Alex North Email & Phone Number

Santa Clara, Ca, Us

Santa Clara, Ca, Us

As the Technical Architect for the HI instance I help review and co-ordinate the adoption of new ServiceNow features and technologies used by internal and external customers. HI is the first production large scale instance to receive all ServiceNow family releases prior to being made available to customers. As "Customer Zero", we provide invaluable feedback to core and product development teams to identify and mitigate critical issues before they hit customer instances.More recently I have been focused on building the framework for HI Service Portal to be available for customers inside regulated environments. The first of these offerings will enable US Government agencies to benefit from ServiceNow "Gov Community Cloud" hosted instances. Two significant challenges had to be overcome. The first being how to enable both internal and external customers to continue to perform their daily work with the minimum of disruption while remaining compliant with a multitude of controls; the second being able to leverage FPKI signed CAC and PIV cards.I participate in multiple architecture review boards spanning the corporate IT environment, the commercial and federal cloud infrastructure as well as the ServiceNow product offerings.

Santa Clara, Ca, Us

In 2013, this was a relatively new role within ServiceNow and involved the continual assessment of processes and technologies employed by the support organisation. I made recommendations on where we could improve our tool set and was engaged with the regional and global leadership teams. Additional responsibilities included creating knowledge content and ensuring the technical accuracy of existing reference materials. Time was also spent coaching and mentoring Technical Support Engineers on new and existing product functionality.At the end of 2013, I traveled to Sydney with colleagues from the London and San Diego offices to conduct the final face to face interviews for the TSEs and SAMs who will operate out of our new support office in Australia. This was the culmination of several weeks of telephone screening dozens of candidates. It was truly gratifying to see this new and incredibly talented team to assume full shift control by the end of May 2014.

Santa Clara, Ca, Us

Technical Support Manager for ServiceNow in EMEA, with responsibility for Performance and Integrations teams. This role saw me continue to develop the technical capabilities of Technical Support Engineers to efficiently respond to and proactively head off performance challenges encountered by users of the ServiceNow platform. I developed training material and delivered masterclass sessions and seminars in all three major support centers operating at that time (San Diego, London and Amsterdam).

Santa Clara, Ca, Us

After an intensive boot camp and exposure to identifying and mitigating platform performance related issues, I became Performance Team Lead for ServiceNow Technical Support (EMEA). During this period of hyper-growth for the business, it was critical that any performance issues or service interruptions encountered by customers were responded to and rectified as quickly as possible, along with providing a root cause analysis to ensure permanent removal of the problem. At the same time as developing best practices, I was responsible for building up and developing the performance team in the London and Amsterdam offices.

Nottingham, Gb

I was initially brought in on a three month contract back in 2006 to bring the level of understanding of the internal Boots service desk of new dispensary software up to a workable level. Following several extensions to my initial contract period, I was taken on as a full time employee in August 2007. I spent a good deal of time troubleshooting problem areas with the dispensary system working closely with end users, testers, developers and the product roadmap team.Through hands on experience and research, I built up a thorough understanding of all technologies in use in Boots stores; including the LAN and WAN infrastructure, IBM ePOS hardware and software, server and client hardware and software platforms. I aided Boots' store architects to resolve problems which were identified post implementation as well as gather requirements and form proposals for and deliver new solutions (notably the knowledge delivery portal). Towards the end of my time with Boots, I was working with others (including a Boots store architect and a Steria DBA) to tune the performance of the dispensary application and identify how best to maximise the use of storage within the restrictions of the database engine.I developed support tools and processes to provide a single stores service delivery team for an estate of around 2,500 stores. This service was delivered by a combination of internal and outsourced staff. Having managed the 'intensive care' given to stores in Scotland, the processes which I established were subsequently handled by an outsourced team and the rollout to English stores was completed successfully.A sub-project of particular interest was the further development of a Lucene-based search engine for our in house knowledge portal - expanding the user base of this solution from 30 users on one site up to several hundred users across 3 continents.

La Défense, Cedex France, Fr

Projects which I worked on included a government accredited ePharmacy solution for Mediphase (Foxpro for DOS, VB6 and Java) and internal information systems (ASP and MS SQL 2000).

La Défense, Cedex France, Fr

Member of the technical escalations team supporting Nexphase and Mediphase dispensary applications. Provided training for new joins and established service desk members.

Duties included building new PCs, performing repairs on domestic and corporate computer systems. Collection and partial processing of obsolete computer equipment for recycling.I wrote an ePOS / inventory system for use in the public facing and eBay side of the business.

Chicago, Illinois, Us

Working up from a part time crew member to a full time shift manager, I was the youngest person to be enrolled on the management programme in the London-South region at that time.I gained experience of staff scheduling, cash and stock control. Towards the end of my time with the company I was a member of the Restaurant Technologies focus group. I was responsible for training the initial takers of the hand held order taking and stock control solution in East Kent. That solution was eventually used in restaurants across the country.