Charles Summers Email & Phone Number

Chicago, Il, Us

Chicago, Illinois, Us

Directing the group responsible for shaping and executing the company's Integration Strategy:• Established the Integration capability, and formed a group consisting several cross-functional teams, each playing crucial roles in the full life-cycle development, support, and operations of SOA based solutions.• The group consists 3 Development teams, a SOA Governance team, and a Triage team responsible for triaging defects found within all software developed company-wide.• Built high-performing teams through coaching, advancement and recruiting great talent. Outstanding record in leading large and complex projects:• Led integration through major program to successfully implement the next generation Operations and Business Support System platform (OSS/BSS Transformation). • Successfully led numerous multi-million dollar projects, oversaw onshore and offshore teams, and fulfilled essential vendor management and governance activities.• Provided significant direction on major programs including Digital Commerce and Omni-Channel.Innovation and continuous improvement: • Introduced Service Virtualization to reduce project pain-points. Implemented the best-of-breed product, and secured a small team and reduced project durations by 2-4 weeks; reduced defect density; simplified infrastructure thereby reduced software and hardware costs.• Improved productivity and quality through DevOps. Automated the building and testing of software, code versioning and deployment, application performance monitoring, and service virtualization. Driving standards of excellence:• Implemented several Centers of Excellence (CoE). • Maintained 99.999% uptime for all ESB web services through high quality software development, capacity planning, superior middleware platforms and 24/7 operational support.• Demonstrated operational excellence by meeting all Service Level Agreements (SLAs). • Accomplished continual improvements to development capabilities and project execution.

Chicago, Illinois, Us

Managed development teams and projects involved in Web Development and Integration:• Built the business case for introducing SOA and integration services.• Established and managed the Service Integration team to develop solutions that enable cross-system interoperability via SOA web services and other means. • Broke new ground by implementing the company’s first Enterprise Service Bus (ESB), which has subsequently been used for the integration of all disparate systems and third parties.• Integration solutions accelerated product development and improved solution quality, thereby reduced project timelines and achieved a faster time to market. • Led numerous project teams with resources and vendors located onshore and offshore. • Fulfilled essential vendor management and governance activities.• Created/led a cross-functional SOA research team to explore benefits of implementing SOA. This led to the SOA Vision and Strategy.

London, Gb

Managed the Application Development team responsible for implementing the Web and Portal Strategies:• Considerable technical background and strong leadership skills helped transform an under-performing Web development team into a highly motivated, high-performing Web/Portal team. • Established the Portal Technology Roadmap, adopted company-wide, resulting in the introduction of portal technologies within the company. • Successfully led several multi-million dollar development projects utilizing these emerging technologies, including the multi-phased Provider Portal project. • The self-service "Direct Provider" portal provides significant capabilities to the provider network, and is highly regarded within the healthcare industry. • Significantly improved our customer's satisfaction, improved customer engagement, and generated higher than anticipated user adoption of the company's products. • Led development of several portals, web applications, and catalogs of portlets and web services. • Implementing SOA as a standardized application architecture for all future products, guaranteed expedited solution delivery, improved solution quality, and kept infrastructure costs down.• Established standards and best practices for all new technologies (e.g. portal, Java, and J2EE).

London, Gb

• Technical Architect responsible for establishing the company-wide portal strategy. Adopted a standard technology procurement process (RFI/RFP/RFQ), and successfully procured a best-in-class portal technology. • Introduced many technologies to the company, including Java/J2EE, Application Servers, Portal Servers, and various open source frameworks. • Advanced architecture by providing the company's first high-availability system design. • Launched many solutions supporting these high-availability/high-performance systems including fail-over, load-balancing, session management, resource pooling, and caching mechanisms. • Established and implemented a Web Technology Roadmap. • Led numerous technology and tool evaluations, leading to the implementation of key technologies that ensured the company's success in application development. • Designed and developed the initial Web Application Framework, which included a Database Connection Pool Manager. This framework was used for all web-based applications.• Established standards and best practices for all new technologies introduced (e.g. Java and J2EE).

Oak Brook, Il, Us

Provided both technical and managerial consultancy services, for the Fortune 500 companies listed below. Gained considerable recognition including the ‘Consultant of the Year’ award.

Lake Forest, Illinois, Us

• Lead consultant at the forefront of developing the Grainger.com website that was independently named in the Top 10 business-to-business websites in the world.• Principal e-commerce developer, responsible for the development of the e-commerce platform. This included design and development of key web application frameworks and utilities. • Designed, developed and implemented the entire cart, check-out and order placement system. • Designed and implemented new web-based capabilities in targeted marketing and campaigns.

Riverwoods, Il, Us

• E-commerce developer, responsible for the development of the e-commerce platform. This included design and development of the web application framework and utilities. • Helped team gain capabilities in new technologies (e.g. Java) including development of a java-based framework that became the foundation for all JVM-based and web-based applications.• Taught developers Object-Oriented Analysis, Design and Programming (OOA/OOD/OOP).

London, Gb

Recruited for the Executive Management Program of the world's fourth largest multinational banking and financial services company.Team Lead / Senior Developer• Successfully led several development teams on many critical enterprise projects.• Designed and developed highly optimized software used by over 60 million customers worldwide, and by internal customers in over 6,000 offices in 80 countries. • Developed enterprise applications, APIs, utility libraries and frameworks. Operations Manager• Led large teams of mortgage underwriters and data capture clerks. • Achieved significant reductions in OPEX via process improvements and technological innovations.