A pragmatic, hands on, results oriented Information Technology
Director driven to deliver business value through innovative use of
technology. A long track record of setting technology direction,
delivering projects on time and within budget and providing process
improvements to enterprise IT services.
- Global IT Design & Architecture
- Enterprise System Design
- Pragmatic Solutions Delivery
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- IT Innovation
- Team Builder
- Multi-Lingual
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- Enterprise System Performance
- Enterprise Software Development
- Enterprise Service Design
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University of Pennsylvania
— Information Systems and Computing,
Philadelphia, PA; March 2012 — Current
The University of Pennsylvania is one of the oldest universities
in America and, as a member of the Ivy League, one of the most
prestigious institutions of higher learning in all the world.
Penn is a diverse institution, including four undergraduate and
eight graduate schools and is one of the world's premier research
universities.
Senior Manager — IT Collaboration Services; ISC
Technical Services,
April 2017 — Current
Service owner for the Penn-branded O365 collaboration (PennO365)
service; on-premise web hosting service; SMTP relay service.
SELECTED ACCOMPLISHMENTS
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Establish and lead an advisory board to help guide development,
updates and configuration of PennO365, representing 30+ diverse
constituent groups on campus. This board consistently gets very
positive reviews for it's transparency and collaborative approach.
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Managed the selection, design, implementation and roll-out of a
central Penn Email sanitation solution for the majority of the 200+
emails Penn domains. This included:
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Design and implementation of a high-availability LDAP service
for managing 450K+ email aliases in use at Penn.
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Design and implementation of a web interface for managing
Email aliases; This includes an implementation of a REST
API allowing constituents groups to automate self-managed
email aliases for specific third level domains with delegated
administration.
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Managed the roll-out of an Email rewriting service option for
additional protection from web based malware such as phishing,
viruses and other malware.
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Manage and implement uplift, replacement and retirement of
multiple 30+ year old software systems, including SMTP services,
web services and bespoke integrations with student management
systems.
Director — ISC Emerging Solutions Office,
January 2015 — April 2017
Provides leadership for strategy, procurement, design and
implementation of emerging solutions for schools and centers at
Penn.
SELECTED ACCOMPLISHMENTS
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Established a centrally managed Platform Service for Drupal and
WordPress, utilizing an external vendor — Pantheon. This
service has enabled many teams on campus to move their content
management systems to a more functional and robust platform as well as
providing significant savings.
-
Collaborating with a researcher at the Veterinary School,
established a process for using GPU enabled virtual clusters
at Amazon Web Services to accelerate the delivery of compute
services for the purpose of molecular dynamics. This approach also
provides significant savings in up-front capital and operational
savings due to avoidance of system maintenance.
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Lead a campus wide team to coordinate Disaster Recovery approaches
using emerging solutions such as cloud, virtual desktops, widely
available high speed internet and
‘bring your own device’.
Solutions Director — ISC Administrative
Systems Project Office, March 2012 —
December 2014
Provided leadership for strategy, design and implementation of global
solutions for Cloud based services for schools and centers at Penn.
SELECTED ACCOMPLISHMENTS
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Working with leaders in Office of General Counsel, Office of
Audit Compliance & Privacy, Office of Information Security
and Purchasing Services established a standard contract template
for procuring cloud based services, significantly streamlining
the negotiation phase of cloud based service engagements.
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Led a project team to establish a proof of concept on-premise
cloud service. Using established processes, implemented a
system to procure and use virtual servers using a ‘pay as you go’ model,
reducing delivery time of virtual hosts from multiple days to
less than four hours.
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Led a project to establish a proof of concept application hosted
on Amazon Web Services' public cloud. The project included a
Virtual Private Network, Virtual Private Cloud, updated cloud
enabled services for a bespoke Java based development environment
and delivered the first public cloud based application for
Information Systems and Computing.
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Engaged industry leading cloud vendors, such as Amazon Web
Services, Google and Microsoft to facilitate engagement with the
Penn community. Organized highly attended and rated vendor classes,
demonstrations and hands on labs on campus.
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Presented multiple classes on using and managing cloud technology
to early adopters of Amazon Web Services.
GlaxoSmithKline, Greater Philadelphia Area, PA;
April 2001 — September 2011
GlaxoSmithKline is a global, fortune 200, research-based pharmaceutical
and health care company, operating in over a hundred countries, with around
100,000 employees. GlaxoSmithKline manages its IT operations centrally and
runs a data centre in Collegeville, PA and multiple strategically placed
data centres around the world.
Director Database & Web Hosting
Integration, April 2009 — September 2011
Provides leadership for strategy, design and implementation of global
solutions for Database and Web Hosting in support of GlaxoSmithKline's
central IT organization.
SELECTED ACCOMPLISHMENTS
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Developed a global outsourcing review model, based on internal
provisioning processes, providing competitive costing comparisons for
external vendor proposals, resulting in $800K/year savings.
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Designed and built a new web service to register, track and
manage all contributors to GlaxoSmithKline (100,000 employees and, for
the first time, 200,000 external contributors), replacing a 25+ year
old system.
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Designed and implemented a SharePoint 2007 infrastructure,
used to host productivity enhancement SharePoint applications for
8000+ US Pharmaceutical sales representatives, aligned with the
central IT strategy of outsourcing collaborative applications to
Microsoft's Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS).
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Designed a 2nd generation
SharePoint environment supporting up to 40,000 external clinical
investigators, based on SharePoint 2010 aligned with a major
R&D initiative, fully integrated with the enterprise
directory, using role based authentication and authorization.
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Defined a database strategy that contains spiraling database
system costs, driving savings of $250K/year by using lower cost
options, as well as a multi-vendor approach to drive competition and
continued saving opportunities.
- Troubleshooter for deep IT problems; examples include:
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Failure of label printers in manufacturing plants, causing
product delays and increased cost. Root cause identified in printer
manufacturer's network stack triggered by a change in trans-Atlantic
routing.
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Identified mismatched configurations on a back end Network
Attached Storage device and Windows Server 2003 web farm, increasing
the performance and reliability of the intranet global web farm.
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Reduced overly complex design and poor system update practices
for global Oracle Real Application Cluster (RAC) systems hosting
business critical R&D and North America sales applications.
Director Internet Systems Engineering,
April 2001 — April 2009
Supported the central IT organization by designing and developing
solutions for internet and intranet technologies which could be
centrally managed and operated and deployed globally as required.
SELECTED ACCOMPLISHMENTS
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Designed a standard web hosting platform for intranet
applications, replacing four legacy environments; Used by all
enterprise web applications, including corporate communications
and employee portal. Payback on the $1M project was achieved in
one year on operational savings. Services over 1M hits/hour.
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Developed and deployed a centrally managed load balancing
solution supporting high availability business critical systems,
integrated with the enterprise directory, providing self-service
capabilities for service owners in the business units.
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In support of the emerging importance of internet based business
models, developed a centrally managed, globally deployed caching
infrastructure used by every user of GlaxoSmithKline's intranet.
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Designed and developed a proxy auto configuration system allowing
all 100,000 GlaxoSmithKline employees optimal, authenticated
access to the internet and specifically improving the performance
of travelling employees by 2 orders of magnitude, as measured by
a low cost measuring system designed and deployed as part of this
effort.
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Managed the GlaxoSmithKline strategic external hosting provider;
oversaw the $2M/year budget and implemented a full hardware
refresh without unscheduled downtime.
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Designed and implemented a time synchronization system, based on
centrally managed network appliances and the existing network
infrastructure, improving security review and incident management
by allowing correlation of events across the enterprise.
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Improved the content management system used for publishing
enterprise content from <95% reliability to >99.99%, using
a combination of instrumentation and six sigma techniques.
Provided a fully automated self-service interface for use by
business users without involvement of IT service analysts.
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Designed and implemented a number of proof of concept
visualization projects designed to improve the efficiency of
service personnel, such as:
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Visualization of a bespoke enterprise inventory system to
better understand component dependencies and single points of
failure.
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Visualization of enterprise change controls allowing for
tighter regulatory control on the full change control life
cycle.
SmithKline Beecham R&D, Greater Philadelphia Area, PA;
April 1995 — April 2001
SmithKline Beecham R&D was the research and development
organization for the global pharmaceutical company. The R&D
organization had around 5000 employees. The IT organization was
globally managed and had major operations and data centres in the
US and the UK.
Associate Director CNT,
April 1999 — April 2001
Supported the R&D IT infrastructure organization by
designing and developing solutions for email and intranet
technologies. In this role also made key contributions to the
‘100-dayt’team tasked with the integration of IT
departments of the former operating companies during the forming
of GlaxoSmithKline.
SELECTED ACCOMPLISHMENTS
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Managed the global external email infrastructure, implementing a
more robust service and support model and team.
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Designed and deployed standardized web-server kits for minimal
effort deployment and improved supportability.
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Member of the ‘100-day’ team which was tasked with
providing integration support and direction for the merger of 4
global enterprise IT teams. In this role contributed with:
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Implementation of a non-connected global phone-book
targeted at travelling executives, providing instant
search capabilities for 100,000+ employees of the combined
organizations.
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Provided strategy and guidance on email and web technologies,
especially around potential integration and simplification of
said services.
Assistant Director Bioinformatics,
April 1995 — April 1999
Supported the R&D IT Bioinformatics organization by designing
and developing solutions for visualization and delivery of
information to researchers in the Bioinformatics area.
SELECTED ACCOMPLISHMENTS
- Managed the development and delivery of web based applications, providing visualization
and database access services to more than 500 researchers world-wide.
- Architect of the web-infrastructure used for the Bioinformatics team.
- Defined the Bioinformatics web-policy, governing the use and infrastructure of web
technologies in Bioinformatics.
- Initiated, maintained and evaluated relationships with business contacts tasked with
custom programming contracts.
- Presented senior management with technology updates and evaluations as well as prototypes
of new technology.
Manager Applications Group, Fox Chase Cancer Center, May 1989 — April 1995
Advanced Programmer Analyst, International Division, SMS,
July 1987 — May 1989
System Availability/Technical Support Programmer, SMS,
September 1985 — July 1987
Ministry of Science and Education, the Netherlands,
Programmer, December 1984 — July 1985
The Hague Institute of Technology (HTS),
The Hague, the Netherlands, B.S. Computer Systems Engineering, 1984
Fluent in Dutch, CIO for a small business enterprise.