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.
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.
Bachelor of Science - Combined Major Computer Science and
Mathematics
University of
Regina, Regina, Saskatchewan
Leading the ActiveMQ service and team.
Lead the technical vision in the creation of Vivvo’s corporate objectives. Forecast and resource plan strategically to optimize team size and composition for upcoming work. Set objectives for development teams, coach teams in workload management and goal setting. Champion customer-centric thinking to maintain quality and culture as Vivvo scales up from 2 to 5 production customers.
Design innovative solutions that exceed customer and end-user expectations such as self-service federation capabilities with support for SAML, OIDC and passwordless authentication. Designed and supported the development and business teams in the development of an innovative way of automatically enrolling in government services both as an individual and as a business for ISED and TBS’ “Tell Us Once” initiative.
Lead ideation, design and implementation of a new passwordless authentication and digital credential product called Eeze which is in proof of concept stages with Industry Science and Economic Development Canada, Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat, Government of Yukon and Government of Newfoundland.
Responsible for solution architecture and integration for all client engagements such as eHealth Saskatchewan. Collaborate with customers and mentor development teams on implementation of appropriate identity verification, adherence to standards such as the Pan Canadian Trust Framework and integration to legacy systems. Launching eHealth Saskatchewan has increased the number of identities Vivvo manages by a factor of 10.
Worked in collaboration with senior leaders at the Government of Saskatchewan and oversaw two development teams to design, build and deploy a new product, Business Connect, for business owners to access government services online.
Lead ideation, design and implementation of innovative new features for Vivvo’s flagship product, CitizenOne, such as pseudonymously and securely brokering data between government organizations and, consent and rule-based guards for access to online services.
Participated in entire client lifecycle from technical sales, solution architecture, integration, feature development and production support.
Consultant at a major Canadian telecommunications company. Trained and mentored client development teams through pair programming, code reviews, and development of a technical reference architecture. Worked closely with internal teams to build and deploy an e-commerce system to support internet and television packages, and the release of the iPhone X.
Implemnted best practices for continuous integration and deployment, unit tests, integration tests and contract tests. Application was automatically deployed to production on average 11 times per day. Configured and supported production deployment on OpenShift to easily scale to 100,000 concurrent users the day the iPhone X was released.
As a senior developer on an agile scrum team, participate in solution design, project estimation, development and production support. Mentor team members on agile methodology, coding best practices and managing their workload in a sprint. Primarily responsible for SAP development and frequent contributor to Java and Angular codebases.
Lead proof of concept and implementation of SAP HANA sidecar for loan balances calculations. Worked with vendor, operations, finance and IT business analysts to develop a loan balances model that vastly outperformed the existing loan balances function.
Member of the SAP team delivering services and extending functionality of SAP CML and CMS. As lead developer on the customer correspondence project, worked with business and QA analysts and printing/shipping vendors to develop clear and accurate customer statements that every FCC customer received.
Member of the first cross-functional team and agile pilot project. Championed agile development practices and scrum. Acquired expertise and in-depth knowledge of FCC products while developing solutions such as a loan calculator and cost of credit calculator. Mentored and onboarded team members in agile methodology and adjusting to new cadence of work as they joined scrum teams.
Lead the adoption of best practices such as unit testing and code reviews. Developed supporting tools such as ABAP plugins for FitNesse and Phabricator. Mentored SAP development team on object-oriented development and modern ABAP.
Provided tier-2 support for all workstations at Farm Credit Canada. Responsible for automating configuration, distribution and management of software. Worked closely with vendors and external support groups to resolve issues. Participated in on-call rotation supporting a number of applications for internal users across Canada and India.