouse strategies.

Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce (CIBC) Wealth Management:  Mr. Pickering first worked on a team to build the RRIF data mart using IBM DataStage, then led a team to successfully tune and enhance it.  Then he played a key role in significantly enhancing and extending it for use as a new RRSP Data Warehouse. Mr. Pickering was largely responsible for the enhancement of the data model and redesign of the ETL processes.  One of his design optimizations resulted in significant performance improvements, ensuring the load process met the SLA and reducing storage by half.

CN Rail (Montreal, Quebec): As a Technical Architect, Mr. Pickering was responsible for completing several parts of a proof of concept (PoC) to show the potential for the IBM InfoSphere Foundation Tools, including Blueprint Director, Information Analyzer, Business Glossary, Metadata Workbench, and InfoSphere Data Architect. He also worked with the project team, including external consultants and internal resources, to help define a vision and process for the swifter development of BI and DW solutions in support of key CN Rail stakeholder groups. The scope of this initiative included CN's existing investment in IBM Netezza database, InfoSphere data integration technologies, and SAP Business Objects BI tools.

Texas Health (Arlington, TX): Working as part of a consulting team from Stream Integration, Mr. Pickering assisted the client with data architecture and data modeling for a Cognos and InfoSphere DataStage based BI initiative.

Constant Contact (Waltham, MA): Mr. Pickering served as Data Modeler and consulting team project manager for this Agile data warehouse implementation. He led a team of five consultants and more than four staff resources to implement the first phase of the client’s data warehouse project on time and on budget. Using IBM InfoSphere Data Architect (IDA), he created the data model for the database and assisted with physical database design and tuning as well as with ETL design. IBM InfoSphere DataStage was used for ETL.

Points International: Working as a subcontractor of The BI Builders, Mr. Pickering worked as lead BI Architect/Strategist on a BI Assessment and roadmap project for Points International. On this project, Mr. Pickering conducted discovery interviews with Points’ executive and management team, including the CEO, CFO, CMO, and CIO. Based on the findings, he created a conceptual architecture and multi-year roadmap for the company’s strategic BI initiative.

Telus: As Solution Architect and Project Manager, Mr. Pickering was responsible for initiating a project to implement a data governance dashboard and scorecard within the client’s BI/DW group. The heart of this solution included automated semantic matching of semi-structured and unstructured data using public domain Natural Language Processing algorithms. Informatica Metadata Manager was used as a central metadata repository and collector, and matching was developed in Java.

Katz Group: Mr. Pickering refactored the data model for the Pharmacy Data Mart using CA ERwin. He installed and configured a proof of concept (PoC) Greenplum database environment and created and loaded schemata for two key historical data sources. For this project, the entire platform was built using open source software including Fedora Linux, Greenplum database, and the Talend Open Studio ETL development environment. Mr. Pickering created the Transformation routines using Talend Open Studio.

Standard Bank of South Africa (Johannesburg, South Africa): Mr. Pickering helped clarify the expectations for this project to improve the client’s data integration development capabilities. He led a workshop introducing BI to Standard Bank’s IT staff and assisted the client in setting up a PoC environment for IBM Information Server Version 8 and its components including Metadata Workbench, Information Analyzer, QualityStage, and DataStage.

Dofasco Inc. (Hamilton, Ontario): As part of a consulting team from Capgemini, Mr. Pickering served as Data Architect on Dofasco’s strategic, multi-million dollar Manufacturing Execution System redevelopment project The project included implementation of new, business-critical transactional systems as well as significant modifications to existing systems. Mr. Pickering also had primary responsibility for the redesign of impacted aspects of the client’s Decision Support Environment (DSE). His architectural approach was based on Business Driven Development, a variant of the Rational Unified Process (RUP).

Ontario Ministry of Health and Long Term Care: As a subcontractor of Cognos Consulting, Mr. Pickering assisted the client in configuring and tuning a replicated reporting database for the iPHIS System in Oracle 10g. This included enhancing PL/SQL replication scripts and recommending performance and architecture improvements. Reports were created using Cognos ReportNet.

Loyalty Management Group: Reporting to the Senior Director, Marketing Products, Mr. Pickering restored the Strategic Targeting Analysis & Results (STAR) data warehouse application to full operational capabilities following a significant outage and period of instability. Once the portfolio was stabilized, he initiated the four million dollar STAR Scalability Project to increase system capacity by migrating to a new hardware platform and new software versions, as well as addressing architecture, design, and support process issues.  The migration provided at least a tenfold performance boost, with one marketing campaign that would have previously taken over 40 hours to execute completing in less than 4 hours.

Syncrude (Fort McMurray, Alberta):  Mr. Pickering helped the client define the scope and implementation plan for their ten million dollar enterprise data warehouse initiative. His work enabled the client to align objectives and gain senior management approval for the project in half the planned time and under budget.

1998 – 2000	Oracle Corporation Canada Inc.		Managing Consultant
1997 – 1998	Red Brick Systems, Inc.		Consultant
1996 – 1997	Manulife Reinsurance	Senior Systems Analyst

Education

B. Sc. (Computer Science), University of Toronto

Certified Business Intelligence Professional, The Data Warehousing Institute

Training

TDWI Orlando World Conference & CBIP Preparation, The Data Warehousing Institute

Ascential DataStage Essentials

Oracle Data Warehouse Method

Ralph Kimball Advanced Data Warehouse Course

Red Brick Internal Technical Training

LOMA Level 1 Certificate - Introduction to Insurance

Introduction to Project Management, Pape & Associates

Systems Testing and Quality Assurance Techniques, AIT

Publications & Presentations

A paper on data warehousing written by Mr. Pickering was published in the 1999 edition of The Handbook of Data Management.  Another paper on the subject of Time Variant Dimensions was included in the 2000 edition.

Mr. Pickering spoke on “Data Warehouse Architecture Best Practices” at the BI/DW Special Interest Group of IRMAC in December, 2005. His presentation can be found online here.

As a member of the Boulder BI Brain Trust, Mr. Pickering participates in regular briefings with BI, Analytics, and Big Data vendors of all types and sizes, and keeps current on industry trends and leading practices.

Technical Skills

Hardware:	Unix Based Systems Linux (Red Hat, SUSE) VMWare DEC Vax/VMS Windows Server SAN (EMC, Hitachi, IBM)	Tools:	Oracle Warehouse Builder, Designer, Discoverer, Express; Siperian MRM; Deft; Erwin; IBM InfoSphere Data Architect, InfoSphere Information Server (DataStage, QualityStage, Information Analyzer, Metadata Workbench, Business Glossary), Cognos; Informatica PowerCenter; Talend Open Studio 4; Brio; Business Objects XI, Data Integrator; MicroStrategy; MS Project
Languages/App’s:	Java, ‘C’, SQL, Visual Basic, Ingres 4GL, Hadoop; SAP, Oracle Financials, IBM InfoSphere MDM Server	DBMS’s:	Pivotal Greenplum 3.3, 4.2; Oracle 9i, 10g, 11g, Express, Exadata; IBM DB2 UDB, Red Brick Warehouse, Netezza, BigInsights; SAP HANA; HortonWorks HDP; Cloudera CDH; CA Ingres; Microsoft SQL Server