SUMMARY
Senior Manager – Information Technology and Architecture

Consistently ranked as one of the Top 20% Nielsen employees (all divisions) for 10 consecutive years

Multi-certified technology executive with extensive experience managing enterprise implementations of highly available, distributed systems. Proven competencies in implementing effective strategies to optimize business processes, elevate efficiency and improve quality while significantly reducing cost. Strong reputation in delivering simultaneous, large-scale, mission-critical projects within the constraints of scope, quality, time and cost. An empowering and hands-on manager with keen expertise in leading, motivating and coordinating technical teams to provide innovative technical solutions and ensure total customer satisfaction. Capable of multitasking within competitive, multi-platform and fast-paced environments with a dedication to operational excellence.

Project and Operations Management
Strategic Technology Planning
Systems Architecture and Engineering
Leadership, Training and Team Building
Budget Control and Implementation

Customer and Vendor Relationship Management
Software Design, Performance and Security
Systems Security & Disaster Recovery Planning
Quality Assurance
Performance and Process Improvement

Professional Experience

Senior Manager, Information Technology and Architecture 2007 to Present

Project Manager, Information Technology 2004 to 2008

Leader and mentor to a onshore/offshore cross-functional team of 45 IT professionals in the areas of engineering, development and support. Provide expert oversight to a department comprising of a sophisticated portfolio of enterprise applications. Foster a positive working environment with the team to maximize performance and professional growth opportunities. Solidify vendor relationships with companies, such as Oracle, Microsoft, CA, Vignette, Adobe, and Sun. Serve as hands-in technologist and architect for key enterprise technologies.

Key Results:
Implemented an innovative enterprise content management and client portal platform, which successfully consolidated 125+ websites representing 50 distinct Nielsen organizations distributed across 80+ countries worldwide in 20+ languages
Set functional goals, plans, budgets and schedules for all platform deliverables
Lead a team of technology experts in developing company wide solutions related to security, networking, data and content management, cloud hosting, Web Portals, and overall infrastructure
Designed innovative delivery mechanisms to leverage cloud hosting to maximize the benefits of elastic capacity and geographic reach to extend Nielsen’s technical capabilities while controlling costs
Designed new Audience Portal, utilizing Enterprise Content Management, Collaboration, Social Communities, Search and custom Java and .Net to best integrate corporate data sources, applications and knowledge management systems. Leveraged a blend of Microsoft Sharepoint and FAST, Adobe Communique, Apache, Weblogic, Siteminder, EC2 to maximize functionality and the ongoing functional growth within those industry standard technologies to minimize custom development where feasible
Led all efforts in creating Global Corporate Intranet platform serving 40,000 employees worldwide to provide a best of breed collaboration, document management and ideation platform in a single cohesive technology stack
Commitment to simplifying and reducing technology. Reduced the technology stack by 67% from Nielsen.com 1.0 moving to the Nielsen.com 2.0 release, new platform also reduced overall complexity with fewer custom technologies requiring ongoing maintenance
Implemented an onshore-offshore model of working that effectively maintained a standard process for systems development life cycle (SDLC), including key initiatives related to requirements gathering, development, QA, UAT testing and deployment
Maintained and enhanced the Nielsen secure gateway technologies to provide highly secure Siteminder based log-in gateway for single sign on to core Nielsen services
Co-ordinated all platform project delivery timelines across business units ensuring features and enhancements were timed with the overall high level goals of the company
Worked with up/down-stream technology teams to ensure that services required by the portal were in the loop with our current and ongoing requirements. For example, SSO, entitlement, user provisioning, integrated reporting applications
Met with project teams weekly to monitor in-flight tasks, discuss roadblocks and upcoming tasks. Consistently ensured successful on-time delivery of all tasks by quickly finding the root cause of any issues and assisting with brainstorming the possible solutions
Performed regular one on one progress/status meetings with staff to discuss performance and growth opportunities. Performed year end reviews and administered yearly bonus/merit awards within corporate guidelines and policies
Maintained excellent relationships with key vendors through regular meetings, feedback sessions and participating in beta programs. This frequently yielded very positive outcomes for Nielsen when we needed rapid assistance on issues that were roadblocks to our progress, as the vendors frequently went above and beyond to ensure our success
Eliminated production incidents and outages through improved tracking and weekly reviews
Formulated the nielsen.com global portal UI standards that governs the UI standards for all sites hosted on the global portal platform in conjunction with in-house UI and usability experts and an outside vendor
Reduced the amount of rework required by catching issues early in the development process by conducting onshore-offshore code reviews of all submitted code prior to its inclusion within the release
Drove all efforts in the integration of the development and QA disciplines; ensured accurate test case modeling by incorporating QA representation early in the SDLC process

Responsible for corporate DNS, Email, Unix, LDAP, Web and Application servers running on Unix, Linux and Windows. Installed, configured, security hardened and performance tuned wide variety of services and servers.

Key Results:
Designed Nielsen Enterprise Security Gateway architecture providing customers and business units with greatly expanded feature sets beyond anything currently available within the Nielsen company, such as single sign on, branded log-in, certificate and non-certificate zones within URL.s, whilst maintaining stringent standards of security, uptime and reliability
Took on an integral role in the execution of a multi-phase IT infrastructure relocation project, consolidating over 50 servers from four regional datacenters to our global technology center in Tampa Florida
Designed security hardened install profiles for Solaris based UNIX servers that stripped all unnecessary libraries/services
Designed, implemented and maintained load balanced, redundant web portal servers within multiple data centers
Proposed and implemented the adoption of RSA token based two factor security authentication to core network infrastructure servers and appliances
Researched, tested and implemented a variety of tuning techniques for web servers, application servers, LDAP, UNIX, Linux and database connection pooling
Implemented clustered LDAP servers across multiple datacenters
Authored a suite of UNIX scripts in Shell and Perl to automate tasks and improve reliability of repetitive and/or time sensitive tasks
Authored suite of UNIX based utilities in Perl to allow for end to end testing of websites, including cookie collection and login using Siteminder. Integrated these utilities with monitoring software to allow for instant paging in the event of any error encountered by the utility
Installed, configured, security hardened 9 corporate DNS servers
Installed, configured, security hardened 10 corporate Email servers
Built a suite of security vulnerability tools to deliver and monitor malicious payloads within highly secured research honeypots. This network was used to ensure the organization could respond rapidly to specific vulnerabilities, thereby minimizing downtime of production systems in the event of a security breach
Maintained rules in Pix and Checkpoint firewalls for DMZ based hosts
Designed, implemented and maintained key disaster recovery strategies, providing disaster recovery implementation plan for 50 Nielsen organizations

Principal Engineer 1999 to 2001
Offered technical Network and Unix engineering services to Fidelity business units in the United States, Canada, and Japan.

Key Results:
Provided technical consulting services to over ten distinct Fidelity business units across multiple regions
Participated in feasibility study on utilizing Linux as a Server OS within Fidelity Investments
Designed and developed a full suite of tools to interface with back-end systems to automate process and ensure data integrity
Performance tuned and security hardened Netscape and Apache web servers
Configured F5 Labs BigIP for load balancing and automated fail over
Assisted in deployment of Websphere with a focus on web server extensions and allowing clients to automatically update their Websphere configurations remotely
Contributed to Vignette product proof of concept and initial developmental installations
Scripted wide variety of tools to automate administration including: user administration, log scraping, application monitoring and others

Education
BA in Business Administration.

Technology Summary

Project Management Professional (PMP), Master, Enterprise Content Management (mECM – AIIM.org)

Systems:

Sun Solaris, Linux, BSD, Windows 2000/2003/2008

Languages:

Perl, Shell/Batch, PHP, Java, J2ee, .Net, html, Javascript

Databases/LDAP:

Microsoft SQL,Oracle, MySQL, Java System Directory Server, OpenLDAP, Active Directory

Network:

F5 BigIP, Cisco Local Director, Cisco Pix Firewall, Radware Virtual/App Director, Checkpoint Firewall, Snort IDS, Nessus Security Scanner, Analysis Console for Intrusion Databases, RSA Securid, Netcat, Wireshark

Single Sign On:

CA Siteminder WAM, CA Federation, Ping Federation

Portal Servers:

Vignette Application Portal, Adobe/Day Communiqué Portal, Wordpress, SharePoint 2003/2007/2010

Web/AppServers:

Apache webservers, Apache Tomcat, Weblogic, JBoss, IIS

Content Mgmt:

Adobe/Day CQ/CRX, Vignette CMS, Interwoven, Sharepoint

Project Mgmt:

Microsoft Visio, Microsoft Project, Microsoft Enterprise Project Management Server