About Me
Leadership Competencies
I am an experienced IT leader with a proven track record of leading a
customer-centric organization with a focus on innovation, best practices and
standards. At Vivvo I have had the opportunity to design and lead the
development and launch of two new products, grow the customer base by a
factor of 5 and strategically direct development teams and technical vision
of the company.
I am comfortable leading client engagements at every stage from RFP responses
to solution and technical design. Working with a Canadian province, I
designed a modern, web-based experience with digital identity verification
for renewing vehicle registrations that preserved their investment in a
legacy system that would have cost them $8 million or more to replace. I
lead the solution and technical design and directed development and business
teams in the implementation of a production ready proof of concept that was
delivered for less than $50,000 – a 160x cost savings over replacing the
legacy system. This resulted in that province signing on as a customer and
planning their production implementation.
Leading Vivvo through startup-up to scale-up has meant being incredibly
responsive to customers and corporate strategy being focused on RFP
responses. I am constantly visioning product development path, and how to
budget and resource it all while championing Vivvo’s corporate values and
enabling continuous innovation. I empower employees and grow talent at every
level of the organization to support these efforts. Recently, a service desk
analyst showed interest and aptitude in Vivvo’s cloud deployments and I was
able to coach and mentor him through the design and development of a new
process that reduced creation of a new environment from several days to less
than 45 minutes.
Learning and Innovation
I have a passion for learning, and I thrive when working on something new,
innovative and leading-edge. I am an avid reader of books, blogs and
technical documentation and often find myself researching a topic in depth
just for the sake of learning. With the recent security flaws exposed in
Zoom, I spent several weeks researching WebRTC, ICE and TURN – the
technologies that underlay most modern web-based video conferencing
systems.
I aim to read at least one technical, business or innovation-oriented book
every month. I recently read three books by Steven Kotler and Peter
Diamandis that I found inspiring and thought-provoking: Bold, Abundance, and
The Future Is Faster Than You Think. These books provide of summary of
leading-edge research and innovation taking place today, and what the future
could be because of that work.
As a member of the Digital ID and Authentication Council of Canada’s (DIACC)
Innovation Expert Committee, I collaborate with senior leaders across the
country on identifying business requirements and priorities for adoption of
innovative identity services and solutions in Canada. Through DIACC, I have
had the opportunity to contribute to emerging digital identity standards
such as the Pan-Canadian Trust Framework, engage with public and private
sector leaders working on blockchain-based identity and credential
solutions, and speak at conferences in Canada and the USA on topics such as
digital transformation, self-sovereign identity and digital credentials.
To keep my technical skills up to date, and to expose myself to new
technologies I experiment with small projects such as a toy BitTorrent
client and a browser-based crypto-wallet. I maintain a personal website that
I have used to experiment with various infrastructure configurations and
cloud providers over the years. I compete in Google’s Kick Start and Code
Jam coding competitions and the Advent of Code.