Virtual CIO/CTO Consulting company serving a diverse portfolio of customers in banking, manufacturing, warehousing and distribution, higher education, health research, and telecommunications.Artificial IntelligenceLed implementation team to create support platform for helpdesk to handle all calls with AI. The new system answers and transcribes all new calls and is able to solve more than half of all new tickets without engaging staff. Consulted with client on new project to create hyper-personalized boutique AI using custom transformation with company dataset of over 200,000 records. All research data was encapsulated and new LLM was protected to ensure all queries were only able to access private data from within the client’s environment.Strategic Planning and IT GovernanceSpearheaded the development and execution of a comprehensive Information Technology Strategic Plan to establish standards and identify best practices for the organization. Reviewed existing procedures to incorporate current methodologies with future state. Established a roadmap for implementation and guidance for adoption of the plan.

Master Distributor Serving Oil & Gas Industry, 9 branches around the United StatesArchitected and launched a customer purchasing system for clients to make buying products from Industrial Valco a simple and enjoyable process. Development efforts for this E-Commerce website encouraged collaboration with all departments to promote internal and external adoption. New website development and the establishment of an eCommerce Business Strategy enabled all company online sales goals to be exceeded by as much as 1000% and resulted in overall eCommerce sales achieving 20% of company revenue after three years.Enhanced Customer Experience to improve relationship between IT Helpdesk and end users, both internally among staff and externally with clients. This was accomplished by incorporating new Artificial Intelligence based Helpdesk software and rebranding the Helpdesk Team while building a streamlined ticketing process which could display Key Performance Indicators in real-time at a glance. All support documentation on known issues was added to the AI Knowledge Base for self-service, with Helpdesk assistants to guide and walk through Standard Operating Procedures as needed. These improvements also allowed the IT team to expand without any additional IT budget while creating long-term opportunities for employees and establishing a reliable IT presence. The result was a customer experience where IT could be trusted to resolve problems in a timely manner with an excellent attitude.Established Information Technology Strategic Plan to bring outdated systems up to current best practices. Collaborated with the CEO and Executive Team to educate and identify opportunities for efficiency and growth with targets at one year, three years, and five years out. This strategic roadmap successfully led to a standardized technology stack to optimize growth and improved confidence in IT capabilities.

Leadership and NegotiationsAs Mayor, created the first community park to provide shared space for residents to come together and participate in activities on literal common ground. Following through on a campaign promise to establish the first park in Villa Park, worked with fellow council members as well as state officials in acquiring grant funding to transform a plot of underdeveloped land into a beautiful green section of trails and grass where residents can meet and play. Officiated at ribbon-cutting opening of park, which is called Villa Park Knowles.Focused on constituent success and highlighted a ‘Distinguished Citizen of the Month’ at monthly council meetings. Met with groups of residents and then individually to compile a full history on outstanding community members, then engaged with leadership at the county and state levels to provide accolades to these individuals in a public forum – all meetings recorded and available on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/@CityOfVillaPark – led all meetings for 2022.Conducted interactive budget meetings with city residents to foster awareness and to solicit community involvement. All residents’ ideas were listened to, debated, and many proposals were incorporated into the direction of city spending. The product of these meetings was four successive years of balanced City Budgets, ranging from $4.5M to $5.8M.Hosted Town Hall to discuss impacts of Inflation on City Services and on city residents. Complied a comprehensive source of money-saving tips for residents to use regardless of diverse financial backgrounds and then led discussions among constituents to answer questions about how the city would handle rising costs.

Leadership and NegotiationsCultivated public trust and collective consensus throughout election campaign, hosting multiple ‘meet and greet’ opportunities where residents from the entire city could express their point of view and participate in discussions about possible solutions. Keeping an open mind to all sides of issues as a non-partisan position, was able to illuminate intelligent suggestions from the whole population. These sessions and door-to-door engagements enhanced a platform that led to successful election. Led $4M city contract negotiations that supported community services impacting 6,000+ residents. These included contracts for law enforcement and community safety with Orange County Sheriff's Department and Orange County Fire Authority, for sewage and refuse with Orange County Sanitation District and Republic Services, for road construction, maintenance, and senior ride services with private companies and the Orange County Transportation Authority, for water with the Serrano Water District, for electricity with Southern California Edison, for gas with Southern California Gas, for phone and cable services with AT&T and Spectrum, for library services with the Orange County Public Library, for animal control with Orange County Animal Care, and for pest control with the Orange County Vector Control Agency.Coordinated Infrastructure Upgrade plan for the City to measure where improvements would be most effective at improving the lives of city residents. Worked with County Library to provide technology such as laptops and wireless access points to residents who were not able to access these previously.Reduced the time spent by City Staff on activities that did not benefit the larger population and concentrated efforts around efficient meetings. Reorganized City committees to better align with community participation and provide better use of City Resources. Committees that were similar were combined.

The Orange County Sanitation District (OC San) is a public agency that provides wastewater collection, treatment, and disposal services for approximately 2.6 million people in central and northwest Orange County. OC San is a special district that is governed by a Board of Directors consisting of 25 board members appointed from 20 cities, two sanitary districts, two water districts and one representative from the Orange County Board of Supervisors. OC San has two operating facilities that treat wastewater from residential, commercial and industrial sources.Review and oversight of ~$500Mil Annual Budget (https://www.ocsan.gov/home/showpublisheddocument/32895/637920994536470000) and all Operations.

Governance and Organizational Development Enabled Enterprise Growth through multiple certifications and Audit results. Crafted and implemented NIST certified Enterprise Audit Standards and Compliance Program for SOC2 Type 1 and 2 audits. Audit success demonstrated that clients’ most valuable secrets were safe in Verdant’s private cloud and enabled multiple customers to choose Verdant as their provider. Fostered communications among employees and clients through technology that enabled highly connected interactions of large and small groups based in locations all over the country. Strategic PlanningDeveloped Strategic Plan working with all Practice Leads to incorporate all viewpoints and establish benchmarks for growth. Especially as the company flourished from 4 to 64 employees over five years, this plan had to accommodate existing technology as well as to support the adoption of new technologies as needed. Created Roadmap for expansion of infrastructure and grew into three data centers to allow for multiple points of redundancy and eliminate risk due to slow bandwidth or catastrophic failure at any one location. Working on a highly resource constrained budget, built from the smallest viable footprint of resources into fully redundant and massively elastic environments as more clients were signed.Infrastructure and OperationsImproved delivery times for new services, which allowed new clients to start up faster in Verdant Cloud. Implemented cutting-edge AI compliance monitoring and by outperforming our competitors, our adoption of new business outpaced all expectations.Fostered relationships with vendors, including Microsoft, Oracle and Amazon as they were expanding Azure, Cloud, and AWS offerings. All contract negotiations allowed Verdant to provide the best available service to all customers at the lowest cost, while strengthening Verdant’s private cloud, and competing directly with much larger cloud hosting companies.

• Directed all IT Operations – Data Center, HelpDesk, IT Security, Networking• Developed Annual IT Budgets for software, hardware, personnel, and services – including the management of licensing programs with Microsoft, Symmantec, and VMWare.• Acted as liaison between various levels of corporate management to convey business importance and ensure successful IT implementation of initiatives• Coordinated hardware reduction to condense corporate server footprint by 80% through implementation of VMWare ESX and ESXi hosts • Redesigned the company SAN and NAS infrastructure using EMC equipment; and ensured that the CommVault backups of all storage were simplified for efficiency• Supervised Altiris development and implementations for software delivery and asset management• Planned and led Data Center Relocation from existing facilities to new collocated space; handled power requirements, space layout, air conditioning, network feeds, and physical move arrangements for over 200 servers, storage devices, and network equipmentEnvironment: Windows, AS400, and Unix servers and desktops.

At Tellabs, Chad was hired as a senior programmer on a team that would design and implement a distributed telecommunications element management system (EMS). His primary responsibility was writing and managing the GUI for the EMS, which handled visual display of processes from several servers. In this role, Chad led a team of between 4 and 8 developers to write supplemental tools to coordinate unit, component, and integration testing, was responsible for bug fixing and even flew cross-country to provide real-time feature enhancements and to present tutorial seminars. Chad’s other roles at Tellabs involved architecting new software, troubleshooting problems in existing code, performing bug fixes, and brainstorming.

Chad was hired as a consultant to troubleshoot and perform bug fixes on all areas of a Radar Verification and Visualization software package called XPatch. After a month or so, he was also given responsibility for writing a stand-alone program to analyze and plot multi-dimensional data. Chad was solely responsible for all aspects of the software development cycle, from Architect to Developer to Tester.