Mark Woodall Email & Phone Number

Herefordshire, England, United Kingdom

Helping to get things decided and make things happen for the people of Leominster and Herefordshire.

Herefordshire, England, United Kingdom

Technical Enablement? What's that then?Well it's about getting new and current Technical Support personnel the foundational training they need to support all the products produced by Rocket Software. It means working with the technical support managers on skills requirements, learning paths, training resources for over 200 products. I am a dedicated learning & development and knowledge management resource for the support team. It's going to be a lot of work and I'm hoping, very useful.Why am I doing it? - I've been providing customers & consultants with support for almost 20 years, and the vast amount of time I am involved with teaching people how to use the technology. Sometimes I didn't get time to learn it properly myself and that felt terrible and I know the customers did not get the results they wanted. When people have confidence in their skills and those of their colleagues everyone is so much more effective and happier in their work. If you get good at something you tend to love it a lot more. So I want to help people love their jobs.

Warwick, Warwickshire, United Kingdom

Managing four support teams across four timezones. It's a challenge and working hours get fuzzy. They are a good bunch, very skilled and the customers seem to like them which is nice. I help them on the admin, priorities and procedures which makes me feel a bit like a hall monitor. I also keep my tech support skills sharp by providing backup when needed but I actually want to support the team now more than the software.I talk to customers much more now instead of just emailing although my MS Outlook is always on. We use Webex a lot for remote meetings, even trying video on occasion and Salesforce for all CRM stuff which is growing on me. I used to do some Salesforce admin so it's an old adversary. I still love BI and the new Rocket Discover self service BI Web app is great fun to use.

Warwick, Warwickshire

Providing technical support to clients and consultants for Rocket Software worldwide, specializing in CorVu's BI, Performance Management and Financial Planning solutions.Troubleshooting software application issues via remote access or on-site visits.I like figuring things out and fixing stuff for people.Recently added self-service web-based BI tool called Rocket Discover to our product list. Working on Mongo db and using node.js to run its own webserver for memory analytics. This is when data analysis crosses over to entertainment! If we can figure out how to gamify this gizmo it should fly.

Waterloo, London

Providing a centre of expertise and best practice in the use of BI and performance management systems. Working with project consultants and directing contractors on project tasks.Specialising in the application of Microsoft's BI Tools, PerformancePoint Server (which is changing to PP Services) and SharePoint software. Attained MCTS certification in PPS in June 2008 and MCTS in MOSS 2007 configuration in Jan 2010.Actually, this was really tough, I found it difficult to work without the kind of preparations I would normally make. There were many shortcuts and a lot of panicky meetings. It was a real eye-opener on the trials of a small business trying to survive. I now know the meaning of building technical debt by cutting corners!

South Ealing, London

Started in the deep end, then got an aqua-lung..Responsible for responding to and resolving customer and consultancy issues relating to the implementation, deployment and use of the BI tools and Performance Management (Balanced Scorecard) suite supplied by CorVu. Web-based Java tools running on Apache web server platform, and C++ Windows tools with HTML output reporting tools.Began as a pre-sales consultant, then project consultant, then moved to product/customer support for last 4 years.Assisted with training, demonstrations, pre-sales, sales tenders, product testing, and product developments.Provided on-site and remote troubleshooting for client issues involving their BI and PM installations. Client industries included medical, petrochemical, automotive, energy, local government, food/drink, conglomerates and SME's. also support and prototype BI systems for partners (ERP and database vendors) and internal consultants. They had to learn to swim good too..

Cheltenham, Gloucestershire

A great bunch of guys and family oriented company. Initially I was a pre-sales consultant for this ERP software and services provider. Assisting with RFI's, product demonstrations and managing the pricing, provision and usually installation of multi-user hardware platforms e.g. HP, IBM and SUN minicomputer systems with green-screen terminals. This expanded into PC LAN based systems with client/server applications when the ERP product went GUI. Then came the requirement for bolt-on products to interface with the MFG/PRO systems. So I moved into product management as the technical consultant working with the technical director.I researched, evaluated, presented, trained and implemented 3-rd party products from Payroll to Shopfloor data collection, from end-user reporting tools to EIS/BI tools. Thus began my interest in BI and performance management systems (Cognos, Pilot, CorVu) built on OLTP and RDBMS data warehouses like MSSQL and Oracle.

Newbury, Berkshire

This was great fun, Norsk Data tried crossing from proprietary (SINTRAN) based systems to open systems, but it all happened in a rush and they lost out heavily to HP and IBM. I was brought in with my early UNIX and Novell Netware experience to help to sell office automation systems. I delivered, installed and trained users on Wordprocessing, desktop publishing (old PageMaker - great stuff), Micrographix Designer and the Norsk Data NOTIS product range.The training department was really well organised and I learned everything and went on every course, from installing memory boards, LAN NICs, tcp-ip drivers, MS-DOS and Novell to using the Uniq RDBMS 4GL system.Yep, those were the days, I had the freedom to build entire solutions including a DIP system from scratch, and then I had to train and support the clients - so I learned about consequences and that loose ends always cause something to trip up. Sadly the company folded in 1992 and tried to reform as ServiceTeam. BTW - did you know.. the World Wide Web originated when Tim Berners-Lee wrote the ENQUIRE program in Pascal on a Norsk Data NORD-10 running under SINTRAN III at CERN.