Chip Cifone Email & Phone Number

Charlotte, Nc, Us

Charlotte, North Carolina Area

IT service transition and operation processes lead for a financial company that is 95% cloud based. Provide direct oversite of the outsourced Service Desk, and own the Incident, problem, and change process for the organization. Oversee the development of ITIL process and continual service improvement efforts. Key decision maker in the configuration and governance of the ServiceNow platform.

Burlington, Ct

Managed operations for a company in the Home Improvement industry that provided organizational goods and services for commercial and residential needs. Oversaw day to day activities and technology needs including office infrastructure and business applications. Directed sales and worked with customers to find product solutions to meet their needs. Facilitated supply chain management, accounting & budgeting, customer support, Project Management, digital marketing, training and staffing.• Setup a SAAS based accounting system for ease of management and collaboration with company’s accounting firm.• Mastered the latest standards in industry tools, technologies and techniques and leveraged process design methodologies to build an efficient and effective operation.• Built an effective CRM that led to a repeat customer pipe-line. This effort Increased sales revenue $360K in 18 months.

Bristol

Oversaw a team of 40+ staff consisting of Project Managers, Technical Managers, and Integration Specialists under a $20M budget. Directed the delivery of the IT department’s strategic and operational initiatives from conception through implementation. Managed a specialized technical team accountable for designing, installing and supporting IT infrastructure at temporary broadcast locations around the world. Oversaw the IT elements of the business continuity strategy, managed data center facilities and collaborated with stakeholders to set standards, plan and manage capacity. • Leveraged project management tools and best practices to build a waterfall-based structure for managing the project life cycle. Built in flexibility and touch points to integrate with Agile and ITIL work streams. • Improved efficiency by establishing a single project work ingest portal for all departments requesting project related IT infrastructure services. Prior to this effort, every group had their own unique mechanism. • Consolidated a project portfolio of about 500 fragmented projects across 5 teams down to 250 and actively managed the portfolio. Met with stakeholders and leaders to review status and set priorities. This effort allowed project resources to focus on business priorities, created efficiencies and improved project delivery time by 35%. • Spearheaded a yearlong effort to identify and document gaps in the IT services and workflows that support the overall Business Continuity Plan (BCP) for ESPN’s two primary networks. Presented findings to executive leadership and led a priority effort across technology to address gaps, improve readiness and established a testing regiment.

Bristol,Ct

Directed a cross functional organization consisting of 65+ technical staff and 18 vendor resources in four locations across the United States. Oversaw customer focused 24x7x365 service desk that followed ITIL best practices and principles. Managed End User Compute environment for all Windows, Mac and Mobile platforms. Directed production operations team that planned, installed and supported broadcast and IT infrastructure for studio shows and remote sporting events around the world. Drove technology transformation, automation and service management practices into the broadcast and engineering environment. Managed an annual operating budget of $16M and a capital budget of $6M. Rapidly promoted as a result of consistent high-level performance• Implemented vendor services to help manage some commodity services. Established SLA’s/KPI’s and monitored vendor performance for compliance. • Drove tool and workflow automation within the client services organization. Efforts focused on ticket routing, software delivery, standard service requests, password resets, approvals and self-help. These initiatives lowered support cost and increase the speed of delivery across the enterprise. • Established standards for the enterprise MAC platform and converted the environment from non-managed to a fully automated ecosystem leveraging the JAMF platform. This effort created efficiency and cut support cost by about 35%.• Implemented hardware and software standards for client platforms that balanced both business and production requirements. The result of these efforts created support synergies and saved the company approximately $250K annually. • Implemented the Change Management process and served as the process owner. Authored the service design document and chaired CAB. This effort resulted in greater change controls, prevented unauthorized changes and reduced outages due to change by about 50%.

Bristol,Ct

Oversaw the strategic direction and daily operations of the Media Technology organization consisting of 30 full time employees under an annual budget of 10 million dollars. Provided 24x7x365 support for all production systems and platforms (e.g., desktops, servers, applications and network components). Managed project related work while maintaining ownership of daily operational tasks which included incident and problem management, deployments, moves, adds, changes and system administration functions. Owned the production systems technology roadmap and drove R&D efforts to find and implement new technologies that would improve workflows, enhance show elements and increase value within studio and remote operations. Forged partnership with application development to ensure that current and future platforms were aligned with the development road map.• Restructured and improved a mission critical operation which provided ruggedized video and telemetry systems that supported live sporting events around the world. The result of this effort improved the process of tracking and recovering of assets, stabilized the reliability of the platform, reduced cost and improved speed of delivery.• Automated production work-streams that enhanced operational capacity and improved speed of content delivery. • Significantly improved availability of key production services by implementing a server clustering technology.• Developed and deployed a hybrid client platform that provided MS office capabilities on production machines. Leveraged Citrix seamless apps which allowed access to these resources while maintaining the security profile of the production environment.

Bristol,Ct

Managed a team of about 15+ staff with an annual budget of roughly 6 million dollars. Provided all technical support services for Information technology and broadcast related systems and network infrastructure 24x7x365. Oversaw the administration of the broadcast domain and the production system. This included account, policy and security administration. Planned and supported over 100 live sporting events a year. Managed R&D efforts, selected and planned the rollout of new technologies. Conducted staff reviews, assisted in goal planning and assigned bonus and merit awards based on performance. • Served on the executive level strategy team as the IT Infrastructure representative for the planning, budgeting and technology fit-out of ESPN’s 120,000 square foot state of the HD broadcast center.

Bristol,Ct

Planned and implemented IT and broadcast related technologies into ESPN's production environments. Worked and collaborated closely with engineering, application development, production, production operations and support to successfully meet project timelines and goals. • Played a key role in the product review and eventual selection of a new platform that transformed our production environment from an antiquated, slow and outdated serial-based structure to a new Windows client server-based architecture. The new client server platform allowed production workflows to become streamlined and efficient though the use of automation.

Bristol,Ct

Provided 16x7 technical support for all Bristol, CT based on-air production related system. Resolved all reported incidents quickly to minimize on-air impact. Researched and found technical solutions to known problems and documented solutions. Designed, planned, installed and supported all IT & broadcast infrastructure for numerous live sporting events around the world.• Partnered with application development to design and implementation ESPN’s first real-time scoring system which still provides the basis of all live scoring data today.

Bristol,Ct

Supervised four technicians which included providing all their daily work assignments as well as dispatching them to customers based on their skills. Built and repaired most types of computer equipment. Designed and Installed Novell & Windows based networks from the ground up including network topology, servers, workstations, system software and network cabling. Ordered all equipment and supplies needed for projects. Built and maintained all networks for company clients. Installed Windows based software application on network & standalone PC’s. Built RF LAN & WAN based networks. Trained users on software and network operating system. Work extensively with schools and municipalities with local and wide area networks. Provided support on hardware and software purchases based on experience with other clients. Extensive experience with Multi-Media on networks and standalone PC’s. • Played a key role in the design and installation of a city-wide wireless network that was used to provide real-time student data to the Board of Education and the contracted vendor who provided bus transportation services to the town.• Designed and installed numerous Windows, Mac and Novell based networks in school districts across the State of Connecticut. These networks supported a variety of educational services from office and administration, computer and science labs to library and multimedia functions.

Bachelor Of Science - Bs, Information Technology

Associate Of Science (A.S.), Business Administration & Computer Information Systems