Summary

• Confidential a proven Big 5 leader, is highly skilled in all areas of Software Development Life Cycle and has over 20 years of combined experience in Data Modeling Architecture, Systems Integration, Business Intelligence/Data Warehouse systems design and development, Project Management and Data Stewardship/Governance. He has a track record of promoting the use of BI in organizations, gathering and prioritizing requirements, assessing and comparing the complete range of BI tools from databases, ETL, data quality, standardized and ad-hoc reporting and analysis including presentation and access control, and designing, driving and managing complete, high quality BI solutions, on-time and within budget, in large complex projects as well as small focused teams. Confidential communicates effectively and credibly at all corporate levels. As a motivating leader, Mr. Hitchens assembles and develops committed teams and builds consensus. As a strong promoter of the Business Cases for the employment of technology, Mr. Hitchens understands the Strategic, Business Process, and Organizational Changes that drive business performance improvement and are affected by the application of Data Warehousing technologies and effective Data Stewardship.
• He has hands-on experience in almost every conceivable role, ranging from programmer/analyst through data modeling/solution architect to Director Level. Solutions range from stand-alone reporting systems using 4GL technologies to the integration of ERP systems like SAP through leading ETL tools such as DTS and SSIS, Informatica, DataStage, or PRISM with powerful Data Warehouses residing in SQL Server 2000, 2005, and 2008 , Oracle, or Teradata using Business Intelligence front-ends like Microstrategy, Cognos, Business Objects, and Microsoft's SSIS ETL tool , SSAS, SSRS, and development environments including VB including custom-crafted ETL , VBA, JAVA for custom-crafted ETL and .NET. He has designed using ERWin, Powerdesigner, Visio and others. He has direct experience maintaining the highest data quality with custom developed applications and the major DQ tools including Firstlogic, Trillium, Group1, and Apertus.

Following are selected projects and summaries of work over the last 20 years:Relevant Experience

• Senior Implementation Consultant for Confidential, a leading global commodity trade management software vendor. Role involved travelling to vendor's clients in the USA, Chile, Argentina, Peru, and Canada and remote support for Australia to gather and document requirements, gap analysis, and writing specifications for the vendor's developers to customize their products, arrange vendor testing and manage user acceptance testing including writing training materials and training users. Primary responsibilities include specifying Data Architecture and custom ETL to support back office reporting, interfaces to General Ledgers, Data Warehouses, and government agencies. Worked extensively with raw materials mainly metals contract management package with custom ETL integrations to accounting packages and other interfaces written mainly in VB and .NET. Nov 2009 April 2012: Cambridge UK
• Project Manager for Confidential a 9 Billion commodities trading firm. Managed the installation, migration, and integration of two new commodities trading platforms Brady's Trinity and Commodity Software's Aquarius with their GL package Agresso and, following their rollout, worked on integrated analysis and reporting using a custom-developed enterprise BI initiative using Microsoft's BI suite including the Data Architecture of the stars, the cubes, and custom ETL written using SSIS, T-SQL, and PL/SQL . These vital projects required the coordination of multiple vendors and a team from the firm's Trading, Contract Administration, Risk Management, Accounting, Treasury, Credit, and IT departments to ensure a smooth integration between the new systems and with legacy systems. Supervised the testing, validation, and reconciliation of the systems and interfaces before retiring the legacy systems they replaced. This was a hands-on role spanning the planning and coordination of the projects, hiring programmer resources, as well as work using VB, VBA within Excel, both SQL Server 2000, 2005 and 2008 including SSIS for ETL, analysis services, and reporting services, Sharepoint portal, Oracle 9i, and Business Objects' Crystal Reports. Jan 2006 Oct 2009 . The hands-on work involved significant reporting development, Data Architecture, ETL for integration and interfacing, and automatic and ad-hoc data quality detection and remediation with an emphasis on 'getting in front' of the problems. Jan 2006 Oct 2009: Stamford, CT
• As an Analyst on the architecture team of a 100-day project involving a dozen dedicated planners for more than 6 months, scoped and planned the implementation of an Enterprise Customer Master MDM at Microsoft in Redmond. Gathered and analyzed the common requirements of the systems supporting the various divisions including thousands of data elements. Three of four architectural cornerstones were conceived and vetted including business architecture new ways for users to find, add, change, or delete centrally mastered data , application architecture high-level approach and interfaces that resulted in a Web Services SOA model, and information architecture logical data model . Buy/build evaluations comparing several different build alternatives and several leading vendors in the CDI application space. Interfaces to SAP and Seibel were critical success factors. A multi-year plan was drafted and estimated, and funding secured for the initial phases of this pivotal enterprise data mastering application with an expected investment of 10's of millions of dollars. Started Phase 1 using MS SQL Server and SSIS ETL to load prototype 3rd party Organizations database and proved feasability of merging those sources as 'objective' org. trees to seed the master db. Follow on phases to use existing Trillium facilities and dedicated DMO to maintain quality of data. Jan Aug 2005: Redmond, WA
• Managed the enterprise DQ initiative for Gartner in Stamford. Drove the comparison and evaluation of several top-tier DQ products, resulting in the selection of Firstlogic's suite to augment/replace legacy data cleansing and matching tools and then managed an ETL/DQ team to design and deploy the solution. Measurably improved the Data Quality in the Data Warehouse and Operational Systems. Savings on direct mail alone was conservatively estimated at more then 80,000 per year going forward. The implemented systems assessed the quality of data in various systems, cleansed and standardized contact information, de-duplicated and consolidated organizational and individual records in support of marketing and operational systems and provided continous DQ reports to an internal group using custom tools to cleanse and reorganize data. Customized the data models in both the DW and operational systems to support new DQ functionality and tracability. Presented, using a Data Quality Capability Maturity Model, and long-term approach to improving data quality and building a corporate culture to maintain it. The technical environment included Sun Solaris, Oracle 8i and 9i, the Data Architecture to support the DQ processes, ETL built using DataStage and Firstlogic, Crystal reports and other tools and facilities. Oct 2003 Dec 2004: Stamford CT
• Working in the PMO of the United States Tennis Association, implemented new Credentialling, Access Control, Meal Allowances, and Gift Card systems for 2003 US Open Tennis Tournament, the world's largest annual sporting event, at the National Tennis Center. These mission-critical systems shared core data and all had multiple-backup of hardware and software, all tested to ensure full operability by the time the tournament started and throughout the event. Among other things, documented opportunities to improve data quality and reduce duplication in databases. Also
• Engaged by Outsourcing Partners International, a financial systems outsourcer, to design the infrastructure enabling broad international access to applications and servers. Assembled the team, helped develop the vision and create the roadmap. The result was the aquisition of a small firm that met most of the initial needs.
• Hired by FM Global to manage a team to create their Corporate QA Strategy and to test it by managing the QA team on a state of the art customer facing extranet portal implemented with .NET technology. Organized the team, developed test scripts and managed all QA activities that ensured a very successful implementation.

• Managed a team of 6 people on a data warehouse project for Lucent Technologies, responsible for assembling and training the team made up of Lucent employees, specifying enhancements to DW data architecture, data mappings, creating an intial portfolio of reports, and driving the architecture of the OLAP facilities. The team successfully employed a mix of new and more proven technologies Datasweep, SQL Server, DTS for the ETL component, Oracle, Business Objects to meet some very aggressive schedules set by the client. North Andover MA
• Brought in to manage a special consolidation and profitability reporting sub-project for Daimler-Chrysler's Freightliner Division Financial Data Warehouse. Responsible for complete project from establishing requirements, through designing special cost accounting ETL interfaces using ABAP and Informatica, and making custom modifications to Informatica's Data Warehouse Data Architecture, to writing complex consolidation reporting specifications for the Business Objects programmers. The sources of data for the Data Warehouse included SAP interfaces as well as external files imported from foreign affiliates. Complexities addressed included consolidations, inter-affiliate transfers, and profitability analysis. Portland OR
• Evaluated and recommended Digital Asset Management vendors for Target to select the tools used to move them to eCommerce using commercially available packages to replace a home-grown, under-powered system. The dynamic, seasonal nature of the business, and tracking more than a quarter million SKUs meant having to manage as much as 1 million images and other media. Minneapolis MN
• Planned, for 3M, a web-enabled extranet interface to legacy international order entry systems with particular emphasis on handling the tricky documentation and regulatory requirements of the systems. St. Paul MN
• Managed a team of 7 developing the highly customized ETL, Data Architecture, and web-based back-end support systems of an international supply-chain data-warehouse for Arrow Electronics. The custom ETL and support systems included both data management through the client's Intranet and complex rule-driven data cleansing engine written in Java and Informatica and built on a custom product master seeded by a 3rd party database. The data was processed in Oracle and loaded to a Teradata Date Warehouse using Teradata utilities. Melville NY
• Managed the data extraction ETL and cleansing/deduplication with a team of 4 on a Customer Relation Management data warehouse for Doubleday, a division of Bertelsmann. Working at Doubleday's headquarters, my team developed the Data Architecture, data mappings, transformation rules, data dictionary, source code COBOL, Assembler, and Oracle , job streams JCL , documentation, and project plans, developed all program specifications, test plans, and supervised the team during programming the extracts and data cleansing using Group1, unit, integration, and volume testing, and the startup of production. Confidential

• Enabled United Rentals, an initial start up firm growing rapidly through acquisitions, to go into business in time for wall-street announcements. Started the project by evaluating several ETL packages and eventually elected to write a custom solution including all the supporting Data Architecture and Processes. Then lead an 8 person team in the home office to assimilate up to 7 new companies' per week Working at both the firm's headquarters and at each acquired company's retail locations, a team of more than 50 converted each acquisition's financial systems and retail systems between the time it closed for business on Friday or Saturday and the time they reopened for business on Monday morning. This extraordinarily successful project resulted in the conversion of 25 companies with nearly 100 locations nationwide in just over one month and put the firm nearly a year ahead of their schedule for growth. It also provided the roadmap for URI to grow an internal team to continue the acquisitions and assimilate companies at their own pace in an ongoing way. Major technologies on my team were Carlton's Appertus tool for data cleansing and matching for customers , MS Access, Excel, FTP, AS400 retail system Wynne Systems . Greenwich CT
• Managed the migration of claims tracking data from the legacy system RMS to a new client/server system Rdb for Intracorp, a subsidiary of Cigna. This included producing all the project plans, documents, schedules, staffing requirements, designing the supporting Data Architecture modeled in ERWin Enterprise edition , building the conversion matrix and supervising the programmers during implementation. The programmers used Prism and COBOL for the ETL in the conversion. Philadelphia PA
• Reviewed for GE Capital's Real Estate management group, the design of an existing system and proposed a number of enhancements to the Data Architecture and programming and changes to simplify and streamline the systems while optimizing the investment in programming and maintenance efforts. The proposals were accepted and implemented after being expanded to include other divisions of the parent corporation. Underlying technologies employed: ERWin, SQL Server, MS Access, Powerbuilder, C . Stamford CT
• Managed for a Purdue Frederick, a tightly regulated pharmaceutical firm, a team that developed a digital asset management system for the firm's packaging artwork and text, and for the package inserts. The LAN-based system used Documentum, Oracle, Powerbuilder, C , and some FOCUS to design and build a custom Data Architecture and logic for their document workflow system. In addition to supporting complex routing, the system had to secure each approval and positively identify each signature digitally using Smart Cards, pins, user Ids and passwords. Norwalk CT

• Managed for A. C. Nielsen Media Research, a team of as many as 8 programmers to implement an extremely complex reporting system for ratings. The system downloads ratings information daily and produces a wide range of reports. Users of the system are able to define their own reports, store them, and run them as needed. Technologies: FOCUS, Basic, C . New York City NY
• Several projects for Schering-Plough in Union NJ including a marketing data warehouse using Teradata and FOCUS for the BI tool, and a clinical trials tracking, analysis and reporting system using NOMAD.
• Numerous other projects, across Marketing, Financial, HR and other business areas, in the Consumer Goods, Pharmaceutical, Manufacturing, and other industries. Projects typically involved soup-to-nuts SDLC from Solution Architecture through implementation and turnover. NY, CT, NJ, IL, VA, TX, AL

Supported mainly the Ragu and Prince Machiabelli brands, and the Risk Management and Market Research groups with sales reporting systems and Finished Goods and Work-in-Process Costing systems and a risk-managment reporting system. I also ran the internal charge-backs system and consulted with IT development management on the FOCUS and Express database technologies. All solutions included Data Architecture, UI designs, analysis and report development.

Managed the conversion of GF's Cash Accounting system from a Fortran system hosted by CSC to an internal system written in FOCUS.

• Promoted into Management Services at the US headquarters. Wrote sales forecasting program using APL and Box-Jenkins model. Then, for the Coffee marketing group, evaluated offerings from MDS Express and A.C. Nielsen proprietary reporting package and implemented an extremely successful marketing and sales DSS using FOCUS for ETL and EXPRESS for the multidimensional Data Architecture and hosted by Tymshare. White Plains NY
• Originally hired into the Process Control group to write an interactive instant coffee blending application to maintain quality and control package fill-weights. Systems were written mainly in Assembler language on a variety of hardware including IBM System/7, Series/1, and several early microprocessors. Fulton NY

Professional Activities

Frequent speaker at trade meetings and educational symposia. Author of several trade journal and newspaper articles. Chaired the Y2K committee for the National Focus Users Group and chaired a roundtable on the Y2K challenge published in Information Week.