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Work Background
Norbrook Laboratories ltdSenior IT Architect
Sep. 2024Newry, Northern Ireland, United Kingdom
Thompson Aero Seating LimitedBusiness Systems Manager
Jul. 2024 - Sep. 2024I am thrilled to share that I have started a new position as Business Systems Manager at Thompson Aero Seating today. I look forward to contributing to the TAS mission and collaborating with my new colleagues to achieve great things going forward.
WrightbusHead of IT
Jul. 2023 - Feb. 2024Northern Ireland, United KingdomWrightbus has been a hugely interesting role for me marking the first time I have worked in the automotive manufacturing industry. I was required to manage the IT department within the business, a team of 14 people providing a number of essential services covering IT networks and infrastructure, software development & maintenance, business intelligence and reporting, and critically to oversee the upgrade of internal IT systems and migrate the company to a new ERP solution. I've been involved in many projects during this time, a brief summary below: Upgrade of existing software solutions to latest supported versions Working closely with business stakeholders to take advantage of new software features
Implementation of a new fibre & wifi network infrastructure in buildings that were perviously unused - making them more useful to the business The rollout of a new Zebra handheld computer solution (for stores & stock management)
Rollout of new centrally managed, site wide WiFi solution Implementation & migration across to new hyper converged infrastructure server environment Implementation of new workstations along the factory floor - to enable better capture of information relating to the manufacturing processes
Procurement of new core & access switching infrastructure for the site (including new ring fibre network)
Provisioning of 2 x new sites in Oxford
Early stages of new Malaysia manufacturing site - ramping up production in an existing facility Implementation of new CCTV facilities - both in existing and new parts of the site to secure company assets
Ongoing ERP project - evaluation and selection of new ERP solution to replace end of life solution in place currently.
firmus energyIT Manager
Jan. 2021 - Apr. 2023My primary responsibility at Firmus Energy was to formulate a 5-year digital strategy with budgeting to be approved by the Utilities Regulator regarding future IT and Systems spend for the organisation and to implement those plans as part of the organisation’s digital transformation process. A short summary of my Firmus specific achievements is included below: • Formulating Digital Strategy & Vision plan – 5 year plan with utilities regulator oversight on budget
• Improving Cyber Security – introduction of a number of improvements & technologies to bolster cyber security stance • Legacy Datacentre Migration - planning & delivery of physical DC private cloud to Microsoft Azure migration. As well as the technological transformation this would result in a significant capex and opex savings in hosting & management costs over the 5 year GD23 budgeting period • Corporate HQ Infrastructural developments • Mobile working initiative go-live
• Hosted SCADA telemetry data processing system • Data Archiving & Backup Improvements • New Supply Billing Solution • New mobile GIS mapping solution • New Gas Distribution system • Client-side workstation / Windows 10 improvements • Rollout of modern Microsoft client technologies
• IT involvement in new smart metering solutions PQQ
Etain LtdCTO and Services Manager
Nov. 2016 - Jan. 2021Belfast, United KingdomMy goal was to oversee and improve the company’s software development methodologies, to manage the principal developers and technical architects and to introduce new technologies that would streamline software development, increase efficiencies, and reduce cost of delivery. As part of this role, I was also required to work closely with the infrastructure team to modernise the internal hosting infrastructure for both software development teams and hosted customer services – primarily to move away from internal virtual hosting (which had its shortcomings in terms of performance, resilience and reliability) and to move towards fully managed hosting services for customers. I also worked closely with the Etain customer services team - improving service levels through automation for our customers. This was a very useful opportunity for me to get to know our customers better - to meet with them, discuss their level of support, and crucially to determine any new possible business opportunities. A short summary of my achievements in Etain is included below: • Introduction of Azure DevOps • Internal Infrastructure improvements
• Introduction of fully Managed 24/7 Private Cloud Hosting • Introduction of Azure public cloud hosting - IaaS, SaaS but primarily PaaS • Fostering new development mentalities and cultures – promoting a sense of pride in what the teams were doing, “show and tell” Friday sessions, encouraging staff at all levels to “speak up” and make suggestions on how we could do things better / smarter – moving best ideas to adoption via weekly TA forums • Working with Sales & Marketing to help win new business – from the PQQ / tendering stages, working with all teams to ensure we were shortlisted, meeting with prospective new customers to “convert” into sales where needed
• Partnering with customers to help them improve on their use of IT technologies to help them grow their business – building trust by working closely with senior executives
Totalmobile LtdHead of Technical Services
Jan. 2008 - Sep. 2016Pilot Point, Harbour Estate, BelfastAs Head of Technical Services I reported directly to our COO and was responsible for all technical operations within the company - internally within our own offices & externally within our data centres in Citywest, Reading/Harrogate & Azure Cloud. I was responsible for ensuring that IT infrastructure was operational during prime service hours of 8am-6pm ensuring the company was unaffected by disruptions caused by outages in critical services such as E-mail, Phones, Sharepoint, Finance and CRM systems & Development / Testing services - scheduling & overseeing any proactive or reactive work that was required to achieve this goal including attainment of ISO certifications, BC and DR plans. Equally importantly the operations of our hosted solutions needed to be managed - it was critical that customers who paid for our hosted, fully managed services received excellent levels of performance and reliability - they depended upon ourselves to ensure their TotalMobile solution were "always on". An important function of this role was to assist the pre-sales, sales and account management teams with business development - whether new or existing. For new business development this would involve assisting with PQQ and tender responses, on site demonstrations of the solutions, meetings with senior IT management and individual ICT departments responsible for server builds, networks & security - anything that was required to satisfy new customers we were a "good fit" for their solution requirements. For existing customers it was equally important to build upon the relationships forged at the start of new projects, to assist them with support / performance issues, IT projects both internal and external - to be someone they could call upon within TotalMobile to take their problem and run with them - a "champion" role who could liaise with other teams within TotalMobile including Top Team, Customer, Project, Integration Services and ultimately Software Development if required.
Totalmobile LtdTechnical Services Manager
Jan. 2003 - Jan. 2008Technology Park, AntrimMy role as Technical Services Manager was predominantly about supporting our customers, both internally within the company and externally with their on premises installations or the ones we managed on their behalf in "the cloud". At that time we had 3 x offices - Technology Park (Antrim), Innovation Centre (Belfast) and ultimately US offices in Westborough (Boston, MA). We also had a number of data centres to maintain by that stage in Bletchley (England), Citywest (Dublin) and Clifton (New Jersey, USA). My role during this period was to ensure that all of these facilities stayed operational during the working day as per the service level agreement agreed with each customer, both internally for TotalMobile itself and customers who paid to host their solutions with us. The goal was to ensure we routinely hit our availability target which was a minimum 99.99% uptime during core working hours for each of the respective customers, typically 8am to 6pm but often outside these hours if negotiated. The SLA was backed up by service credits if we failed to meet these targets, which generally was not an issue - we were consistently successful in meeting these targets exceeding expectations in most cases.
Totalmobile LtdIT Manager / Technical Design Lead
Jan. 2001 - Jan. 2003Technology Park, AntrimAt the start of the ".COM" era we had a good solid Windows solution that was gaining adoption among our user base. More and more customers wanted to move away from UNIX towards Windows and importantly towards centralised storage of their data in relational databases where it could be accessed more openly by 3rd party tools. Although we take this for granted nowadays the ability to take a valuable pool of data, e.g. finance information, and access it from other applications using tools like Crystal Reports, Excel etc was quite new. Up until that point data was often held in data stores that were difficult to access flat file / C-ISAM formats if you were lucky, alien/proprietary formats if you were not. Many new customer had the internal skills needed to build and manage these new IT systems, the requisite Windows, SQL-Server, Oracle skills were available to them. However for a few they wanted to be able to take advantage of these new technologies without committing internally to the infrastructure and skills needed to build and manage them. At this time I assisted our CTO to come up with a new delivery method for our customers - ASP, or "Application Service Provision" - a delivery mechanism that allowed customers to access hosted client / server solutions through the Internet, a one stop shop to a fully managed service for Consilium to deliver our solutions. At this time I was working with our CTO and partners to design and build this hosted "platform for the future", a pre-cursor to SaaS / PaaS. This involved working closely with BT, our chosen hosting partner, to design, build and deliver a hosted platform in Bletchley, England that would offer customers a 99.99% SLA, fully managed, with secure Internet connections both into the DC and to each other if required. We not only had to host our own solutions but those of some other companies we successfully partnered with at that time, for example Sx3/Northgate, Lagan and others.
Consilium TechnologiesPrincipal Software Developer
Jan. 1998 - Jan. 2001Technology Park, AntrimThe primary differentiator between a senior and principal developer is the ability to make decisions which may not conform to an established pattern - to be able to "think outside of the box" using analytical, interpretive and evaluative thinking - to not only oversee decisions made by others, but importantly challenge those decisions and propose new ways to achieve the same result with minimal direction. Self motivation is important, with both the ability and desire to drive those decisions through to operational effectiveness - ultimately resulting in business success. This is less of a technical skill, more of a mind set change than anything. During this time I was able to take the skills I had building our solutions in code, our physical development platforms and work more closely with the development director, CTO and CEO to assist with moving the company forward technologically - to provide technical know how to make excellent, well informed business decisions, to avoid "dead ends" in technology terms. Around this time we were building our new Windows product - I already had an in indepth knowledge of building windows based software at Xerox, so was able to take what I knew about man machine interface design, human factors, WIMP / GUI software design along with Object Oriented programming and low level WIN32 API's and apply them to the early design of the new TASK NG application. I was able to apply knowledge of low level WIN32 API calls and message handling to enable us to build significantly richer controls for the new apps. It's fair to say there was a lot of "questionable" software available at the start of the Windows generation - many "Windows versions" of applications appeared that were poor. The challenge for us was to build our new applications to be as close to MS Office as possible - the reference standard for Windows apps for the time, a goal we met - our new software was very elegant in operation and very efficient, fast and easy to use.
Consilium TechnologiesSenior Software Developer
Jan. 1995 - Jan. 1998Technology Park, AntrimAs a senior developer I was asked to investigate the options for re-engineering our then COBOL / UNIX product for the growing Windows platform. Up until that time WfW (Windows for Workgroups) was used for some desktop applications, Office Productivity applications, e-mail etc, but our core solution still ran as a UNIX "terminal" application, either on a dedicated hardware terminal (e.g. from Wyse) or increasingly commonly inside a terminal application running inside Windows, with access to the UNIX server through serial or later TCP/IP 10-baseT LAN's. As a result the level of integration with Windows was poor - interaction using the mouse and pointer, use of tiled windows, context sensitive help, user friendly "do anything any time" operation of the apps were all missing from these older terminal based apps. As part of this role I looked at which development environment would replace our Micro Focus COBOL development IDE, they included Microsoft Visual C++, Microsoft Visual Basic, PowerBuilder, Micro Focus's own Windows product and finally a relative new comer from Borland called Delphi. We evaluated each and determined which could be suitable for the task at hand - while some were more powerful than others, or easier to use than others, we needed something that would provide the performance expected from our new solution, with support for Object Oriented design we knew we needed to make the job possible, and importantly excellent native utilisation of the relational database engines we needed to use for storing and managing data. After much deliberation we settled on Borland Delphi Enterprise Edition, which turned out to be an excellent choice, in hindsight we probably would never have been able to get our product to market on time using any of the other development systems - each had their weaknesses that ultimately could have significantly delayed development, or stopped it altogether - the dreaded "dead end, start again" scenario.
Task Software LimitedSoftware Developer
Sep. 1992 - Jan. 1995Antrim Technology ParkWorked in a small team of 5 developing INFORMIX-4GL applications for UNIX platforms - the solutions were for Northern Ireland Councils initially, later to be sold into councils in ROI and England. The new solution would allow Environmental Health Officers from NI councils to perform their daily routines carrying out inspections, collecting samples, dealing with complaints & prosecutions and monitoring and following up with actions relating to their visits on retail shops, wholesale, offices, catering facilities, restaurants & hotels, residential care homes and leisure and cultural events. The information gathered from this new system was also used to automate the production of the annual MAFF (Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food) return monitoring each council's progress to UK central government. I also worked on COBOL finance solutions around that time, as well as an internal CRM solution that was used by our own helpdesk. As part of this we were able to add on a user defined reporting tool that allowed the users to select the the columns needed in the report, the views it was taken from, the grouping and sorting, custom joins, presentation and selection criteria prompted for - experience that would prove useful for a similar financial user defined reporting solution later when we rewrote our COBOL finance products for Windows client/server model. Working with the INFORMIX SE and Online database engines in those early "pre-windows" days gave me a good solid understanding of SQL and prepared me for the work we carried out subsequently on our new Windows client/server product using SQL-Server and Oracle. Some of the concepts used in those early "green screen" applications such as full form searching using wildcard operators ("A*", ":>10", "100:200" etc) were later borrowed for our Windows based products and helped differentiate our products from competitors at the time.
XeroxInterLISP-D Software Developer
Mar. 1985 - Jul. 1986Welwyn Garden City, HertfordshirePlacement Student with Xerox UK based in Welwyn Garden City. I developed a rapid prototyping system called HyperTrillium that allowed Industrial Designers in a Human Factors department to develop touch screen interfaces for industrial copiers and laser printers in the newspaper industry. I worked alongside hardware designers to optimise a "tile" based system of storing graphics for physical electronic systems. The resulting interface design tool was a runner up in the Xerox Innovation competition that year since it allowed designers to use their tile designs to build working prototypes that were used to benchmark and user test the interface designs without the use of silicon. I was lucky to be the only student to have ever been nominated for this award although unfortunately I didn't get to go to PARC (although was lucky enough to visit EuroPARC). Although short the time spent at Xerox was an amazing experience, I was privileged to work with some of the first "WIMP" / "GUI" systems that ever existed, including the now legendary Xerox 6085, Daybreak, Dandelion and other workstations that later formed the basis for Apple's Lisa and ultimately Mac computers. I was fortunate to gain in depth experience developing in some of the earlier Object Oriented development systems, InterLISP-D and Loops, languages that ultimately spawned Smalltalk and other OO development environments we take for granted today.
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