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Professional Experiential
Portfolio
for
J. William
Bennett
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Spending
over 18 years of my career as a mainframe systems programmer, technical
support manager and system integrator, I have had a considerable amount
of exposure to systems support and IT infrastructure management. I
have been actively engaged in mainframe to server transitions, web
enablement projects and wholesale IT center management roles. This
page attempts to outline my experience as it has evolved over the years.
- Introduction:
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Information Systems were predominately mainframes during that portion of my career that included operating system support and administration. As early as 1970 I was involved in IBM and Sperry operating systems. Both DOS and TOS (tape
operating system) were in use.
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IBM Operating Systems
IBM dominated the market and through a natural monopoly of reliability and scalability, they became the sole provider of large mainframe operating systems by 2000. I had varied experiences with most of the early operating systems from IBM, including: DOS, OS, MFT, MVT, MVS, MVS/XA/ESA, VSE/XA/ESA and VM/ESA. This experience was gained predominately through my employment with GTE Data Services (now Verizon IT) in Ft. Wayne, Indiana. See
appraisal; Interfirst
Bank (now Bank of America); and extensive IBM contract roles.
I attended Amdahl's IBM Systems Internals classes as well as diagnostic and tuning classes at Amdahl and IBM. Through 2003 I had been installing, maintaining and servicing operating systems. latter day IBM systems with which I have detailed hand-on experience include: -
Z/OS V3
- OS/390 R8-R10
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All versions of MVS (XA, ESA, el al)
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AS/400 & OS/400
Mainframe SNA networks, VTAM and NCP support were core
competencies at one time. The introduction of Ethernet and TCP/IP
have (gladly) reduced those capabilities to academic importance. My
exposure to TCP/IP and Ethernet to SNA interface is fairly broad.
I have implemented and designed applications for both native IP and
encapsulated SNA.
- Client Server Systems
I have also had considerable exposure to UNIX systems and Linux systems in recent years. I have done administrative work on Windows NT and Win/2000
severs including web development, POP/SMTP server setup and administration and overall system maintenance and upgrade. Much of this experience came as a result of installing these systems in my own lab for development support.
I have had functional exposure to and/or experience with:
- HP/IX/UX
- Unisys 2200; A-Series
- Compaq VMS
- Win/NT/2000
- Sun Solaris
I have developed TCP/IP interfaces and maintained server networks
of various sizes. I do not consider myself a network expert but I
have enough applied networking knowledge so the experts respect my
management and advice.
- Facilities Management
I have been involved in both technical and managerial support
of large data centers. From operations to complete facility
stewardship, I have intimate knowledge in the operation of
information technology infrastructure.
Technical roles included: system operations and
administration, systems programming, technical support; automation,
problem management and security systems architecture.
Management Roles included: Chief Technology
Officer, Technical Services Manager and Operations Supervisor. I
have also had separate hardware procurement, software procurement
and operations cost accounting roles.
- Evolution of Systems Management
In the first 20+ years of
my career, systems management methodologies and practices were
largely part and parcel of the systems management role of the
systems programming department.
Today, the luxury of a central private network
and isolated mainframe is a thing of the past. With the IT processes of
the average enterprise spread out over literally hundreds and
thousands of servers, network nodes, and often countries -
specialization is today a necessity. But understanding the big
picture is also necessary to keep all the pieces integrated with
enterprise goals and objectives.
With the birth of the
ITSM/ITIL
disciplines, Systems Management has become a specialized field -
complete with skills training and certifications. However,
most of the methods and practices that define the foundation of ITIL
is rooted in what my generation developed. I actually designed
and developed programming to automate and
support Change Tracking, Problem & Incident Reporting, Service Level
measurement and compliance; and Performance monitoring.
In a nutshell, my experience includes:
- Change Management - An
overly broad term that encompasses, software, hardware,
infrastructure and methodology. Many independent change
control processes have spun off of this discipline including
version and release control, configuration management, project
management and risk management methodology. I have had
experience in each of these areas.
- Problem Management - I have
designed incident reporting systems, knowledgebase applications
and root cause analysis guides. I have also defined
processes for integrating problem management into an ITSM life
cycle that includes change management and service level
management.
- Security Management - Most
of my experience comes from the installation, maintenance and
administration of security software for the enterprise. I
have not had extensive experience in IDS, encryption, firewall
and DMZ deployments, although I am quite familiar with their
implementation.
- Performance Management - I
have extensive experience in performance disciplines (systems,
applications & storage) that are deployed in mainframe
environments. I have limited exposure to application
server and RDBMS performance management.
- Configuration Management -
Again, an overly broad term that encompasses many change
management skills, I have not had any hands on experience with
software packages that automated this practice, but I have
designed many spreadsheets and reporting methodologies to
facilitate configuration control.
- Service Level Management -
As much an art as a science, SLM includes business process
analysis (BPA), requirements analysis, technology assessment and
politics. From developing measurable and enforceable SLAs
and SLOs to chargeback systems and compliance reporting, I have
had a lot of experience in SLM. The issue is most often
the validity and origin of the data that drives compliance and
reporting models and I have considerable experience in
developing these sources.
- Business Continuation -
Business continuation planning (BCP - a.k.a. business
contingency planning) and implementation have
been rooted in my systems experience for 25 years. From the
early days of annual hot site 'disaster recovery' field trips
to today's complex web of distributed services, redundant
systems, mirrored backups, On Demand computing and 'fail over' techniques, business
continuation is another one of the ITSM disciplines that has
spawned many specialized technologies and skills.
Nevertheless the basic blueprint of BCP still resides in the
enterprise service model and the SLM requirements at the
application level of detail. I have had considerable hands-on experience
from designing to auditing BCP processes.
Within the last 5 years (1999-2004) I have
written process guides for incident management; performance and
service level reporting; and business continuation methodologies. In
2005 I developed a complete set of
level I - Level III problem management guides and a version and
a release control methodology for a start-up software vendor.
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Operations Summary
Although I spent the better part of my career installing, maintaining and administering large operating systems, I have very little in the way of experiential artifacts remaining from those days.
Latter day operations expertise can be demonstrated by the outsourcing contract that my consulting company (BGI) recently concluded with El Paso Energy in Houston. Artifacts include, a
letter of verification and
report deliverables.
I have the experience and ability to apply best practice
management methodology to any size IT infrastructure. From cost
structure analysis, TCO and benchmarking to ITSM/ITIL disciplines, I have a proven track record of accomplishments.
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