PricewaterhouseCoopers
Principal Consultant, 1998-2001

e-Business Technical Architecture, Daily Telegraph

Technical architect leading a major strategic re-structuring of the Electronic Telegraph web site - a major on-line newspaper. This required a sophisticated and scalable technical architecture including personalised content, profile tracking, e-commerce and interactive Java applications (such as personal budget planners or portfolio trackers.) Responsible for the design of a component based architecture to support the end-to-end business process, including content creation, editing, staging, publishing and distribution. This included detailed consideration of load balancing, performance security, firewalls, session management, failover and recovery etc. This role required the understanding and application of key e-business technologies, including content management and delivery solutions using XML/XSL, Java and EJB component development. Key applications used include ATG Dynamo application server, personalisation server and commerce server, Netscape web server, NetGravity advertisting servers, Verity K2 search engine, iChat Message Rooms chat server, Chrystal Astoria XML database and Interwoven content management system.

e-Business Strategy, Marks and Spencer

Lead the technical side in a review of the e-commerce strategy for Marks and Spencer. This entailed evaluation of the current commercial strategy and existing e-commerce platform and developing detailed recommendations for the forward technical, marketing and commercial organisation of Marks and Spencer in e-commerce. This required detailed analysis of the existing web site architecture, components and interfaces through fulfilment channels. Detailed knowledge of packages such as InterWorld Commerce Exchange and Microsoft IIS web server was gained. The scope of the study expanded to include IT and business liaison, organisation structures and ways of working - particularly the effective management of suppliers and software vendors. A detailed logical architecture for a proposed future e-commerce platform was developed and documented.

Workflow Strategy Design, SG Warburg Dillon Read, Investment Bank

Consultant advising the middleware engineering division develop a technical strategy for adopting workflow across the bank's various trading and back office systems. This involved building detailed case studies of a number of large scale projects within the bank and analysis of their use of middleware technologies such as CORBA, MQ Series and publish/subscribe messaging. This work required close liaison with senior members of the office of architecture to identify the key technical and management issues involved in the successful adoption of large scale, high volume workflow.

Digital Radio Subscriber Provisioning, Dolphin Telecommunications

Project leader assigned to design, develop and manage the implementation of a new subscriber provisioning system for Dolphin Telecommunications - a leading supplier of mobile digital radio networks. Responsible for all aspects of the system delivery, from requirements capture using use cases, formal analysis using OO CASE tools, through detailed design, coding and acceptance testing in C++. The project was delivered ahead of schedule with a very high quality of deliverable; both software and design and user documentation.

Technical Architecture Review, The Post Office

Appointed to review the technical architecture of the strategic data transformation hub used by the Post Office network to integrate central office with the Horizon network of electronic POS terminals in sub Post Offices. The objectives were to assess the flexibility and adaptability of the data hub architecture and design in meeting new business requirements and to assess its support for a corporate hub-and-spoke architecture. The approach taken involved the use of business scenarios to investigate the impact of specific business change on the technical components of the design.

Distributed Workflow Systems Design, World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO)

Proposed a software architecture for automating WIPO's paper-based administrative system for the clearance of international patent applications. The emphasis was on using existing third party packages (workflow, document management, security, scanning, database etc.) within a flexible and distributed architecture. A 4-tier architecture was proposed based on the Java Platform for the Enterprise (JPE). The business objects and higher level business logic (the 'use cases') were to be implemented as Enterprise JavaBeans operating within a EJB application server such as Weblogic from BEA.

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