Gregg Withers Data and Information Management

linkedin.com/in/GREGGMWITHERS

Availability on calendly.com/greggwithers Happy to relocate within any of the 50 states, without constraints. SUMMARY

Professional Professionally: Passionate about driving great business value by delivering world-class business solutions that delight my business clients by exceeding expectations in terms of scalability, fit, and extensibility. My philosophy: Essential questions / stances for success:

- What’s the real problem, and why? Who’s really benefiting, and how?

- Technology is secondary – a utility: It’s people, processes, management and monitoring that makes things work.

- What’s getting in the way of analyzing the problem, and determining the most suitable solution?

- Real solutions must pass the workability test, not the politics test.

- Be honest, open, real, responsive, receptive (not a given from everyone).

- Good enough now versus “perfect never.”

- Business / customers drive priority. Serve the customer, or fail. Simple. Experience Extensive and significant experience, spanning about 30 years, in architecture (multiple disciplines), solution-design, project management, analyst, developer roles, and C-level roles. Founder and operations of own company. Delivery Proven track record in providing on-the-ground consulting guidance, and personally delivering completed fully scalable systems.

Goals To continue exceeding the expectations of project stakeholders, by delivering systems architectures and solutions designs that delight!

Verticals • Banking, Finance - Transportation / Fleet Management

• Insurance (Life, Long-Term Care) - Medical (pharma, provider, insurer)

• Telecommunications - HR

• Retail

SPECIALTIES

EXPERIENCE

Data Modeler & Information Architect:

Starbucks Coffee Company (Seattle WA, USA) DEC 2021 - Present

Data Governance (people, process, and technology – Collibra) Logical Data Modeling: Store Location Data Exchange)

Conceptual Modeling Solution Architecture

Evolving Information Architecture discipline Ontologies and taxonomies

Data Profiling Defined Information Architecture Mission, Principle, Values, etc Data Architect:

Data IMCORP: Electrical Utilities Servicing, Manchester CT USA JUNE– NOV 2021

Defining Enterprise Architecture practices and processes Solution Design for key application

Defining Business Information Strategy Database Rationalization

Database Consolidation Cloud platform determination, design

Identify technical & business process issues & target state design Drew up tech. architecture current state, identified gaps, overlaps Data Management Consultant:

DFINITY Foundation: Building the Internet Computer – Zurich Switzerland, Palo Alto/San Francisco, CA USA. JAN– MAR 2021

Working remotely for both offices, documented enterprise structure using Prince-2 / Value chain and value stream analysis.

Used the above as a template for enterprise-wide redesign of fragmented websites to increase end-user participation. Business

Systems

Architecture

Since the early 90's, I've been analyzing and defining business requirements, and successfully architecting and articulating solutions to my business sponsors in their language, including articulating added value (e.g. through extensible designs). I am also well versed in the building of business cases, participating in the budget gating process and the design review process

(application design reviews etc.), and the integration of the design with existing hardware and software systems, people, and processes.

Data

Governance

Full life-cycle, minimally invasive DG definitions and implementations, including supporting functions, all aspects of enterprise data management, tied to performance assessments, yielding real world business value, risk reduction, increased compliance, covering all aspects of enterprise data management for both business and IT. Data

Architecture

Actively architecting data since 1989, which is the formal specification of the data needs of the business, starting at a high-level conceptual model (entities and subject areas levels), and progressing to logical (implementation independent), and target environment-specific physical database design and optimization. My standards for documenting data architecture requirements allow the business and technologists to self-validate the modeled data requirements, and for developers to “see” the data design in “live” format. Most recently master data management in a Service Oriented Architecture context. Team Leader Deep experience in leading highly matrixed and geographically distributed teams across the globe (multiple locations in USA, Canada, South Africa, India, Hong Kong, Japan). My role usually morphs initially from architect to SME responsible for Knowledge Transfer to remote resources, to tech lead / implementation lead, and usually also includes development work and some training of new concepts to subordinates.

Solutions

Architecture

Experienced since 80s in compiling high-level and detailed functional and technical specifications; detailed technical specifications, and application and database designs that developers have been able to take from specification through completion.

Technologies RELATIONAL DATABASES: Microsoft SqlServer (2018), Oracle, DB2 DATABASE PROGRAMMING: SQL, Stored Procedures, Triggers, database functions, web-enabling the aforementioned DATA MODELING: SQL WORKBENCH, ERWIN SQLSERVER MANAGEMENT STUDIO, SPARX EA ARCHITECT, SQL DBM, MODELIO, VISIO (DB PLUGIN), DRAW.IO

GRAPH DATABASES: Neo4j

DATA VIRTUALIZATION: Denodo

CLOUD DBS/ WAREHOUSES: Snowflake; Supports all backends (Oracle, Sql, DB2 Azure, etc). DATA GOVERNANCE: Data3Sixty, Collibra

Recommended governance mechanisms to enhance & define accountability, traceability, roles and responsibilities.

Unix Scripts: Bash and Z-shell. Diagrams: Draw.io, PlantUML Asciidoc. Google Sheets. Google Draw. Rust. GitHub. Notion. Jira. Lucid Charts. Slack. PlantUML. VSCode (Visual Studio Code). ITIL4 (Value chains and streams) Data Architecture, Modeling, Governance, Data Quality: Provincial Government (13 distinct departments / businesses) – South Africa: MAY 2019 – DEC.2020 Enterprise Information and Data Management

Defined Data Governance policies and principles.

Defined master data standards for Party, Facility, Address, and Service data subject areas; heavily involved in implementation.

Key player in mastering data across independent legal entities, and defining engagement process model

Involved in establishing Master Data- and Data Quality capabilities, including matching, merging, assessment and correction rules.

Defined and built business glossary and data dictionary tools, including metadata sourcing, population, and supporting methodologies

Defined guidance framework for data virtualization

Defined master / reference data reference models, and application thereof to development efforts

Participate in Provincial Data Office as Enterprise Data Architect.

Changed sponsorship model of architecture to ensure greater success and improved business alignment

Assessed technology proposals from 13 departments along technical, data, business, and enterprise dimensions.

Defined provincial data strategy and solution designs to modernize province’s data landscape, along with accompanying RACI matrices.

Defined, built, and started populating Data Landscape Tool to centrally capture provinces data and information assets, across all lines of business / departments.

Defined data model for new APM tool (application portfolio management) to optimize application spend / save.

Microsoft SqlServer 2018: SQL, MDS, DQS. Excel: embedded data modeling, slicers + pivots (dashboards) with Excel VBA. Archimate

(business and data modeling). Trello, Microsoft Project, and Microsoft Planner for project management / planning. Microsoft Word, Visio, Power BI. SQLData Modeler. SQL DBM. Sharepoint: Sites creation etc. VSCode for database design. SqlServer Management Studio

Data Compliance Consultant:

Sanlam – Bellville, South Africa NOV.2018 – APR.2019

Legal Compliance Governance and Framework: Data protection regulations

Decomposing of regulations into elemental requirements, and mapping to data management knowledge areas (governance, metadata management, data architecture, data modeling, reference and master data management etc.)

Built reporting mechanisms to support ease-of-access to the above.

Excel to capture and decompose complex regulations and map to data elements and operating units. Excel to defined RACI matrix with WBS / functional decomposition to clarify roles and responsibilities to execution level

.

Data Quality Specialist / Assessment:

First Rand Group: WesBank and FNB (financial Service) – Johannesburg, South Africa. JUL.2018 – NOV.2018

Data Quality Audit: Assessed the Data Quality practices of FNB and WesBank from a functional perspective, considering organizational structure, richness of assessment and correction rules, integrity of data value chain, change and issue management, etc. Assignment also included, as a value-add, a custom-built data quality assessment tool that allowed the two operating units to further exploit synergies and opportunities between them vis-à-vis DQ rules.

Tableau (database design and reporting / visualizations). Word, Excel. PowerPoint. Microsoft MDS. Helped develop custom vendor solution (SQL + data model) for DQ assessment, correction, and reporting MDM Specialist; Data Modeler:

Woolworths (retail) – Cape Town, South Africa. APR.2018 – JUN.2018

Performed Enterprise Architecture, Data Architecture, Solution Architecture for the following solutions:

Data Quality across technical systems lineage: determination and identification of inconsistencies across systems, at both logical and physical levels

Determining of functional communications confidence by consolidating, aggregating, and analyzing mobile messaging and email delivery and interaction rates, and opt in / opt out elections per client and per channel, resulting in reduced communications costs and improved customer engagement. This included the design of a user-driven business rules engine that will allow business analysts to easily adjust rules according to predefined criteria.

Informatica (ETL). Sql queries (Oracle, SqlServer, DB2 DBMSs). Microsoft PowerPoint, Visio, Word. Data Modeler, MDM Specialist, Data Governance Consultant, Data Quality SME: Direct Axis (Financial Services), in Diep River, W. Cape, South Africa: NOV.2016 – APR.2018

Platform optimization / rationalization Realized opportunities to save millions annually in cost, improve compliance, reduce risk, and improve collaboration between teams by defining best-practice guidelines, adding governance controls, by building and operationalizing a repository tool to centrally store and manage metadata across the entire organization relating to where all applications store their data, in all environments, at both business and technical levels, allowing for several hundred database to be identified for elimination and consolidation, amounting to millions in all-in cost savings.

Application Portfolio Responsible for defining, capturing, validating with business and technical staff: Business and technical data lineage diagrams, system context diagrams, and User Interface Tiers, Business Logic Tiers, and Database Tiers, for Direct Axis’ entire suite of Business applications, at conceptual, logical, and physical levels, in the Erwin Enterprise Architecture tool.

Data Management Practice Improvement: Responsible for defining, operationalizing, and optimizing the organizational Data Architecture and Data Management operating model to better align with and deliver on business strategy, focusing on modeling artifacts (conceptual, logical, physical), standardized processes, the data architecture interaction model including roles and responsibilities, and governance-related controls and measures.

Data Governance Establishment, ensuring that otherwise burdensome legal compliance with BCBS239, was leveraged to realize business and IT efficiencies, cost reductions, and increased effectiveness and efficiency. Included designing models and templates, working committees, escalation mechanisms, defining of minimum viable artefacts that would allow full traceability from legal requirements, to supporting artefacts by business area, allowing for full risk data aggregation and risk reporting at any detailed level of the business / business function, and rolled up into multi-company risk data aggregation and reporting.

Master Data Management: Designed an advanced multi-context “party” (people and organizations) MDM architecture, that via a rules-driven front end whereby data sharing/restriction agreements between various data consumers (“contexts”) based on their relationships with data providers, will be able to instantly synthesize context-sensitive (aka data provider-consumer data sharing contracts) compliant views of the party in question on the fly, while being able to provide full audit trails (survivorship) of how each master data element’s value was determined, and also the historical values as of any prior point in time.

Compliance Framework designed generic legal compliance framework, and populated it for specific regulations, along with roles, responsibilities, and reporting, escalation, and aggregation mechanisms that both measure and ensure compliance at the subsidiary levels and parent corporation, Initially populated the framework with BCBS239 (RDARR) (similar to GDPR (Europe / global) legislative requirements and their mappings to the corresponding data management- and evidential artifacts to capture, measure, and ultimately prove compliance.

Metadata modeling: Architected an enterprise wide metamodel that brought together the application portfolio (above) and compliance framework (above) and allowed for compliance data across the franchises (subsidiaries) to be captured in a uniform manner, and aggregated and rolled up to higher level holding companies etc.

Target Data State: Worked with business and IT partners to motivate for, and subsequently determine and develop target data state, and started analysis to determine roadmap to from current to target.

Data modeling: Erwin Data Modeler, Sparx EA. Microsoft Word, Excel (advanced), Visio, and Advanced PowerPoint. Informatica ET. SqlServer 2008 – 2015: MDS, DQS, SSAS, SSIS, SSRS (analysis, master data, data quality, integration, reporting services) SqlServer Management Studio

MDM Solution Architect:

Old Mutual (Insurance, Financial Services), in Pinelands, S. Africa AUG.– NOV.2016:

Designing a solution against the IBM Info Sphere stack (ODM, Data Stage, Quality Stage, Information Analyzer) in a service-oriented architecture to support name and address validation, standardization, and verification for people and organizations, to improve party data matching for Old Mutual’s Master Data Management process

IBM Info Sphere stack (ODM, Data Stage, Quality Stage, Information Analyzer) Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint Data Governance Specialist / Accelerator:

Curo Funds Services in Bellville, W. Cape, South Africa FEB. – JUL.2016:

Defined and implemented an enterprise data governance program, covering:

Building the business cases for and increasing adoption and appreciation of data governance.

Defining the Data Governance Roadmap

Organizational establishment of the data governance purpose and function, defining roles and responsibilities, governance operating model, policies and principles.

Modeling the organization’s governance requirements into Data3Sixty (commercial governance tool);

Institutionalizing (entrenching into SOPs and enforcing of) governance best practices.

Onboarding business areas in an accelerated fashion into an enterprise-wide governance mindset and tool usage.

Data3Sixty Data Governance / Data management solution Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint SqlServer Management Studio Business Information Architect:

Humana, Louisville KY: Data Governance Office NOV.2014 –DEC.2015:

KY. Key activities included the following, along with supporting processes and procedures:

Building a Conceptual Business Information Model (CBIM) in a purely business-centric, technology- and application agnostic manner that the business can relate to that is aligned with company strategy and helps to inform IT of the same.

Building an INFORMATION MAP between the CBIM and relevant systems of record, in an easy and business-navigable manner so that executives can correlate enterprise goals, identify stewards, determine quality issues, etc.

Building a business information glossary with enterprise-wide endorsed, well-defined terms across all business areas, business functions with participation and involvement from all business areas and functions.

Advanced Visio (data lineages, animations etc.). Microsoft Word, Excel (data mappings) PowerPoint (value chains and value streams)

SqlServer Management Studio

Enterprise Solution Architect:

John Hancock Financial Services’ Corporate Technology Office FEB.2012 – NOV.2014:

Serviced different lines of business in defining and aligning business requirements, with reusable in-house and / or commercial enterprise software catalog components in architecting solutions to satisfy business needs in a timely and cost-effective manner, across a wide range of business functional areas and projects.

TIBCO ESB (Enterprise Service Bus) Erwin (logical and physical data modeling) Microsoft Word, Excel SqlServer Management Studio

April 2011 – JAN.2012:

Enterprise Data Architect - Service Oriented Architecture at John Hancock Life Insurance Company. Defining of enterprise Canonical message- and data models, and creation of management system to:

Facilitate model management and master metadata and data management traceability.

Capture the mapping of business services to business domain- and capability models

Various projects within the business units, such as but not limited to mastering securities, etc.

SOA CoE – Active contributing member of the John Hancock / Manulife’s Corporate Technology Office’s Center of Excellence for Service Oriented Architecture, reviewing and facilitating hundreds of service contracts and service design documents submitted by business units across the enterprise, for quality (adherence to best practices, SOA design principles, and canonical model standards).

Erwin Microsoft Office Suite Toad SqlServer Management Studio TIBCO ESB (Enterprise Service Bus) Enterprise Data Management:

John Hancock Financial Services JUL.2009 – APR.2011:

Actively contributing member: Enterprise Master Data Management Group at John Hancock Life Insurance Company. Leader for 1 years of international Data Management Task Force tasked with analyzing current state relating to data management people, processes, and procedures, and identifying and recommending improvements.

Erwin Microsoft Office Suite Toad SqlServer Management Studio TIBCO ESB (Enterprise Service Bus) MAR.2009 – APR.2011:

Actively contributing member: Enterprise Architecture Forum at John Hancock Life Insurance Company.

I compiled LTC Future-State Use Case, incorporating LTC's strategic vision, and other key business capabilities and technologies such as ESB, SOA, and MDM.

Word,, PowerPoint, Excel

APR. – DEC.2012:

Pricing and Securities/assets: Vendor evaluation, and data architecture. Determined technical and functional (business) evaluation criteria, and then chose to select a software vendor in this space that is able to support legally independent business units running on a single instance of the application. As data architect, I designed structures that will allow the company to reuse securities pricing data across business units, realizing a huge cost reduction over current duplicate purchasing and inefficient securities sourcing practices.

Benefits Administration – Application architecture, data architecture, and solution design to solve for NY Regulation 200, in such a way that short-term “emergency phase” solution to meet regulation deadlines was compatible with future-state strategic solution, which includes integrating “leading edge” solution elements such as semantic search and enrichment, federated search, fuzzy matching, rules engines, etc. This solution realized huge business cost savings and efficiencies by establishing a single enterprise-wide standard for “death match processing” and provided the first-ever “single view of customer” across the organization, et al.

Erwin

Architect (Volunteer capacity):

Youth Build – Just-A-Start Nonprofit, Cambridge MA SEP.2011 – APR.2012:

Evaluated business alternatives for educational aid and advancement programs. I donated my professional skills during vacation time to advance these efforts.

Enterprise Architect:

LTC Technology Council May 2009 – APR.2011

Lead the 7-member Architecture Task Force to define and improve the Long Term Care business unit's architecture-, development-, and solution-design best practices.

Word, PowerPoint

Architecture, Solutions Designer at John Hancock Financial Services 2000 – APR.2011

Identified business drivers, and defined business cases.

Developed / designed both high-level and detailed functional specifications.

Authored detailed technical application and database design and specifications.

Word, PowerPoint

Data Architecture and Development Consultant (Butler International) 1997 – 1999

Domains: banking, insurance, and telecommunications industries.

Erwin

Data Modeling: Metadata Repository (Bank One, Columbus OH) 1997 - 1998

Logical and physical data modeling (metadata repository for enterprise data warehouse)

Erwin

Chief Information Officer (FastFleet Transportation Company, South Africa) 1996 – 1997

Led entire IT unit within a newly formed transportation business unit.

Responsible for overall IT strategy, architecture, infrastructure, budgeting, and defining/assigning IT development tasks to a geographically diverse team.

WordPerfect Oracle DBMS

Jr Developer to Tech Lead, to Analyst, to Application Architect (Telkom South Africa) 1989 - 1996

Mainframe- and PC-based transaction processing and reporting systems

Career progression: Junior to senior developer to tech lead and business analyst to solution design

Technical scope: Application and systems architecture; Design, development of mainframe and Windows-based OLTP and batch systems.

Business scope: Stock system; International telephony accounting; Fleet management system (preventive maintenance, scheduling, utilization planning and other capabilities)

COBOL AM (Application Master), RM (Report Master) IDMSX JCL Developer: Pascal, B-Trieve, Assembly Programmer (Zarab South Africa) 1988 – 1989

User Interface screens were taking weeks at a time to develop.

Realizing this inefficiency, I developed a screen-generating- and menuing application that reduced screen generation time from weeks to hours.

Pascal BTrieve

Internship / Utility Mainframe Developer South African Medical Research Council) 1988

C programming (IBM mainframe) to capture images from unsupported scanning microscopy hardware.

SAS programmer to develop new- and maintain existing routines to provide research scientists with data visualization and custom-coded statistical processing capabilities.

Development of numerous REXX and KEDIT support / utility macros to aide mainframe developers

C and Assembly language. SAS (Statistical analysis REXX and KEdit editors w/ macro programming JOB FUNCTIONS (2000-November 2014, John Hancock Architecture)

Applications, Solution, Data architecture

System Architecture

Data architecture (logical, physical) for OLTP, OLAP, DW

Defining architectural standards for business unit

Environment / infrastructure installation and configuration

Identification and assigning of tasks to local and remote resources.

Permanent member of Corporate Technology Office’s Service

High-level and low-level functional and technical specifications

Converting user requirements into technical specs Oriented Architecture’s Center of Excellence, responsible for

Current- and target state cross-functional diagrams institutionalizing SOA best practices and design principles, and

Migration and masking of existing legacy data canonical models within the organization

Knowledge transferring of requirements to outsourced REFERENCES

Available on request

EDUCATION

Bachelor of Science, Information Technology (Cape Peninsula University of Technology)

Post-graduate training available on request

Current certifications / studies: Google Cloud Platform, Azure, Amazon Web Services

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