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Martin Palmer BSc, MCSD, MCAD
E-mail: martin@mjpalmer.com Over
the past few months, I have taken the opportunity to realize some of my
bucket list items. One of my passions
is the natural environment and wildlife photography. Although I have often wanted to head off to
isolated locations to observe and photograph some exotic species, dedication
to work and family has never allowed me the opportunity. Since I now had some time I visited the
Falkland Islands, South Georgia Island and the Antarctic Peninsula in
November, and in February I was able to get close to polar bears cubs and
their mother in Manitoba. You can see
the results here. Currently,
I am assisting the College of Dietitians of BC (CDBC) with the implementation
of a new IT environment. CDBC are working with the College of Registered
Nurses of BC on a shared IT environment.
As a trusted advisor I’m helping to bridge the gap between the 2
groups and ensure that key IT related details are considered. Previously
while I was working at Western Forest Products (WFP), I managed the system
development team. My responsibilities
included development of system integrations, applications and business
intelligence. WFP is a forestry
company that historically had a very poor IT environment. The application support was vender driven,
resulting in applications that provided patchy coverage of the company’s
processes and created islands of data with incompatible key fields. To deal with the application limitations,
poorly thought out process were organically created to fill in the gaps.
Sometimes one off integrations were developed, by vendors or consultants to
connect some of the systems. With no
development standards or controls, it resulted in a poor performing,
unsupportable environment.
Unfortunately this is not an uncommon story in the resource
industry. About five years ago, the CFO
hired a new IT management team to rectify the situation. I
was hired as an integration architect to build a solution to the system
integration problems and was later promoted to the Manager of Integration and
Development. The integration platform
I architected for WFP consisted of WCF services and Microsoft’s
Service Bus to deliver both request-response and event bus messaging
patterns. The services implemented a standardized set of components to
provide guaranteed message delivery, dynamic routing, connectivity, exception
and instrumentation services. This
allowed the developer to focus on the development of the business logic
rather than the component plumbing.
This architecture provided consistency, reusability, extendibility and
maintainability. As
the development team manager, my philosophy was to build a small, highly
skilled team that would take ownership the WFP’s application
environment. Due to the small size of
the team, external resources were a necessity, but all application designs
were reviewed and approved by the development team. They were also required to follow WFP’s
coding standards. This meant future
support could be done confidently with internal resources. The
first areas I tackled was the standardization of development processes. This included coding standards, design
documentation, deployment scripts and source control. Source control was a particular challenge
as there were some critical systems where the source code had been lost or
not provided by the consultant who had written the code. One such system was WFP’s accounts payable
application (APFlo). APFlo was a
critical finance system that was prone to failure during the month end
process. Over several years there had
been 3 or 4 failed attempts to replace APFlo. The projects failed due to the high cost
associated with the project. I
proposed a solution low cost solution that would result in the addition of a
workflow platform (K2) to the IT environment.
The idea was that K2 could then be leveraged to improve many other WFP
processes. We also implemented an OCR
platform that was extendable so it too had the potential of being leveraged
in other processes. The new AP system
utilized the integration platform to move data between components. The integration platform allowed the
receipt of invoices through other channels, such as an online web form, excel
upload or EDI. The project team
included 2 external vendors that provided OCR and K2 expertise and internal
resources that programed the backend services to a defined API and
reports. I architected and project
managed the project and it was delivered on time and on budget. Governance
and transparency of the IT resource allocation was tackled by implementing a
new IT management system. The initialization process for system enhancements
or new applications included business feedback and approvals to make sure the
projects were prioritized to provide maximum business value. Once the project was approved, if required,
I was responsible for creating an architectural specification to ensure the
project would result in an improvement to the interoperability or
maintainability of the overall IT environment. I also developed a set of architectural
principals to align the different WFP departments with a common philosophy
around implementing IT systems and leveraging IT resources. Unfortunately
the CFO who started the renewal of WFP’s IT systems left the company. The new CFO, from a different forestry
company, has replaced the IT management team and is returning the company to a
vendor driven model. This resulted in
the loss of many of the talented team members throughout WFP’s IT group. Thank
you for taking the time to review my resume and if you have any questions
please contact me. Resume
Objective
To
support business objectives by promoting the implementation of an efficient,
standardized and maintainable IT architectures and development
processes. This approach leads to better
defined IT environments that are easier to support and provide greater
business value. Experience
Summary
·
Over 17 years’
experience architecting and developing multi-tiered enterprise applications. ·
Managed the
enterprise architecture and development team for a billion dollar
international forestry company. ·
Managed contracts
and relationships with 3rd party development teams and vendors. ·
Built and managed
a small efficient development team, augmenting it with external contractors
for larger projects. ·
Implemented code
and process standardizations to improve system functionality, stability,
maintainability and reduce the cost of development. ·
Successfully built
or enhanced over 20 enterprise solutions.
These solutions include system to system and business to business
integrations and business process improvement applications. ·
Architected the
instrumentation for Vancity’s Integration Service
Layer (ISL). Employment
History
College of
Dietitians of BC, Vancouver, B.C. ·
Provide guidance
to the College of Dietitians during the implement of a shared IT environment
with a consortium of Canadian medical colleges. ·
Reviewing the
agreement to identify any technical issues that the college needs to consider
around Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act (FIPPA) ·
Reviewing the
consortium's infrastructure with respect to physical security, data security,
backup processes, disaster recovery and fault
tolerance.
Western Forest
Products, Vancouver, B.C. As part of the IT
management team, I was responsible for the architecture and development of
all custom applications, including business intelligence and system
integrations. ·
Implemented
coding, source control and documentation standards to improve code
maintainability. ·
Implemented new
deployment processes that significantly reduced deployment errors. ·
Introduced new
architecture concepts into a monolithic web portal, reducing the need for
high risk deployments. The concepts
included; a service orientated security service allowing the development of
new disconnected web applications that could leverage the portals security
model and the introduction of an upload tool that implemented Dependency
Injection to enabled dynamic functionality updates. ·
Architected a
custom Accounts Receivable (AP) system using K2 workflow, K2 forms and ABBYY
optical character recognition (OCR). I
also project managed the development of the AP system using both internal and
external resources to deliver the project on time and on budget. ·
Created an
enterprise data model to assist in planning core business applications
refresh projects. ·
Worked with the infrastructure
team, software vendors and Oracle to ensure WFP's environment was compliant
with Oracles licensing. ·
Participated in
software selection processes for both Software as a Service (SaaS) and
on-site applications. My role was to
assess the technical requirements, system architecture, hardware and network
requirements, data security and system integration. ·
Negotiated with
Data Intensity to provide backup DBA resources. ·
Mentored the BI
developer to validate BI designs to enhance an existing enterprise DW. ·
Worked with the BI
developer to select a tool to merge data from dissimilar DWs and other
potential data sources. Isolated DW’s
are being introduced with the system refreshes. This concept was designed to
get IT ahead of the business requirements for a unified enterprise data
environment. ·
Worked with the
infrastructure team to support a data center migration project including
mapping out system/server dependencies. ·
Participated in
the migration of WFP’s Lumber ERP system to a new application called LumberTrack. I was
directly responsible for integration to the LumberTrack
system with JDE, Canadian and US banks, a customs broker and standardizing of
the integration with 3 different lumber production tally systems.
Western Forest
Products, Vancouver, B.C. ·
Architected and
develop the framework for a service orientated integration platform that
included dynamic routing and fault tolerance.
The integration environment used WCF and Microsoft’s Service Bus to
deliver request-response and event bus messaging patterns. (Service
Orientated Programming) ·
The integration
platform consisted of standardized components to provide routing,
connectivity, exception and instrumentation services to the integration environment. This architecture added consistency,
reusability, extendibility and maintainability to the integration environment
(Aspect Orientated Programming). ·
Built a test
harnesses to validate the integration platforms performance capabilities and
test for memory leaks.
VanCity, Vancouver,
B.C. ·
Participated in a
team of integration developers to build a unified integration service layer. ·
Architecture a custom
BizTalk streaming pipeline and instrumentation layer for the ISL. ·
Successfully
extended the Business Rules Itinerary (BRI) and Universal Description,
Discovery, and Integration (UDDI) resolution functionality in Microsoft’s ESB
Toolkit, to provide improved message routing for the ISL ·
Worked with the
Integration Solution Architect on the design of the new ISL environment. ·
Guided the
infrastructure team on setting up and configuring the ISL environments. ·
ISL development
team’s Build Manager.
Catalyst Paper
Corporation, Vancouver, B.C. ·
Lead application
developer for a Chemical Accountability project. The project is projected to save Catalyst
tens of millions of dollars. ·
Administrator of Catalyst’s
SCOM environment. ·
Architected and
designed the APMS tool for describing the complex dependencies in distributed
enterprise environments. APMS is now
the back bone for Catalyst’s Help Desk. ·
Architect/team lead
for the largest .Net application development project accomplished by the
company. Coordinated tasks for 6
developers. ·
Architected a
highly configurable and dynamic customer EDI solution using BizTalk. ·
Reducing the cost
of maintaining Catalyst’s messaging solution by promoting the creation of a
unified application design for the migration of all Catalyst EDI
communications. ·
Developed multiple
SharePoint applications utilizing InfoPath and Workflows. ·
Developed services
to support the move to a Service Orientated Architecture (SOA).
ResponseTek, Vancouver,
B.C. ·
Responsible for
maintenance and development of ASP code for Customer Experience Management
Portal. ·
Build Manager -
Responsible for tracking modified files and preparing transports lists for
production builds.
B.C.
Association of Pregnancy Outreach Programs, B.C. ·
Developed web
presence, member portal and prioritized functionality for project, based on
business requirements, cost of implementation and cost of maintenance.
Electronic
Data Systems (EDS), Vancouver, B.C. ·
Developed
automated web-based server outage alert and reporting system for BC Gas. Application included an outage request
interface, notification, review process, and approval process. The portal included ability to personalize
user experience. ·
Developed a web
portal for BC Gas employees to access user specific data. The project included personalization of web
pages.
Shocking
Colors Electrostatic Painting, Surrey, B.C. ·
Planned and
managed daily operations included negotiating with clients and establishing
efficient project plans. During my 2
years with Shocking Colors, the company became profitable, increasing its
sales by 25%.
Adventures
Down Under, Bellingham, WA, U.S.A. ·
Worked as a team
member, with other instructors and teaching assistants, to create a safe and
enjoyable learning environment. Technical
Proficiencies
Development
Certifications:
Training
(Highlights):
Webage Solutions, Vancouver, B.C.
UBC
Sauder School of Business, Vancouver, B.C.
QuickLearn, Redmond, Washington, U.S.A.
Webage Solutions, Vancouver, B.C.
Mindsharp, Minneapolis, MN, U.S.A.
Quantum Leap, Vancouver, B.C.
CDI, Vancouver, B.C.
Human Factors International, Fairfield, Iowa, U.S.A.
Education:
Information Technology Institute, Vancouver, B.C.
University of British Columbia, Vancouver, B.C.
University of Hull, Hull, England.
Interests:
·
Wildlife and landscape photography ·
Designing and building fine furniture ·
Outdoor sports
including scuba diving, hiking, camping and rock climbing. |
