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1234567891011121314Resume 3Tim HarrisonChicago, Illinois Executive Summary 10 years of extensive experience in web and client / server technologies covering all phases of project development including business requirements analysis, architecture and design, user interface design, module and component construction, testing and quality assurance, and implementation. Specializing in multi-tier web or traditional client / server projects using Microsoft server and development technologies. References are available upon request. Certifications
Industry Experience Insurance, Manufacturing, Construction, Real Estate, Chemical, Accounting (Audit), Packaged Software Development Technologies
Publications Author of "UDC Care: A Case Study" published September 1995, in Paradox Informant magazine. Copies are available upon request. Engagement History Please note that some projects are done concurrently with other projects and that the projects done at St.John University are research projects for St.John and not professional experience per se. Richter InsuranceJul 2001 – Jun 2002 B-PLUS Application The assessment I wrote for Richter in November 2000 was reviewed and a migration plan was approved to improve the architecture of the B-PLUS application. I was contracted to assist in this effort. The majority of my time on this project has been spent between development and production support. As part of the B-PLUS team I am assigned various production support issues that arise. Sometimes those issues are simple data changes, sometimes they are complicated bug fixes in the application code. The development time is spent adding new features to the application required by the business customer and cleaning up the existing code by separating logic into presentation and business tiers. A data tier was also proposed but has not been approved to date. The eventual goal being to have a thin client with the majority of the presentation logic and a server-based business tier. In July 2001, B-PLUS was one large client application. The effort has been largely successful. New features have been added on time and on budget while significant improvements have been made to the structure and stability of the code base. The overall footprint has decreased despite additional features because of increased code reuse between areas of the application. Technologies Used: Visual Basic 6 Enterprise Edition, COM, DAO, ADO, IBM DB2 Universal DatabaseResponsibilities My responsibilities as architect and developer for Richter were as follows:
Jan 2002 – Mar2002 ABC Clearance Web Site The ABC Clearance web site was created to allow United Kingdom producers to clear business for ABC in the United States. After ruling out modifications to the B-PLUS client application, a web application was decided to be the best solution. Over a 12 week period, the site was created from scratch, including about 3 dozen ASP files and associated includes and 3 middle tier business objects. The ASP pages were written with Visual InterDev with integrated SourceSafe. The business objects were written with Visual Basic 6. The business objects returned data to the ASPs in a custom XML format. The MSXML component was used to create and parse these XML data streams. Photoshop 6 was used to create the images for the site. As with other Richter web applications, the site is served on IIS 4 and goes through the Webthority proxy server which handles SSL and LDAP-based authentication. Traditionally, a significant amount of work has gone into working with the Webthority team to test the security of the site and to ensure maximum availability. Technologies Used: Active Server Pages (ASP), Visual Basic 6 Enterprise Edition, COM, HTML, ADO, MTS, IBM DB2 Universal Database, IIS 4, XML, Webthority, LDAP, JavaScript, VBScript, 128-bit SSL Responsibilities My responsibilities as architect and developer on this project were as follows:
Feb 2002 – Mar 2002 Word Sense Disambiguation Word Sense Disambiguation is an ongoing project at St.John, in conjunction with the WordNet project at MIT, to identify the context of a given sentence based on the words in the sentence and their relationships to other words in the sentence. For example, when a human is given the sentence "He sat on the river bank and watched the boats go by," the human knows that the person is not going to a bank to finance a boat. A computer might make that mistake because it is difficult to identify what context of bank is meant. My work on this project was to create a web-based front-end to the application which accepts a sentence and attempts to identify the context. The site consisted of only a single JSP and several classes. Technologies Used: Java Server Pages (JSP), Java, Tomcat / Jakarta, Windows 2000 Server, Borland JBuilder Enterprise Edition Responsibilities My responsibilities as programmer were as follows:
Aug 2001 – current AI Search This is an artificial intelligence project which uses various algorithms to optimize the contextual accuracy of Internet search results. Given a particular search criteria, the application then measures the relevance of all database documents, reporting the most relevant documents back as search results. The Java classes implement a number of mathematical measurement functions to determine relevance. Technologies Used: Java Server Pages (JSP), Servlets, Java, Microsoft Access, Tomcat / Jakarta, Allaire JRun, Windows 2000 Server, Borland JBuilder Enterprise Edition Responsibilities My responsibilities as programmer were as follows:
Oct 2001 – Feb 2002 B-PLUS Document Generation Server One of the most time-consuming tasks involved in using B-PLUS in the generation and printing of various forms and letters. Before this project it took between 40 seconds and 2 minutes to generate a given document in the field. The same document only took 10 seconds or so when generated local to the database. The overhead was due to the slow connections between field offices and the home office and the massive number of database queries required to generate a given document. I proposed offloading the document generation task to a powerful server in the home office. A request would be initiated by B-PLUS in the field, the server would receive the request, generate the required document, and return a completion result. The documents were and continue to be stored on a file server at the home office so the document itself did not need to be sent back across the network. The solution was implemented as a web service using SOAP and the accompanying components. The document request was sent via SOAP, collected by the SOAP Listener on the server, and then the documents were generated. A significant amount of componentization of the B-PLUS logic was required to make this work. The document generation logic was eventually hosted in MTS and was separated between several objects. This was one of the bigger successes for B-PLUS as the average time for document generation went down to 3-4 seconds in the field. The generation time was better than expected due to the server actually generating the document much faster than in the field. The server was a dual processor, 1 GB machine where the average field machine was an older Pentium model with 32 MB RAM and most users having Lotus Notes loaded simultaneously, i.e. very slow machine. Technologies Used: SOAP 2.0, Visual Basic 6 Enterprise Edition, COM, DCOM, HTML, ADO, MTS, IBM DB2 Universal Database, IIS 4, XML Responsibilities My responsibilities as architect and developer for Richter were as follows:
Jul 2001 AON - Web-Based Field Quoting Application AON was in the process of writing an web-based application to allow agents in the field to capture customer information at the customer site, get online, submit the information, and retrieve a quote for the proposed coverages. The application was to be run on the agent s laptop using Personal Web Server. A local SQL Server database contained the customer and quote data and was replicated with the master SQL Server database in the office. I was brought in to assist in meeting the proposed deadline and became responsible for the web application. The architect directed me to create an XML document definition to contain the variables captured in the customer coverage application interview. Each page would collect the data, insert it into the XML document, and pass the document to the next page to persist the data. All of this was done using ASP written in JScript and JScript classes. Technologies Used: Active Server Pages, JScript, HTML, Visual InterDev 6, IIS 4, XML, MSXML Responsibilities My responsibilities as developer for AON were as follows:
May 2001 – Jun 2001 TelePlus TelePlus is the online system that claims operators use to take claim information over the phone. TelePlus is mostly a COBOL application with a semi-GUI front end. Richter is in the process of replacing the front end with a web-based front end served in the Internet Explorer browser. My responsibility was to review all front end screens and document the conversion of those screens to web page equivalents. I was also required to review the COBOL code and identify key business logic which could be moved to an NT middle tier. Technologies Used: COBOL, HTML Responsibilities My responsibilities as business analyst for TelePlus were as follows:
Nov 2000 – Apr 2001 JPI Legal Bill Review System Richter receives over $200 million in legal bills from over 700 law firms which it does business with. Ideally, each legal bill is audited for compliance with the services agreement between Richter and the law firm. The average legal bill is generally 10-20% overstated. In other words, the majority of law firms charge Richter more than they are allowed to in their agreement with Richter. Unfortunately, only a handful of internal auditors are on staff to perform these audits and, hence, the vast majority – over 80% - of the legal bills go unaudited. If these legal bills could be audited, Richter would save millions per year in legal fees. The JPI system allows law firms to submit legal bills to Richter electronically for payment. The system performs an automatic audit on the invoices in the electronic document based on a set of threshold rules and math checks. Some reductions are made automatically. Other invoice line items are flagged for manual review by internal auditors. The system then provides tools for the auditor to do the audit more quickly. After an invoice is complete, an Explanation of Payment (EOP) is sent to the claim adjuster and made available to the law firm via an online "inbox" provided by the external site. Emails are sent to the adjuster using AspQMail and Lotus Notes. As architect and developer on this project, I was responsible for designing and building the manual review interface and for designing and building an interface which allows admin personnel to set up law firms, agreements, roles, timekeepers, and other key items in the database. I was also responsible for overseeing the design and construction of the law firm interface as well as implementation of certain business rules in the overall system. I was responsible for maintaining the DB2 and SQL Server 7 versions of the ERD. DB2 was the production database but both Access and SQL Server 7 were used in prototyping. I was responsible for the architecture of the system overall and its integration with existing Richter facilities. I was responsible for selecting and configuring the web server and application server hardware. External user logon is performed by Webthority against the enterprise LDAP server. The proxy server maintains the 128-bit SLL certificates. The web sites are hosted on two web servers with business components residing on an application server. The web servers have hardware-based load balancing using Network Dispatcher. The web servers are running NT 4 with IIS 4. The application server is running NT 4 and ADO 2.5. Data access is restricted to the application server for security reasons. All business and data access components are located on the application server and referenced on the web servers via DCOM. The internal web site is comprised of almost 9,000 lines of ASP code across over 30 web documents. A single COM object is used and is comprised of over 3,000 lines of Visual Basic 6 code. The invoice loader application is an additional 2,000 lines of VB code. I was responsible for the code reviews of the external site and the EOP object. Technologies Used: Active Server Pages (ASP), Visual Basic 6 Enterprise Edition, COM, DCOM, HTML, ADO, MTS, IBM DB2 Universal Database, IIS 4, XML, LEDES EDI / XML specification, SQL Server 7, Webthority, LDAP, JavaScript, VBScript, saFileUp, AspQMail, 128-bit SSL Responsibilities My responsibilities as architect and developer for Richter were as follows:
Nov 2000 B-PLUS Architecture Migration Assessment This was a short, two week engagement. I was contracted by Richter to analyze a small, 2-tier application written in VB with an IBM DB2 Universal Database backend. The application was originally intended only for departmental use. The application was very successful and popular, though, and had been rewritten and / or extended for three additional lines of business. I examined two versions of the application and documented a migration path to convert them from the 2-tier architecture to a scaleable 3-tier architecture using VB and COM, ASP, MTS, and the existing DB2 database. I analyzed each form and code module in the VB application and documented the complexities of the forms and the functions in the code. I itemized the tasks for separating the application into 3 tiers. I assessed the current IIS infrastructure and made recommendations for maximizing performance, scalability, and availability. I also assessed the possibility of deploying the application using CITRIX nFuse as a quick method of getting the application out to users on the web. Finally, I assessed the challenges in interfacing the application with existing or pending CORBA Java components using a COM / CORBA bridge or SOAP. Technologies Used: Active Server Pages (ASP), Visual Basic 6 Enterprise Edition, COM, HTML, ADO, RAO, DAO, MTS, IBM DB2 Universal Database, CORBA, IBM WebSphere, Java, Java Beans, CITRIX, IIS 4, SOAP, XML Responsibilities My responsibilities as enterprise architect for Richter were as follows:
Sept 2000 – Oct 2000 Internet Web Site Hippo.com s original Internet site was built using a 2-tier architecture. When I started at Hippo my first responsibilities were to help them finish moving the original site over to a 3-tier architecture using ASP, VB COM, and SQL Server 7. I was responsible for the RFP functionality, the region maps, modifications to property searches, and the Hippo Direct functionality. Each area required five to a dozen functions in a COM object and usually a half dozen stored procedures. Once the site had been migrated to the new architecture, it was moved to the production servers. The Hippo Direct and RFP features both used CDO and scheduled NT processes to automate sending of user email messages. Hippo did not have a replication architecture in place prior to my arrival. They also did not have separate development and staging environments or solid code promotion procedures. I contributed significantly in planning and deciding how to implement replication and how to design and promote between a multi-stage server environment. Technologies Used: Active Server Pages (ASP), MS Visual InterDev 6.0, MS SQL Server 7.0, DTS packages, all types of SQL Server replication, Windows NT Server 4.0, IIS 4, HTML, JavaScript, VBScript, Transact-SQL, ADO, PC AnyWhere, MS Visual Source Safe 6, Microsoft Transaction Server (MTS), SMTP, Collaboration Data Objects (CDO), Visual Basic 6 Enterprise Edition, COM Responsibilities My responsibilities as a web developer and SQL programmer for Hippo.com were as follows:
Aug 2000 – Sept 2000 Nalco Project Proposal DRS contracted me as an interim practice manager for their new e-commerce practice. They had an immediate opportunity with Nalco that required quick business requirements gathering and analysis. I attended several client meetings with the DRS account manager to interview key client personnel. During these interviews I documented the requirements of the applications needed and other details which I would use to assess the complexity of the project and estimate an accurate work effort. After the client interviews I went back and broke the project down into several stages for each application. For each application I identified technologies which I believed would yield the best cost-benefit ratio. For each stage I identified the resources needed and assigned tasks to each resource. When the project plan was complete I created a formal project proposal which documented the overall scope of the project and detailed costs and schedule estimates. Once DRS approved the project proposal, we submitted it to the client. Technologies Used: Lotus Notes 4.6 / 5.0, Microsoft IIS, Microsoft Access, Microsoft Project, various other technologies considered including SAP and Oracle Responsibilities My responsibilities as interim practice manager for DRS were as follows:
Apr 2000 – Jul 2000 EOR, BADA, QARM, Fraud, BPO, BRCA When I first started at Bill Thompson, my responsibility was to learn the EOR application and to begin debugging the existing version. When a bug is reported, a System Investigation Request (SIR) is created by the tester and assigned by management to one of the developers. I completed several dozen major SIRs, the application was promoted to production, and the EOR code base was used to generate additional applications: QARM, Fraud, BPO, and BRCA. Each application was then customized to the specific requirements of the application sponsor. There were approximately 100 ASP pages, written with VBScript, in the EOR application with a significant amount of embedded JavaScript routines. There were also about 50 SQL stored procedures and several COM objects served via MTS. The database used was SQL Server 7 running on NT 4. One of the other responsibilities I had was to manage a daily data migration between application data stores on several SQL Servers, some V6.5 and some V7.0. The migration code was encapsulated inside of several DTS packages and scheduled with the SQL Server Agent. The packages moved approximately 600,000 records each day, some requiring BCP due to translation of code page specific characters to Unicode (nvarchar). Replication was investigated, proven, and is due to be implemented in the environment soon. Several application components and modules were written in Visual Basic, compiled, and promoted to production to run when needed or on a scheduled basis. One of the applications used CDO and SMTP to automate emailing statistical reports to management. Another task required me to use the Wise Installation system to create installation executables to install EOR-based applications on multiple web servers. The installation was required to set up ODBC connections, install COM objects into MTS, and install all ASP code and HTML pages. Technologies Used: Active Server Pages (ASP), MS Visual InterDev 6.0, MS SQL Server 7.0, MS SQL Server 6.5, DTS packages, Windows NT Server 4.0, IIS 4, Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), HTML, DHTML, JavaScript, VBScript, Transact-SQL, Software Artisans saFileUp, ADO, Timbuktu Pro, Platinum ERwin, MS Visual Source Safe 6, Lotus Notes / Domino 4.6.1, Microsoft Transaction Server (MTS), SMTP, Collaboration Data Objects (CDO), Visual Basic 6 Enterprise Edition, COM/DCOM Responsibilities My responsibilities as a web developer and SQL programmer for the various Bill Thompson applications were as follows:
Jan 2000 – Mar 2000 Digital Board Strategy Sawer Wagonlit Travel (SWT) hired Proxicom to help it create a digital strategy for competing against Expedia, Travelocity, American Express, and others. Technologies Used: Windows NT Server 4, IIS 4 (not many – this project was a strategy / assessment engagement) Responsibilities My responsibilities as the project manager and technical lead were as follows:
Sept 1999 – Jan 2000 gmpower.com General Motors Corporation (GM) hired Proxicom as general project management and architecture contractors for "their gmpower.com site. I was one of 3 primary project managers for the effort. I was responsible for the site rollout in Mexico, Taiwan, Brazil, and Australia. The entire gmpower.com team was made up of over 300 contractors from 9 different vendors, including IBM Global Services, EDS, CompuWare, and others. I worked with the architecture team (30+ architects) in planning the Version 1 a rchitecture and the Version 2 architecture. The majority of my contributions on the architecture team were in the area of configurator selection and implementation. The configurator software, provided by a third party, allows a customer to select various options on a car. This is a hugely complex piece of software as it has to keep track of all the options combinations, the cost of each, and various rules regarding inclusion and exclusion of additional options. Additionally, I participated heavily in the construction of a single UI to be used in all 40 initial rollout countries and the underlying components which allowed local variables such as postal code vs. zip code to be resolved. I spent several weeks in Australia leading a team of 18 developers, architects, UI designers, and several business strategists in working directly with the Holden company of GM to implement the Holden version of gmpower.com. There were quite a lot of technical and political challenges to resolve in Australia, including differences in calculating distance to dealerships based on latitude and longitude, postal code, and legal issues regarding storage of personal data. The Holden site was run on NT with IIS and ASP. We spent a lot of time revising the ASP to match the functionality of the JSP used in the United States version of buypower. Technologies Used: Windows NT 4, IIS 4, Active Server Pages (ASP), Solaris, Java, Java Server Pages, JDO, Java Servlets, WinRunner, Trilogy, Selectica, FirePond, Calico, various configuration management tools Responsibilities My responsibilities as a project manager and technical architect were as follows:
May 1999 – Sept 1999 Corporate Intranet (Archie) McDonald s hired USWeb to lead the effort in building their corporate Intranet, later called "Archie". The Intranet was to be rolled out to the 3,000 or so Oak Brook employees with a view toward rolling out to all 8,000 or so US domestic employees. Access to some Intranet applications would be given to McDonald s suppliers via extranet and to the Owner / Operator stores. The Intranet would then be rolled out internationally after that. When I left they were beginning to roll out to Sweden using Domino R5. I was the project manager, lead architect, and LotusScript and ASP coder. The system was hosted in various point releases of R4.6.x of Lotus Domino and IIS 4 on NT 4. All of the Intranet data – articles, press releases, etc. – were stored in Notes databases for security reasons. The home page of the Intranet was hosted on NT as was the content editor. The home page was made up of modules which were periodically updated by an NT service. The NT service would connect to Notes through ODBC (not easy) and pull headlines and article summaries out of the database to populate these modules. In addition, there was a polling / survey module which had its data stored in an Access 97 database. The content management interface was used by almost 100 content managers throughout the organization to post their articles and other content. The content management interface was in Notes but the forms where the actually content editing was done was ASP because of a dependence on DHTML and IFRAMEs. Technologies Used: Visual InterDev, Active Server Pages, Windows NT 4, Lotus Domino 4.6.x, Lotus Notes, Visual SourceSafe Responsibilities
May 1998 – Mar 1999 Practice Manager, eCommerce & Groupware Technologies Used: Microsoft Active Server Pages, Lotus Domino 4.6.2, Lotus Notes 4.6.2, Lotus NotesPump, Oracle 8, Microsoft SQL Server 6.5, Microsoft Project, Microsoft Word, Microsoft Visual InterDev, Microsoft Access 97, Windows NT 4.0 SR4, Microsoft Internet Information Server 4.0, Microsoft Internet Explorer 4.01, Dynamic HTML (DHTML), Cascading Style Sheets, JavaScript, VBScript, Adobe Photoshop, Allaire HomeSite 3.0, Microsoft Visual SourceSafe, Microsoft Visual Basic 5.0 Professional Edition, ActiveX, Apex True DB Grid Pro, Sheridan Data Widgets ActiveX, Seagate Crystal Reports, VB Help Writer Project Descriptions L.R. Nelson – Oakridge, IL Feb 1999 – Mar 1999 Designed and constructed a marketing presentation printing application. Users selected presentation inserts and the application created a customized proposal / presentation for customers. The entire application was hosted on the web. Morton Metal Craft Corporation (MMCC) – Morton, IL Jan 1999 – Feb 1999 Designed and constructed a Lotus Notes database for tracking engineering programming requests. Duplicated functionality of an existing Visual Basic application in the Lotus Notes database. RLI – Oakridge, IL Dec 1998 – Jan 1999 Converted an existing knowledge repository into a Lotus Domino hosted web-based knowledge repository Caterpillar – Oakridge, IL Oct 1998 – Dec 1998 Designed and constructed an updated version of the Parts Maintenance Planner application which tracked and estimated machine maintenance schedules and costs. Caterpillar – Oakridge, IL Oct 1998 – Nov 1998 Designed and constructed an application used for tracking and distributing career goals and progress. Unified Resources Corporation – Rolling Meadows, IL May 1998 – Nov 1998 Designed and constructed a knowledge repository for internal use. The repository held documents as attachments in the Lotus Notes databases but also used SQL to access financial data held in Platinum and Proamics application databases. All content was delivered dynamically to a browser-based client. Edmonton-HartJan 1998 – Apr 1998 Project Manager Technologies Used: Lotus Domino 4.5, Lotus Notes 4.5, Adobe Acrobat, Microsoft Project, Microsoft Word Project Descriptions Caterpillar – Oakridge, IL Feb 1998 – Apr 1998 Designed and constructed a web-based marketing materials catalog. The existing paper-based catalog had approximately 2,000 items available for dealers to order. An Adobe Acrobat document was created for each item in the marketing materials catalog and then placed as an attachment in a document in the online catalog. A comprehensive search engine was created to allow users to easily search the online catalog. Edmonton-Hart – Oakridge, IL Jan 1998 – Feb 1998 Designed and constructed internal application for tracking differences in actual and estimated consultant billings. Tekara Technologies, Inc.Sept 1992 – Dec 1997 Owner, Application Architect and Developer Technologies Used Borland Delphi Professional Versions 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5, Borland Interbase, 80386 Assembler, PVCS Product / Project Descriptions DocObjects: Designed and constructed a full-featured word processing component suite, including text control, data-aware text control, ruler, status panel, and toolbar. All components were developed in 16- and 32-bit programming environments. Care: Designed and constructed Care medical records management software. Enforcer: Designed and constructed a component-based security system, including BlowABCh encryption algorithm implementation. The component was developed in both 16- and 32-bit programming environments. GridObjects: Designed and constructed a full-featured grid / spreadsheet control, including integrated formula and function parser. The component was required to have both 16- and 32-bit versions. Accounting: Design and construction of 16 separate component-based accounting modules, including accounts receivable, accounts payable, job costing and estimation, financial reports, and financial graphing. All components were required to have both 16- and 32-bit versions. Fujitsu Corporation – Tokyo, JapanApr 1997 – Jun 1997 Revision of word processing control to handle Japanese Kanji character set and other Asian character sets. Required conversion of internal data format to Win32 Unicode (double byte) character set. ALLTEL – Atlanta, GAFeb 1997 – Apr 1997 Revision of word processing control to handle Hebrew character set and right-to-left typing to support Middle Eastern typing direction. 1234567891011121314 |
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