Hi. My name is Steve. Thanks for stopping by.
This site contains information about my professional journey in data management with some insight and links that I hope others might find useful too.
Early Beginnings:
I have thoroughly enjoyed working in the IT field ever since my early days in college where I came to learn the competitive advantage to be derived by managing data and mining it for business intelligence. Through my concentration in MIS courses, and specialization in relational database management systems, I discovered that by using a structured query language and Visual Basic programming, one could develop front-end applications enabling end-users to perform their tasks more efficiently. The MIS club provided an environment of camaraderie and open discussion that further fostered my interest in using information technology to improve efficiency for any business.
My vision about the efficiency of properly managed data became more clear from my advanced systems analysis design courses. These showed how work flow and data flow diagrams could be used to develop high level conceptual models, and then into logical entity relationship diagrams and data structure diagrams, until finally being realized in the physical models for implementation in a relational database. It all made sense that utilization of such techniques could serve to reduce, if not outright eliminate, the drudgery of performing tedious manual processes found to exist in many business operations that lead directly to higher costs, lower productivity, and decreased profitability.
Learning and Making Use of New Skills:
Immediately after graduating with honors from San Jose State University, I accepted a position as a Network Administrator at a technology-based, non-profit organization that served to provide technology tools to other non-profits throughout Santa Clara County. Simultaneously, I began working towards a two-year Telecommunications and Network Engineering certificate from U.C. Berkeley-Extension which facilitated implementing various IT projects. Work at the organization challenged me to put in to practice a range of IT and business skills.
First Big IT Project:
The first project was to set up an online database to be accessed in an IP-based WAN connecting 54 homeless agencies in a nine county region in the San Francisco Bay Area. The project was called Bay Area Homeless Alliance (BAHA). I had to employ my knowledge of relational database development, SQL, HTML for the front-end Web application, image editing, PCs, application installations, training, and voice messaging system administration.
Business skills included performing a cost-benefits analysis of the WAN technology to be used, budget development, hardware and software procurements negotiating with vendors, MS Project management developing timelines, milestones, and resources, and PowerPoint presentations to steering committees. This project received a Smithsonian award for innovative use of technology in the non-profit sector.
Other Large Projects:
A few other notable projects at this organization included similar efforts to implement online databases for a county-wide information and referral database, and a housing resources database. Here I delved into the open source world using Debian Linux servers and firewalls. The success of these prior projects led to a grant award to develop a region wide Information and Referral Web data warehouse using a star schema with conformed facts and dimensions according to the Kimball methodology. It was at around this same time that I received formal training at Adobe headquarters to better learn about their image editing Photoshop tool and Illustrator drawing tool for our Web application front-ends. Additional formal training for the DW project occurred at the Business Objects headquarters to learn how to use their Data Integrator tool (now renamed Data Services after acquisition by SAP). Informal team training for .Net and .Asp technology was received directly from professors at my alma mater, San Jose State University. In order to develop the status reports I would regularly present at steering committee meetings, I was obliged to learn Crystal Reports through reading academic texts and actual development.
Because the position also required serving as an IT consultant to other non-profit agencies wishing to set up an online presence, a couple of soft skills that are critical to develop are listening closely to how customers describe their business needs in order to gather requirements to propose suitable solutions. I have learned empirically that being able to communicate technical information in non-technical ways to various audience levels is also essential to a successful project implementation.
The Hat Trick:
Eventually, I was hired away to serve as a DBA/Crystal Reports developer at a wireless start-up company in San Jose, CA. I soon discovered that by working at a small startup company, one learns to wear many hats.
Hat #1 - DBA / Database Developer:
This position required proficiency in SQL Server database administration and development for typical tasks such as creating databases and accounts, granting/revoking rights, performance tuning with clustered/non-clustered indexes, and implementing backup and replication strategies, as well as developing requisite T-SQL, DML, DDL, DCL, stored procedures, scalar-valued functions, and triggers in support of the many applications used., Development and management of legacy MS Access databases was required to support our corrective action request and failure analysis databases.
Hat #2 - Crystal Reports Developer:
Support for all department reporting inevitably led to the use of various constructs to implement string manipulation, concatenation, joins, and unions where needed to develop the necessary formulas in Crystal Reports for the BI sought by management. Passing of parameters to sub-reports and groupings were always things to test before deployment. Version control helped ensure data consistency.
Hat #3 - ERP System Administrator:
Serving as the senior system administrator of our local ERP application for the entire organization, I ended up learning about the full spectrum of our business: from purchasing, manufacturing operations, order fulfillment, inventory management, RMA and warranty tracking, customer, vendor, and material master data as well as finance activities such as billing, A/P, A/R, GL, and close operations. Customizing fields in the ERP application and the native Crystal Reports, managing the Business Objects Report scheduler using the CMS and CMC utilities, as well as performing application updates were all part of the expected duties. I needed to maintain and enhance the MS Access database applications as front-end GUIs to manage cost-rollups, MRP updates, and cost set data updates.
Hat #4 - Salesforce System Administrator
Associated with the above duties was the need to serve as the Salesforce System Administrator for our go-to-market team. I learned to develop basic dash boards and reports related to project opportunities, sales activities, profitability reports, as well as enabling synchronization with user email and mobile application accessibility. An important aspect of synchronization was learning how to ETL data between our systems and Salesforces' using data loaders and WSDL files.
Even More Hats:
After acquisition by a public company, I continued to serve as the Salesforce System Administrator. To better serve the company, I received formal training at Salesforce headquarters in order to manage accounts, troubleshoot issues, develop complex dash boards, and various types of reports for accounts, leads, opportunity wins and losses, product lines, workflows, and alerts.
Hat #5 - SOX Compliance Manager
Acquisition by a public company meant that I was elected as the SOX compliance manager. So, I managed the non-native system controls to prevent/manage/audit sensitive financial transactions in our ERP and integrated Finance package. I also managed the IIS Web server and .asp pages for utilities that fired SQL triggers to track changes to customer credit limits, account holds/releases, customer and vendor account creations and part master costing changes.
Hat #6 - Data Manager:
The acquiring company necessitated the need for a large effort to integrate much of our ERP system data with corporate headquarters. This included sending our parts, vendors, customers, sales, revenue, costing, pricing, inventory, etc. feeds to the corporate data warehouse, financial transactions to a shadow ledger, data for credit card and check clearing processes, as well as importing foreign currency data from corporate, and supply and demand data exchange with contract manufacturers.. All these processes required developing .Net and SQL scripts to transmit data. I received in-house training in Cognos Report and Query Studios to support reporting from specific data marts within the data warehouse needed.
Data Migrations:
Eventually, my company was acquired two more times. Once by a very large enterprise and then by a smaller enterprise as part of a business unit divestiture. Both times, large data migration projects were required to migrate to SAP. Each time, I was elected as the senior ERP systems analyst to facilitate extract, transform, and load operations for our ERP and Engineering systems data. Participating in discovery, kick-off, and mapping meetings, on-site process integration tests, UAT and implementation support were all part of these migrations. Complex use of .Net and SSIS and SQL scripting were involved for these efforts. The projects were both lengthy, technically challenging, and critical to successful migration with aggressive schedules and milestones. The projects involved supporting numerous meetings with cross-functional departments to capture business operations and develop accurate field mapping, data cleansing, and complex scripting to transform the data prior to loading, testing, and final move to production.
Professional Development:
By supporting the organization is so many areas, I learned early on to embrace change in the IT industry. I was obliged to learn and administer many functional areas within the organization. So it now seems natural to me, when reading about such emerging technologies as in-memory databases designed to quickly derive the business intelligence needed to gain a competitive advantage, that I engage in more learning to find out how to leverage these newer technologies. Knowing that the sheer variety and volume of the Big Data being generated by today's social networks, e-commerce, and Internet of Things, I began taking a number of online courses to deepen my knowledge about managing Big Data in the Hadoop ecosystem. Over the last year, I have completed study in a number courses in Hadoop and MapReduce, as well as open source applications such as MySQL, Linux Ubuntu, and Python. The technologies also enabled me to hone my knowledge through hands-on experience in setting up virtual machine environments, configuring applications in Windows and Linux environments, and utilizing Web technologies like WordPress widgets and themes to go along with my existing expertise.
Check here for some of the latest courses I completed.
I hope you find the information here useful.
Please visit my LinkedIn page for more detailed information about my professional career.