Chris Barber Email & Phone Number

Texas, United States

Northbrook, Il, Us

Accountable for full data lifecycle and supporting systems for Allstate’s operational, analytic and reporting ecosystems. Consolidating disparate processes and technologies into a unified data architecture that delivers the right data at the right time to the right stakeholders via automation and predictive analytics to know what the business needs before they know they need it.• Led a 170+ person, geographically dispersed data powerhouse, managing a $50M+ annual budget.• Championed enterprise-wide data governance initiatives, ensuring data security, compliance, and accessibility.• Established a best-in-class Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) practice to drive data platform automation, self-healing, and autonomous scalability.• Drove out millions of dollars of software expense by replacing proprietary technology with cloud agnostic and open-source solutions. • Successfully migrated core data systems to multi-cloud offerings, achieving agility, elasticity, and cost-efficiency.• Optimized data analytics and reporting systems to improve data time to value from weeks to near real-time.

Northbrook, Il, Us

Led global organization of 70+ individuals responsible for mainframe systems engineering and enterprise job scheduling accounting for financial reporting and data integrity of $30B+ in annual revenue.• Optimized global talent pools, fostering a collaborative and geographically agnostic IT organization.• Led the strategic automation and disaster recovery initiatives, ensuring high availability for mission-critical applications.• Eliminated single points of failure in application architectures, achieving 24x7x365 service uptime and unparalleled resilience.• Revitalized application development through strategic partnerships with agile development teams.

Northbrook, Il, Us

• Masterminded the execution of Allstate's most successful large-scale disaster recovery exercise to date.• Delivered a 20% annual reduction in software expenses through innovative licensing models and platform optimization.• Developed and implemented a future-proof mainframe modernization strategy for GDPS implementation, mitigating legacy technology risk.• Championed the value proposition of enterprise systems careers and spearheaded initiatives to modernize core mainframe applications.

Northbrook, Il, Us

• Delivered Allstate's first Linux on z environment, unlocking increased efficiency and significant cost savings.• Designed high-availability, cloud-native Web Services environments, generating $10M+ annual savings, replacing an entire legacy platform implementation.• Partnered with infrastructure leadership to optimize hardware, software contracts, and platform costs, driving financial accountability.• Led the adoption of industry best practices, resulting in a dramatic 74% reduction in planned downtime.

Northbrook, Il, Us

Technical Lead for mainframe platform performance tuning and capacity planningDeveloped procedures for benchmarking performance in order to detect performance anomaliesBuilt relationships between application and testing organization to drive performance and capacity considerations into the initial phases of the software lifecycleProvided training to application development and testing staff around performance enhancement techniquesLed R&D and proof of concept activities around mainframe performance enhancing technologies (hybrid computing, appliances, etc.)Partnered with numerous IBM experts to help shape the future of the mainframe platform and see that Allstate's computing needs are addressed in future mainframe hardware and software releasesDeveloped mainframe management dashboard for enterprise reporting of mainframe performance metricsRecommended mainframe hardware lifecycle changes

Northbrook, Il, Us

Led effort to completely refresh Allstate's mainframe hardware in order to realize $5 million annual savings while improving platform performance.Reliably supported over 20 vended software products used by thousands of individuals across 37 z/OS images. Successfully implemented and maintained z/OS system exits. Built and maintained Coupling Facility structuresSuccessfully utilized z/OS knowledge and skills to quickly identify problems in the environment, maintaining a high level of availability for our customers.Mainframe performance and capacity analysis Change and Release coordination for mainframe environmentAccountable for all sysplex configurations and hardware lifecycle eventsLed team to optimize mainframe performance, resulting in a decrease in utilization of 10%Created reporting process to give management full transparency into mainframe utilizationRepresented Allstate in IBM workgroup calls and biannual meetings to help shape the future of mainframe technology

Northbrook, Il, Us

Reliably supported over 20 vended software products used by thousands of individuals across 37 z/OS images. Successfully implemented and maintained z/OS system exits. Maintained and implemented changes to the Hardware Configuration for over 35 z/OS images without incurring a single outage.Built and maintained Coupling Facility structures to support 4 high performance sysplexes.Led a team effort which resulted in the successful implementation of a quality system utilized by the z/OS team to measure successes.Successfully consolidated workload from three production sysplexes to two in order to drive down the cost and complexity of technology.Successfully utilized z/OS knowledge and skills to quickly identify problems in the environment, maintaining a high level of availability for our customers.Installed, maintained, and tuned IBM Websphere MQ and IBM DB2 Connect on Windows and Unix environments.Led a team in the upgrade of Websphere MQ for z/OS across 21 mainframe systems.Installed and upgraded z/OS operating system across the enterprise mainframe environment.

Northbrook, Il, Us

Reliably supported over 20 vended software products used by thousands of individuals across 37 z/OS images. Led an effort to integrate a new scheduling system into a highly modified z/OS system.Successfully implemented and maintained z/OS system exits. Designed and implemented system to track all vended software usage on all mainframe systems, resulting in a savings of hundreds of thousands of dollars annually.

Reliably supported over 20 vended software products used by thousands of individuals across 37 z/OS images. Successfully implemented and maintained z/OS system exits.

Supported mainframe system programming efforts through coding of z/OS exits, vended product support, and usage reporting.

Mba, Business Administration

Ms, Computer Science

Bs, Computer Science