Career History

IT Strategy

I help customers define an appropriate strategy for their IT infrastructure based on an understanding of their business objectives.

IT Assessment

I help customers understand at a high level how well their current IT infrastructure support their business objectives and IT Strategy. I make recommendations that improve the way IT enables these objectives and strategies to be met.

Enterprise IT Architecture

I provide recommendations for enterprise-wide IT architectural components required by the customer to support their IT Strategy.

IT Architecture Review

I help customers review their existing IT Architecture and determine their readiness to adopt suitable emerging technologies. I verify that selected technologies meet architectural guidelines and provide advice on the use of standards and guidelines for interoperability.

Transition Services

I help customers develop a comprehensive plan to ensure a smooth transition to a new environment.

• Acted as the chief architect of a major joint project between HP, Telstra and the Australian Children’s Television Foundation to develop an interactive on-line environment targetted at school children based on multimedia content creation and collaboration.
• Acted as the Technology Strategist/Architect for Unix Servers for a major Australian building products, contruction materials and energy corporation.  In this role, I helped define the implementation and deploynment strategies and was responsible for the initiation of several multi-million dollar projects.
• Assisted in providing a migration strategy and project plan for upgrading the systems infrastructure of a major division of a large Australian telecommunications corporation.
• Provided an architecture review of an imaging and workflow project (claims processing) that uses client/server technology at a major insurance company.
• Acted as a lead architect during the initial phases of a enterprise-wide client/server architecture for a major bank. These phases include Scoping, Readiness Assessment, Business Alignment and IT Assessment.
• Performed system architecture reviews of several mission critical applications of a major telecommunications company.
• Acted as a Solution Architect and Technical Team Leader for several tender responses.
• Assisted a major insurance company in extending their existing IT Strategy by developing an enterprise-wide applications architecture.
• As a team leader for the IT Strategy/Architecture practice in FY'95, I was responsible for formulating the practice plan, including the Hoshin and Implementation plans and coordinating team meetings.
• I manage and run a mailing list for IT Architecture on behalf on HP consultants who engage in architecture activities.

• Enterprise architecture and planning,
• Selection of standards and protocols to meet business objectives,
• Use of methodologies and tools in the design of overall solutions,
• Defining, describing and documenting enterprise and specialised systems, and
• Policies and procedures for procuring, implementing and deploying enterprise systems.

• Designed an enterprise-wide architecture for a branch automation and sales platform for a major retail bank. Subsequently, I was invited to participate as part of a worldwide solutions development and marketing team to extend the architecture. The objective is to create an architecture framework for a Retail Delivery Management Solution that will assist retail banks in effectively managing the presentation of multiple products through multiple delivery channels together with a single view of the customer.
• Assisted a major bank in the implementation of a management information and funds transfer pricing system. This involved an initial business analysis phase to determine requirements and to select appropriate funds transfer pricing methodologies, followed by a data extract phase to determine how to extract data from current operational systems into the management reporting system.
• Assisted a major bank in performing the business analysis to determine the requirements for implementing a system to track and measure the Key Performance Indicators of chief managers.
• Conducted an extensive analysis of the support services that NCR was offering to a major banking customer and formulated a unified services strategic plan that linked the various services already offered and identified additional services that could be of value to the customer.
• Evaluated the technical merits of several third party products and technologies for possible inclusion in AT&T product offerings. This included a client/server development environment and a performance analysis and benchmarking tool.
• Assisted a major building society in developing a client/server architecture and applications development environment based on NCR TOP END as a middleware environment.

• AUUG'94 (Australian UNIX Users Group)
• OracleWorld'94
• Client/Server Strategies'95

• Providing systems analysis and design consulting
• Acting as technical leader for pre-sale and post-sale situations (coordination of technical team)
• Project management of customer installations
• Pre-sale activities (account planning, customer presentations, proposal preparation, demonstrations and benchmarking)
• Migration planning and application porting (help identify issues and develop plan)
• Technology selection consulting (such as choosing a relational database or development environment)
• System performance consulting and capacity analysis/planning
• Operational procedures consulting and disaster recovery planning
• Third level support for client/server technologies like NCR TOP END

• Awarded the NSW Branch Employee of the Month twice: once for outstanding work in supervising the resolution of a customer incident, and again for the design, project management and delivery of a system to a customer
• Assisted in the porting of several major applications to the NCR platform
• Helped supervise, construct and execute several major performance benchmarks on behalf of customers and vendors.
• Provided course instruction (on database design)
• Acted as the primary technical liaison to several major database and UNIX software vendors
• Created and maintained an internal mailing list for NCR consultants on UNIX database technologies
• Designed a special purpose transaction management and load balancing system for regulating access to the Teradata decision support system.
• Acted as a technical team leader for various pre-sales (demonstrations) and post-sales (implementations) projects.
• Acted as a project manager for several critical large-scale installation projects, including for a large telecommunications company.
• Supervised the resolution of severe performance issues on two customer sites: a ladies fashion retail chain; and an electrical product distributor. On the first site, the customer was deeply dissatisfied and was threatening litigation if the problem is not resolved within two weeks.

Business Analysis

I was responsible for assisting the Bank in determining algorithms and formulae in the area of financial modelling and risk management, including bond hedging strategies, the construction of special purpose zero coupon curves, exotic option pricing and risk analysis.

Systems Analysis and Design

This involved evaluating proposals for new systems development projects, analysing business requirements and converting business specifications into system designs. I also acted as a technical liaison with the Information Systems Division who was responsible for the implementation of the systems. This involved working closely with the dealing team and their managers in understanding the issues involved and designing a solution that met the business requirements. We typically used the SBV Workbench (based on Excelerator) as a CASE tool, and systems development was done using C and Oracle development tools such as SQL*Forms, SQL*Menu and SQL*Report. Data was stored in the Oracle RDBMS as well as within a proprietary record manager.

Technology Architecture

I was required to evaluate new and upcoming technologies and trends in information system design, including new user interfaces, deal capture and information retrieval, object-oriented design and development, and new hardware platforms.

Systems Maintenance

I was partly or wholly responsible for coordinating the maintenance of some production applications. This includes designing, implementing, and supporting the applications, which included pricing, risk management, trading, deal capture, management reporting and arbitrage.

Database Administration

I was also given the responsibility of administering the Oracle RDBMS, which is used manage the data stored by the trading systems. This involved coordinating and managing development activity involving Oracle, providing technical support to database designers and programmers, capacity planning, and evaluating new tools for database connectivity and access.

• Designed and implemented various pricing tools.
• Designed and implemented a new zero coupon curve for hedging options.
• Consulted on option pricing formulae for the new options trading system.
• Reorganised the Oracle physical database layout and implemented procedures for database backup and recovery.
• Designed a disaster recovery strategy. The strategy describes procedures for migrating users and data from the production machine to the development system in the event of a loss of service.
• Migrated the majority of existing applications from using a proprietary flat-file record manager for data storage to a fully relational data model on Oracle.
• Migrated existing applications from the OSx BSD to System V environment for enhanced portability and long term supportability.

I was responsible for part of the data design of Tesla, and wrote the functional specifications and detailed design of several major components of the system, including:

• A custom-built transaction processor that monitored all database access and auditing,
• Security access services,
• Implementation of all option and hedging instrument pricing models,
• A distributed, real-time fault-tolerant portfolio position evaluation and re-balancing service that replicates and distributes itself across idle network nodes, and
• Graphical display and charting facilities.

• Writing UNIX systems software in C and the Bourne/C shells,
• Installing and updating in-house and packaged software,
• Designing and implementing a backup and restore strategy design, and
• Other systems administration related tasks.

I also participated in the design of a generic Bond pricing library that allowed various types of bond-like financial securities to be priced.

One of my major achievements was porting the money market pricing tools and other applications from UNIX to MS-DOS, allowing the smaller overseas branches of the company access to a critical subset of the dealing applications that ran on the UNIX system. This involved converting all UNIX dependent code to MS-DOS and attempting to fit a large application within the memory constraints of personal computers.

I also participated in implementing some components of the proprietary operating system for the motherboards, including:

• the diagnostic interface (which allows an RS-232 terminal connected to the motherboard to change system parameters and monitor system status) and
• a machine language monitor (which allows interactive real-time debugging of the operating system and control programs).