Summary

 

Twenty years of technical expertise in designing, architecting, developing, and managing web-based, client-server, and Service Oriented systems.  This experience includes analysis, design, implementation, and integration functions in a variety of industry verticals ranging from Nuclear Engineering to high-speed financial systems.  My broad range of industry experience provides for unique perspectives on how technology could and should be used at the enterprise level to augment and leverage existing resources and enhance new business opportunities.

 

Professional Experience

 

Solutions Architect

Kaufman Hall                                  December 2013 – present

Hands-on Solutions Architect for a leading advisory company to senior management and boards for strategic and financial management in a broad range of industries including banking, healthcare, higher educations, insurance, retail, and manufacturing.  Responsible for a guiding an analysis and consolidation of technologies, teams, and processes to streamline operations, reduce costs, and improve corporate flexibility.  Responsibilities included:

·   Provide solid technical leadership to align business needs with technical solutions

·   Provide guidance in best practice and tool use in the design and build of technical frameworks and the applications built on them

·   Architect and implement technical solutions supporting identity management and single sign-on across all corporate systems and the entire suite of next generation financial and collaboration products.

·   Develop and communicate a technology roadmap encompassing software architecture, program architecture, design, and development standards for data architecture, Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) and code management for developing custom web, mobile, business intelligence and business applications.

·   Research, recommend, and implement Proof-Of-Concepts of new technologies, development tools and development methodologies that allow the organization to remain adaptive and maintain a consistent architecture while providing quality products and services to our customers.

·   Partnered with key stakeholders and senior partners to define and conduct competitive market analysis and user research to develop long and short term website and application strategies.

·   Develop and facilitate implementation of architectural policies/procedures for use in conducting enterprise system operations and development efforts, and analyze their overall effectiveness to ensure best practices are incorporated to successfully meet the strategic goals.

·   Lead cloud application architectural design, identify trade-offs, and determine risk-mitigation considerations.

·   Responsible for defining and implementing the Cloud strategy for IaaS, PaaS, SaaS and working across all IT domains and with both internal and external business partners to deliver enterprise Cloud capability

 

Chief Architect / Director of Technical Architecture

OptionsXpress/Charles Schwab                        February 2010 – December 2013

Hands-on Enterprise Architect for a leading real-time Options, Futures, and Stock trading firm. Responsible for driving a major standardization and consolidation of technologies, teams, architecture and processes to eliminate redundancy, improve performance (over 500%), increase flexibility, reduce operating costs and time to deployments. Responsibilities include but are not limited to:

·   Provide leadership and technological expertise to align technology investments with business goals.  Go-to senior resource for developing solutions.

·   Directly accountable for creating and realizing architectures to expedite delivery of new products and services to market while meeting company's cost and risk reduction objectives. Coordinate with senior management and business experts to translate key strategic objectives into actionable and governable roadmaps and designs.  Collaborate directly with VP of Technology on efforts.

·   Design and execute hands-on proofs-of-concept for critical enterprise capabilities, including building business case with costs, benefits, and efficiency measures along with coding the solutions – leveraging C#, SOA / Web Services (WCF), virtualization, and proven Microsoft technology solutions including Windows Work Flow (WF), LINQ, WPF, MVC, MVVM, SharePoint (MOSS), BizTalk Pub/Sub, TPL, along with advanced SQL Server solutions.

·   Collaborated with key stakeholders and internal teams to define enterprise architecture principles, standards, guidelines, and blueprints.

·   Translated business requirements into systems qualities and repeatable design strategies and patterns - focused on adaptability, scalability, availability, and reusability. Personally developed corporate frameworks, key services, and solution templates. Directly accountable for all Schwab integration efforts.

·   Performed design reviews across company and collected enterprise architecture performance metrics to assure continuous improvement. Identified bottlenecks and improved site performance by nearly 300%.

·   Partnered with leadership teams to evaluate technology challenges, define new structures, and build governance model of Enterprise Architecture for business, data, applications and technology within IT Organization.

·   Designed and coded integration platform with Business Partners as well as all functionality for FOREX and other integrated trading platforms using C#, WCF, Web Services, and advanced threading (TPL) in .NET 1.1 – 4.0, C++, and JAVA.

 

Managing Architect

Prime Source Health Care               March 2008 – January 2010

Enterprise and Integration Architect for a large health care company - designed and developed an integrated electronic medical records information system along with a fully electronic document management system.  Responsibilities include but are not limited to:

·   Designed a fully integrated medical scheduling and encounter capture system for use on remote tablet PC’s using .NET 2.0 and .NET 3.5 technologies including LINQ, WPF, WF, WCF, MVC, MVVM, and the Microsoft Entity Framework, along with discreet C++ development.

·   Designed a secure, high transactional volume messaging system for distributing information and medical records information through BizTalk, Web Services, WCF, Windows Work Flow (WF), MOSS (Microsoft Office SharePoint Server), and SQL Server 2005/2008.

·   Coordinated development efforts to align with HIPPA/CCHIT requirements for medical records information.

·   Coordinated with all levels of management, including the CEO and CIO, along with all key business stakeholders on project implementation.

 

 

Enterprise and Integration Architect

LTD Commodities     March 2006 – May 2008

Enterprise and Integration Architect for a large online retailer - responsible for designing, managing the development, and implementing a corporate architecture to enable real-time integration of SAP with nearly 2 dozen enterprise systems along with a mainframe and high volume website.

·   Enabled SAP implementation with 80% less integration cost than initially budgeted – nearly a $4M savings compared to traditional integration approaches. 

·   Developed custom tools to speed SAP integration from weeks or months to hours using the .NET 2.0 and 3.5 frameworks – supporting well over 1 Million transactions per day. 

·   Developed solutions using BizTalk, WF, WCF, Web Services, Remoting, Entity Modeling, and SOA design approaches.  Solutions supported full web-enablement using ASP.NET.

·   Directly managed corporate Integration team and coordinated efforts with Tier 1 SAP consulting firms for systems development. 

·   Authored numerous white papers on SAP integration techniques and the .NET framework and featured as a regular speaker and trainer on SOA technologies and techniques within the ERP Community and SAP specifically. 

·   Implemented an Extreme Programming approach based on test driven development models for use both within the Integration Team and the .NET development.

·   Ensured strategic goal identification and alignment of development initiatives with corporate focus.

 

Director of System Architecture

CorSolutions             October 2004 – March 2006

Director of System Architecture - responsible for architecture, design, coordination of development, and implementation of a healthcare e-commerce and portal site which was dynamic, extensible, high-performance and cross-platform compatible.

·   Architecture supported multiple high volume sites (.NET 1.1 and 2.0) with nearly 500 thousand total and nearly 30 thousand peak simultaneous users.

·   Supported real-time and optimized interval integration patterns connecting more than two dozen insurance companies and 3^rd party partner companies.

·   Designed, developed and implemented numerous SOA based systems to perform tasks such as encryption, drug analysis, data mining, and smart client processing through a guaranteed delivery system that supported dynamic publish and subscribe functionality with full HIPPA compliance – using BizTalk Server, Web Services, TCP/IP sockets, and .NET frameworks. 

·  Designed and developed systems to exchange information with the multiple ERP system (SAP, Oracle, and PeopleSoft) platforms in real time, near real-time and at optimized schedules – with more than 3 Million transactions per day being processed.

 

Director of Development

Chicago Police Department                                                    November 2001 – March 2003

Director of Development for the Chicago Police Department - directly responsible for both the long-term and day-to-day computing programming and applications development operations of the third largest police force in the United States with 16,000+ end users. 

·   Accountable for managing all general software development and directly managed a number of special technology initiatives including Data warehousing, video systems, GIS mapping, and electronic reporting systems. 

·   Trained and directed staff in IT audit procedures - performed IT audits and risk assessments along with developing mitigation strategies for senior command staff. 

·   Implemented and managed to Program Management Office (PMO) standards with full SDLC methodologies in a mixed environment with 6 different development platforms across 23 distributed sites – technologies included VB6, C++ Oracle PL-SQL, Oracle Forms, ASP, and ASP.NET.

·   Directly responsible for coordinating and designing integration solutions into new and existing ERP systems at all levels of City government. 

·   Directly responsible for revitalizing and motivating the civilian programming staff and instituting policies and procedures for efficient operations – effectively “turning around” years of stagnation. 

·   Managed a P&L with a development budget worth over $20 million – generating estimated savings of more than $12 million per year. 

·   Responsible for recommending and negotiating with vendors concerning contracts, services and SLAs.

 

Selected Contracting / Consulting Roles

 

Web Architect / Designer

Baer Supply                August 2004 – October 2004

Consulting Architect and System Designer - responsible for the integration of a web-based e-commerce portal with a multinational distributed SAP/R3 ERP system using C++, JAVA, Apache, and Tomcat. System supported thousands of concurrent active users with full audit support and tested to over 500,000 transactions per day. 

 

Architect / Lead Designer

American Express/Corvus Group                                      November 2003 – February 2004

Consulting Architect - responsible for analyzing, architecting and managing the development of a state-of-the-art, web-based financial mortgage underwriting system written in .NET. Coordinated and worked closely with senior managers, financial investment advisors, and various government agencies to gather requirements, develop test cases, and design the system. Integrated with dozens of governmental and financial institutions including multiple ERP Systems. Developed and tested financial models to be used in the system.  Lead and coordinated the development of and implemented the solution on-time and under-budget.             

 

PACS Manager / Lead Developer

University of Chicago Hospitals                                                         April 2003 – October 2004

Radiology Picture Archiving and Communications (PACs) Manager for the UC Hospitals - directly responsible for the day to day operations and management of Radiology Imaging Software and IT equipment for one of the world’s leading medical facilities. Accountable for integrating systems with existing ERP, HIS, and various mainframe platforms. Personally accountable for overseeing and managing the development of numerous software packages and services used to integrate various generations and types of equipment from multiple vendors as well as providing mechanisms for accurately capturing and generating detailed Management Reports. Designed and implemented “next generation” JAVA and web-based diagnostic systems utilizing HL7, C++, and .NET.

 

Managing Technical Consultant

Discover Card                                                                           January 2001 – October 2001

Managing Technical Consultant - responsible for managing staff in redesigning and architecting core national and international communications infrastructures, client applications, and associated back-end systems for complex financial transaction management and data reliability. Responsible for improving systems infrastructure efficiencies by up to 300% and reducing back-end system loading by up to 500% - resulting in a greatly increased scalability and availability in just the first generation of implementation. Developed detailed documentation and performed CORBA modeling and business analysis utilizing the Rational Rose UML modeling suite. Redesigned, developed and deployed first generation Java components running under IBM Application Server, WebSphere, and MQ Series.