Project Engineering
Resume:
Yuan-Tsong (YT) Chen, Ph.D.
Plano, TX 75024
*********@*****.***
SUMMARY OF QUALIFICATIONS:
A passionate and effective enterprise solution architect with 15+ years of experiences practicing software
development, solution architecture and enterprise architecture in retail, mobile commerce, telecom and defense
industries
Innovative creativity with strong command of application and infrastructure technologies produces sound
solutions, meeting business requirements and exceeding service level agreements
Open and skilled communication influences stakeholders and engineers for more optimized solutions
Strong business acumen with positive can-do energy and deep analytical skills helps business organizations distill
business needs and devise strategies
In-depth knowledge in objected-oriented programming and design, design patterns, software engineering, agile
methodologies, Service Oriented Architecture, and enterprise architecture practices.
Well versed in architecture governance, developing IT models, formulating IT strategies and roadmaps, defining
architecture best practices, and reviewing architectural deliverables
Track record in solutioning/developing large-scale quality applications in Web, mobile, enterprise systems, in
time and cost, to serve millions of users and thousands of stores with billions in value
EDUCATION:
Ph.D. in Computer Science with specialty in Software Engineering
Southern Methodist University, Dallas, Texas
Dissertation: A Quantitative Software Reuse Framework
M.S. in Computer Science
The University of Oklahoma, Norman, Oklahoma
Thesis: A Universal Approach for Single-row Routing)
B.S. in Industrial Engineering, Tsing Hua University, Taiwan
WORK EXPERIENCE:
3/13-Present Lead Architect, Isis/Softcard Mobile Commerce, Dallas, TX.
Lead Architect for Commerce, Work with Product Management, architects, development teams and
partners to define, design, and implement commerce features of ISIS/Softcard wallet, including
automation of couponing, offers, loyalty programs and promotions in mobile advertising with NFC
technology. Re-architected the commerce platform for location-based services, event processing, offer
targeting, and robust error handling. Leading a team of 15 developers, with agile methodology, to
successfully delivered 3 major releases for Isis/Softcard wallet in a year. Achievements include a
Bronze Appreciation Award, two pending patents, 10x performance improvement (sub-second times),
and a strong high morale team.
8/08-2/13 Enterprise Architect, JC Penney, Plano, TX.
Solution Architect for Payment Solutions, Instrumental in defining the vision and roadmap for digital
wallet and payment solutions. Introduced an SOA approach to build new functionality while
maintaining compatibility with existing integrations. Actively leading the architectural and solutioning
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efforts for wallet and payment initiatives.
Enterprise Architect. Member of Architecture Working Group, the body governing JC Penney
architecture & technology standards. Regularly conduct technical reviews and providing
recommendations to projects. Advocated practices and developed templates for Non-Functional
Requirements, promoted ESB & SOA strategy, concepts and practices, devised an incident reduction
approach resulted in 70+% improvement, developed a security architecture for COTS application, drove
the adoption of reusable domain components, contributed in Styles, Patterns and Stacks for apps,
defined Naming conventions for Java & .net packages/namespaces, and designed and rolled out ESB to
1100+ stores.
SOA Architect. Developed and rolled out strategy, standards & best practices including XML
namespace naming, service versioning, traceability message header, integration exception hierarchy,
integration error handling, guidelines for sparse & complete events, service classification schemes,
guidelines for data validation, services & events catalog, naming conventions for queues/topics,
presented a messaging architecture scalable to 70K+ endpoints at TIBCO TUCON 2011 conference.
Solution Architect for Project Import Program, Defined best practices for a large scale program,
including Sequential Processing of Messages, Provider-centric integration testing approach, integration
patterns and practices, reference app architectures for .net and for Flex/Java, and reference Web service
in CXF. Strong performances in architecting, designing, mentoring, and problem solving with teams,
winning the praise of the most sought-for architect.
Solution Architect for Supply Chain & Stores Systems, Designed the solution and oversaw delivery of
large scale enterprise projects. Successfully introduced Java technology, event processing and SOA into
the portfolios. Developed messaging architecture for stores, Promoted and standardized the practice of
Non-Functional Requirements in solutioning, infrastructure engineering and operation management.
3/01-7/08 Sr. Advisor and Architect, Blockbuster, Dallas, TX.
CRM Lead Architect, Tech leading from technology evaluation, solution formulation, to design and
implementation. Delivered a state-of-the-practice closed-loop CRM system with BI reporting on 100+
million customers and 6+ billion transactions. Effectively addressed data quality and meta-data
management. Re-engineered the data warehouse to achieve 20%-95% performance improvements,
winning a “Beyond Expectation” praise form project sponsors.
Solution Architect for Integrated Customer View Project, Full-cycle architect from business case,
solution, architecture, to design and implementation. Built a commerce engine for real time
interactions with customers visiting 5000+ stores. Achieved sub-second response times with 1st-year
zero outage at 30+ million daily transactions. Scalable solution sustaining load tests at 4000 TPS. Key
business functions include coupon distribution & redemption, personalized offers, targeted marketing,
and loss prevention. Sound architecture supported evolved requirements and new features over time.
Served as the customer commerce engine for 5+ years.
Lead Application Architect of the Architecture Program Office, governing enterprise architecture
standards and practices. Instrumental in developing Blockbuster IT Strategy. Evaluated and adopted
technologies such as ETL and EAI. Authored architecture methodologies and design
guidelines/templates adopted across IT teams. Reviewed all major projects for quality and compliance.
Contributed key ideas and solutions in large-scale enterprise projects.
Lead Technical Architect for In-Store Subscription Project. Responsible for estimating the IT volumes
based on business projections, assessing all IT systems upon impact of doubling work load, accurately
identified capacity and performance weaknesses for upgrade, reviewed and baselined SLAs of 16
applications and 114 batch jobs, and led a performance testing team to successfully test and tune all
impacted applications.
Lead Architect for the new Point of Sale (POS) initiative, Instrumental in defining the strategy and
architecture and in evaluating technology partners for the implementation.
Solution Architect for Weekly Focus Report project, Defined and developed a solution for field
reporting for 4500 stores in 6 weeks, Quality and speedy delivery saved $100K in cost and won an
award from the President of Blockbuster. The solution has been reused by 5+ other reports.
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Lead Java Mentor. Developed a comprehensive Java training program with internal and external
tracks for all application developers. Won praises from trainees and managers. Partnered with SMU in
conducting a successful training program.
Solution Architect for Customer Payment Solution Project, Leading the architecture work of
customer payment solution for 5000 stores. Developed and implemented architectural methodology and
deliverables used effectively through the project.
Lead SOA Architect, Researched and developed the service oriented architecture strategy and
roadmap. Conducted ESB product evaluation. Developed SOA enablement and migration strategy.
Mentored and guided applications in evolving from data centric paradigm to service-oriented paradigm.
Business Architect. Develop three business cases with potential benefit of $40+ million. Two of the
business cases were funded, implemented and deployed in production, realizing $20+ million benefits.
2/00-2/01 Team Lead, Trilogy Software, Austin, TX. Led a consulting team on a Web project using agile
methodology at Nortel networks. Successfully delivered a Web application, led a team using fast cycle
time software development process to achieve quality Web site release every two weeks.
2/99-2/00 Manager and Lead Web Architect, Sprint, Irving, TX. Responsible for defining Sprint’s standard
Web architecture, tools and frameworks for Web development. Led an architecture team that
successfully provided technical architecture support for a major Web application release, achieved 75%
speedup, and established a framework for performance tuning Web applications. The Web architecture
and framework was adopted by 13+ applications successfully.
4/98-2/99 Software Engineering Specialist, Raytheon Systems at Garland, TX. Responsible for GUI
development using Java in a fast-paced team. Developing code and solving problems to meet tight
schedules. Won the title of “Just In Time Programmer”. Led a benchmark team performing studies in
sever capacity and system architecture for a billion-dollar surveillance project with findings being used
across the project lifecycle
6/97-4/98 Consultant (Technical Architect), MCI Systemhouse, Dallas, TX. Engaged with MCI Dallas.
Responsible for OO-modeling, and Java Applet development using OrbixWeb. Achievements: created
and maintained a reusable class library used heavily by team members, developed a layout manager
used in 70 percent of the screens, improved performance of 80% to a Java application.
9/95-5/97 Consultant, Acxiom Corporation, Conway AR. Led and completed a CMM based software process
assessment. Responsible for advising and mentoring in object-oriented analysis, design, and
programming, Internet Web and Java development, and in researching and developing a prototype for
data mining and metadata in a large-scale distributed database, which eventually developed into a major
product.
9/93-8/94 Consultant for Spedden & Associates, Inc. Coding and maintaining a large base of software for an
actuarial project with C++, C, Pascal, and Paradox. Achievements include superb accuracy in
complicated computations, performance improvement in execution time from 15 hours to 20 minutes.
TEACHING EXPERIENCE:
8/94-6/97 Assistant Professor. Computer and Information Science Dept, Arkansas Tech
University. Responsible for teaching various undergraduate core computer science courses with great students’
evaluations. Successfully acquired $110K grants in research and teaching. Received Outstanding
Performance and Contribution Award from the department.
9/93-12/93 Instructor. Responsible for teaching labs for courses, including operation research,
engineering economy, computers and their applications (undergraduate), and engineering management (graduate
level), CSE Dept, SMU.
9/88-8/93 Teaching Assistant. Taught and assisted to teach several undergraduate and graduate
courses, including operating systems, application programming, computers and their applications, and
introduction to computing, CSE Dept, SMU.
RESEARCH EXPERIENCE:
1/94-6/94 Post Doctor at CSE Dept., SMU. Responsible for investigating problems related with
software reuse and testing. Duties include studying quantitative measurement for reusability and researching
techniques for automatic reuse by utilizing test data. Achievement: A proposal accepted by US Army for
$156K.
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1/90-8/93 Research Staff Member at SEK research group, SMU. Responsible for the design
and development of a new software reuse model, which combines techniques from software testing and
programming by example. Its advantages include low set-up costs, wide-domain applicability and adaptability to
many specification and programming languages. An axiomatic approach to specification metrics and a
framework for measuring reuse are presented (dissertation work).
5/89-12/89 Research Assistant at SEK research group, SMU. Developed a Prolog database and
a windowing tool using DMA to achieve superior performance (in C). This was part of a large software
development project at Northern Telecom.
HONORS AND PROFESSIONAL ACTIVITIES:
Member of IEEE Computer Society
Associate of the Month, June 2010. JC Penney
Certificate of Appreciation, Blockbuster, 2005.
Outstanding Contribution Award, Computer and Information Science, Arkansas Tech University, 1997.
Judge, ASCIT Programming Contest, 1995, 1996.
Faculty Sponsor, IEEE Computer Society's Student Newsletter, looking forward, 1995, 1996.
Vice Session Chairman of Computers in Engineering Symposium of ASME Energy-Sources Technology
Conference and Exhibition (ETCE), 1993, 1994.
Associate Editor-in-Chief for IEEE Computer Society's Student Newsletter, looking forward, 1993.
Student Representative for IEEE region 5, 1993.
Reviewer of International Conference on Software Engineering and Knowledge Engineering (SEKE),
1993.
Reviewer of ASME Energy-Sources Technology Conference and Exhibition (ETCE), 1993, 1994.
Reviewer of the Second International Conference on Systems Integration (ICSI), 1992.
Representative of the Engineering School Graduate Student Council, Feb. 1992 - May 1993.
Vice President of the Chinese Students Association at SMU, Fall 1991.
REFERENCES:
Available upon request
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