Personal Details
ADDRESS Fleet,
Hants, United Kingdom
NATIONALITY British
MARITAL STATUS Married, 2 Children
A highly experienced individual with a strong sense of problem ownership and excellent interpersonal skills. A credible and convincing presenter at all levels, with a proven track record of successfully delivered projects. Achievement motivated and equally happy in a senior hands-on role, as a creative pre-sales consultant or as a technical architect/manager.
Accomplished in the management and motivation of teams, with the primary objective of delivering high quality technical solutions to business problems, especially in the Web Analytics and Data Warehousing arena, with due regard to budgetary and timescale constraints.
25+ years
professional IT experience.
20+ years analysis and design experience.
15+ years Data Warehousing experience.
15+ years relational database experience.
15+ years technical leadership/architect experience.
15+ years programming experience using Basic, Pascal, C and C++.
8+ years Web Analytics experience and experience of using HTML and Javascript.
Experience in the
Internet, Digital Media, CRM, Telecommunications (Landline and
Working knowledge of PCs and UNIX, including MS Access, Word, Excel, Powerpoint, Visual Basic, Borland Delphi and Project.
Fencing, Skiing,
Motor Racing (as a spectator), Photography, Marcos cars (Owner),
Recent Roles
I have been involved in the design and deployment of most of Webtrends Data Warehouse/Visitor Data Mart (VDM) projects in EMEA, involving the integration of web analytics data with Client data related to customer attributes. This involves definition of custom events and feeds into and out of the VDM product to provide segmentation and insight into Customer activity by both online and offline attributes.
Trained
in Netezza database appliance DBA and usage.
Converted Oracle/Unix scripts to
Netezza/Unix scripts for major telecoms client.
Developed Backup scripts for same client.
Carried out Web Analytics POC for ISP.
Since returning to WhiteCross I have worked, primarily, in a pre-sales role. This has involved activities including initial sales qualification meetings, development of presentations and sales collateral, collection and documentation of business requirements and the design of solutions to address them, running performance and compatibility tests with hardware and software partners, delivering demonstrations and presentations on a one-to-one basis and at public events, as well as developing and running WX2 database proof of concepts with live customer data and the usual regular meetings and activities and documents associated with the process of moving from an initial contact towards a successful sale.
In recent months,
I have written whitepapers and press releases for Kognitio. I have carried out WX2
proof of concepts for dunnhumby (27 Billion retail transactions, in the
These POC exercises have involved ETL, database design and development and SQL (and some Business Objects, including Universe and report development) analysis, partly in a workshop environment, where customers are able to ask questions and I immediately formulate an SQL query and run it, presenting the results through a tool like Business Objects or Excel.
WhiteCross and Kognitio merged in 2005.
In this period as a Freelance consultant, I worked for O2 for a number of months as a Solutions Designer, responsible for ensuring that customer requirements around the Companion Project were being satisfied by solutions designed by 3rd parties, notably IBM and LogicaCMG. I also acted as a Project Manager for O2 on smaller projects (such as the integration of interconnect charge data into the data warehouse), which was carried out by external consultancies.
In addition, I carried out Pre-Sales work for WhiteCross, database design work and advised on effective design of websites for business insight. I also work part-time as an ICT Technician at my son’s school (providing technical support for the equipment and helping the children become familiar with the computers).
Sand produce and
market an analytic database, similar to Sybase IQ, based upon Bit Vectoring.
Implemented systems are typically analytical CRM in nature and include such
things Prospect Pool systems, Sales and Customer Service analysis systems.
Achievements included the production of Web Analysis positioning documents and marketing presentations for the sales force (within the first month of my time at Sand), participation in requirements analysis workshops in the UK, France and Germany and the successful development of proposals which won Sand business at Vodafone UK, a target account for a considerable time. In addition, I was able to bring a troublesome pilot project at a railway company to an acceptable conclusion.
My initial role at Sand was as a Bid Manager, reporting to the President EMEA, with responsibility for managing bids to customers. This involved carrying out requirement analysis with the customers, producing commercially viable proposals and ensuring that accepted proposals were delivered within time and cost constraints. Sand has a guarantee, under which all proposals are delivered fixed price to a set of agreed acceptance criteria. I was also involved in acting as the technical liaison between Sand and partner organisations, including CSC and Clickstream.
With the arrival of a Vice President for Commercial Operations, the organisation was restructured and I was given the role of Solution Business Development Manager for ISP/Portals. I developed a plan for the development of this business over the next business year and into the following, but Sand decided to focus upon other business areas, before the plan was presented.
Positions : Systems Engineer (Presales) – Consultant - Senior Consultant.
White Cross Systems manufacturer and market a range of Massively Parallel Processing (MPP) Relational Database Servers, specifically aimed at the Data Warehousing and Data Mining sector. The company has customers in various verticals including Telecommunications, Financial, Retail and Utilities.
Achievements included the technical delivery of numerous major systems for Web Analytics and Call Detail Analysis to major blue chip companies, such as British Airways, Channel 4, Freeserve, Cable And Wireless/ntl: and British Telecom.
I was the technical architect and lead technical consultant on the development of the Freeserve Web Analytics systems, which won the 1999 DM Review Best CRM application. This system formed the basis for WhiteCross’ Web Analytics system, which is sold as a managed service to a number of high profile e-businesses, including BA, CNN and Channel 4 interactive. I was responsible for presentation of the White Cross offering to senior board members within these organisations and also took part in a radio interview, contributed press articles and spoke at conferences on advanced web analysis and its value to major organisations, both e-based and ‘clicks and mortar’.
As Technical Manager on such projects, I carried out user requirements definition, system architecture design, data modelling and database design, technical team management, user liaison and training. I also assumed responsibility for sub-contractor delivery.
The technical skills employed at White Cross Systems were varied, (including Visual Basic, C and UNIX shell programming) , but concentrated on the use of SQL, database design and project planning and implementation. Additionally, attained considerable experience in the areas of training and presentation to all levels of corporate clients.
Contracts
Principal developer designing, coding, testing
and implementing enhancements to a call logging system. The system (known as
NICE) used the Client/Server model extensively.
The enhancements involved design and
development of completely new client and server modules and modifications to
existing modules. Coding was in Pascal and C on a VAX/VMS platform. In addition
the system used RDB, SQL, CMS, RMS, CDD and other Digital layered products.
As a member of the Performance Team on the
Control Room Operations system (CROS) for Eastern Electricity, I performed
capacity and index efficiency tests upon the RDB database, validating designs
where appropriate and identifying solutions for areas falling below
specification.
In addition, I was involved in analysing the
impact of changes upon the database with special emphasis on the impact upon
the size of the database and the efficiency of the indexes, and in proposing
and implementing solutions to problems identified by such analysis. I also
converted SQL routines to the latest ANSI compliant standards and used RDB V6.0
and VMS 6.1.
Technical Lead on a number of Data Warehousing
projects, co-ordinating work amongst the team and providing technical and
design consultancy to developers on these projects.
I worked on the analysis, design and
development of Data Warehouse systems for order fulfilment and effort
recording. The work included analysis of requirements, design and optimization
of relational databases and design and development of software in PASCAL, SQL,
CDD Plus, RMS and Datatrieve to build databases. Some work was also carried out
in C and involved interfacing with MS Project. The role involved considerable
liaison with user representatives to identify technical solutions to business
problems.
Analyst designing and writing specifications
for a share holdings management system. This system covered such things as
buying and selling of shares, issues of dividends, bonuses and rights issues
and periodical charging.
I gained experience of, and exposure to, SSADM
and carried out testing of programs produced by a team of programmers.
Analyst/Programmer developing and supporting
applications using PASCAL, Datatrieve and DCL for programming languages and RDB
and RMS as file management systems. Projects included an order fulfilment data
warehouse system and a management reporting system.
While at the DTI, I worked on a project, for the Research Establishments, called REMIS. It used VAX Basic, FMS, RMS, CDD and Datatrieve. My work was a mixture of program development and program enhancement.
|
Period Company Position(s) Systems Used Languages, etc Achievements |
March 1985 - November 1987 Allen Computers International, Programmer - Analyst/ Programmer-Team Leader Digital VAX Basic, DCL, FMS, Datatrieve, VMS Facilities managed a live Point Of Sale system for a chain of DIY
stores. |
Period Company Position(s) Systems Used Languages, etc Achievements |
February 1983 - March 1985 Spectra-Strip Ltd, Hants Junior Programmer -Programmer Wang MVP 2200 Basic, Speed Program Development system Support of computer systems for production of cable and
administration tasks. Design and development of new applications. |
|
Period Company Position(s) Systems Used Languages, etc Achievements |
May 1981 - February 1983 Junior Programmer DEC Stations, Systime S500 + S5000, CBM Microcomputers. Basic (DEC Basic, Basic +2, CBM Basic), RSTS/E. Design and development of bespoke applications for a range of
customers, including a taxi firm, Plessey Controls and a number of bakeries. |
Period Company Position(s) Systems Used Languages, etc Achievements |
August 1980 - May 1981 Stage One Computers, Hants Trainee Programmer CBM Microcomputers. Basic. Delivered demonstrations to customers in office and computer show
environments. Development of elements of an accounting package. |
Education
Professional training courses successfully completed in Netezza Data Appliance DB Admin, Advanced Consulting, Data Warehousing, Project Management, Unix Tools and utilities (eg Perl, Awk, etc), Perl Programming and C++ Programming.
City & Guilds 747 in Computer Programming and Systems Analysis (3 part examination) - 2 Credits, 1 Distinction.
‘O’ Levels in English Language, Economics, Mathematics, English Literature, Geography, Physics, History and Law.