Portfolio

IT Solutions Leader

30+ year personable IT leader passionate about influencing and delivering admirable solutions seeking an opportunity to join an amazing creative team to thrive, grow and enjoy work with, while giving it a full two barrels.

HIGHLIGHTS

Miro, Microsoft Visio, and Whiteboard aficionado for illustrating complex concepts clearly for all audiences.

Data engineer connecting and integrating cross platform datasets delivering real-time visualizations.

Cloud and premise systems expert delivering resilient infrastructure reliability for complex demands.

RELATED EXPERIENCE

Senior IT Administrator, OPS, Database

Erie Insurance Company

2021 – Present / Erie, PA

  • Lead consolidated data NoSQL database system implementation solutionist, delivering MarkLogic documentDB on AWS EC2 with Terraform IaC in GitLab CI/CD.
  • Product Scrum SME leading IaC advancements for immutable upgrades, seamless migrations, and transparent capacity expansions.
  • Data delivery team partner supporting data modeling strategy and efficiency growth.
  • Refined and leaned immutable automated patching routines, offloading maintenance operations from our team.

Information Systems and Technology Manager

Erie County Technical School

2006 – 2021 / Erie, PA

  • Member of executive leadership team for 15 years decisioning our $6M budget.  Directly responsible for $500K annual IT budget, maintaining technology alignment with education strategy. Proudly achieved lean budget effectiveness over career, accumulating millions in realized financial advantage.
  • Hands-on leader designing, architecting, and delivering low-cost solutions by personally learning, willfully empowering others, and prioritizing in-house success over out-sourcing.
  • Lead IT decision maker and strategy sponsor coordinating with internal, state, and federal stakeholders to acquire grants, maintain standards compliance, and effectively grow operational success under budget with increased capabilities.
  • Led my team of technologists, educational staff, and seasonal interns through device, software, process, and operational advancements with intentional escalation processes maximizing delivery efficiency.
  • Led the migration from on-premise centralized IT to  Office 365 with advanced VDI delivering online  instruction to 1000 students in a cross-platform bring-your-own-technology (BYOT) landscape.  Led the training team to ramp student, faculty, and administration with the new learning management system (LMS).
  • Led delivery of an indoor and outdoor campus-wide wireless network leveraging SSO and dynamic VLAN increasing operational performance, simplicity, and overall network security.  Early adopter of RUCKUS Wireless delivering 40% under budget.
  • Led team of vendors, administration, faculty, and staff through scope, RFP, migration, delivery, and adoption from an aging legacy student information system (SIS) to a modern SIS resulting in improved educational effectiveness with automation, visualizations, and platform accessibility.
  • Led and delivered the transition to virtualization on Hyper-V increasing operational efficiency including  our flagship shared GPU AutoCAD and Adobe Suite HTML5 VDI infrastructure to deliver software from anywhere.

IT Operations Manager
Telatron Marketing Group

2005 – 2006 / Erie, PA

  • Led IT operations center of 15 employees in multiple shifts for 24×7 support and escalation.
  • Led solution discussions for rapidly growing data center to meet business growth strategy and organize IT projects.
  • Worked with CIO maintaining policies and procedures toward regulatory and organizational compliance.

Microsoft Systems Support Engineer

Microsoft Corporation

2004 / Charlotte, NC

  • Provided customer escalation support on Windows Server 2003, Active Directory, Exchange, ISA Server, SQL Server, and SharePoint services.

Technical Support Specialist I

Blair Corporation

2001 – 2004 / Warren, PA

  • Led the deployment of Exchange 2003 and Live Conferencing infrastructure to reduce initiative timelines by 20% and manpower resources by 30%.  Prepared and presented ROI (Return on Investment) and risk analysis of the implementation options.
  • Led the solution and delivery of a clustered Checkpoint NG edge security infrastructure improving up time of mission critical hosted content.
  • Led delivery of advanced network security with SSL VPN web portals extending employee, vendor, and associate access to internal resources while eliminating P2P and VPN overhead costs.
  • Wrote custom Perl application automating near real-time data exchange eliminating operator processes.
  • Provided instrumental expertise with VSE mainframe data integration interconnection project with open systems, assisting with the architecture and implementation of the data format, protocol, and network connectivity.
  • Instrumental leading solution design and delivery team in the automated deployment of Windows XP to 2000 nodes from Windows NT.

IT Systems Specialist

Brooks Sports, Inc.

1999 – 2001, Seattle, WA

  • Key involvement in the design and automated rollout of 100 desktop upgrades.
  • Streamlined desktop support services through centralized software distribution and management.
  • Maintained digital telephone system and carrier contracts.
  • Managed merger of financial applications through a corporate acquisition including real-time data exchange across WAN links.

Electronics Technician / IT Manager

U.S. Navy

September 1993 – September 1999

  • Served as IT Manager of collateral duty team establishing first IT support staff with undesignated crew members.
  • Work-center manager of 10 staff in combat electronics communication technology service and support.
  • Received Navy Achievement Medal for embracing IT above and beyond duty responsibilities and saving $70,000 in outsource expenses by learning and upgrading shipboard network to facilitate email communication and file sharing.
  • Instrumental in connecting the shipboard network to the DOD network through SAT link and Fiber Optics.

CREDENTIALS

  • AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner
  • Microsoft Certified Professional
  • Checkpoint Certified Administrator
  • COMP TIA Network+
  • US Navy electronics depot repair expert
  • USCG-MM 100 Ton Master Captain