Mike Cech Email & Phone Number

Glendale Heights, Illinois, Us

Provided leadership and direction within all areas of Information Technology for a rapidly growing, multi-site environment, including Application Development, Infrastructure and Security. Overall responsibility for creating, securing and supporting several in-house developed and third party applications as well as highly virtualized private and public cloud-based infrastructures.Developed and maintained IT strategies to align technology initiatives with company objectives.Aligned with business leaders to ensure project portfolio includes and supports business needs and priorities.Developed strategic roadmaps for all IT services.Developed Information Security Policies and implemented technology and process changes to ensure conformity.Implemented Change Management, Risk Management (including BC/DR), and Vendor Management programs/processes.Achieved an unqualified SOC 2 Type 2 report, providing an additional avenue for revenue growth related to pharmaceutical customers.Implemented structured data warehouse, significantly improving business reporting quality and timeliness.Migrated key customer-facing services to AWS to provide scalability and elasticity, with focus on Infrastructure as Code (IaC).Identified opportunities for digital transformation related Operational Technology (sorting equipment). Developed software integrations with OT and other third party software.Implemented billing automation with SAP integration, providing substantial time savings for the AP team.

Chicago, Il, Us

Responsible for all areas of infrastructure and operations for a 210+ site environment, including Network, Servers/Systems, Desktop, Enterprise Support, Service Management, Applications, Information Security, IT Controls/Compliance, Procurement, IT Finance & Budgeting. Worked with business unit leaders to ensure IT goals and service performance met their needs and aligned with expectations. Developed and maintained strategy for IT infrastructure and related support processes.Created and maintained IT budgets for over 210 locations. Developed a recovery model that provided $1.4M to assist IT funding, resulting in flat corporate IT budgets for four years amid growth.Drove operational and process improvements, which led to dramatically improved service levels and overall IT perception improvements.Established standards for security practices such as Single Sign-On (SSO), to assist with application authentication and access removal. Developed automated processes to manage identity, providing improved team member experiences as well as accurate charge-back information.Implemented standard ITSM processes for Incident, Knowledge and Change Management, along with cost-effective new tooling to assist with process automation.Established a cloud-first approach for new applications and migrated data center infrastructure of approximately 110 servers and applications to AWS.Implemented mobile device management solution (VMware Airwatch) for management of phones and tablets, primarily used for field-based POS solutions.Implemented several business-facing solutions for Finance, HR and the Supply Chain teams utilizing existing systems, reducing costs, and creating efficiencies.

Chicago, Illinois, Us

Member of the Technology Leadership team with responsibility for 24x7 infrastructure and application management for a growing, highly virtualized multi-site environment. Provided guidance to IT Service Management teams relative to process improvement and management.Lead and directed several infrastructure teams with responsibility for staff development, project planning & prioritization and the management of several multi-million-dollar budgets.Played a leadership role in the Architecture and Standards Council, which included the review of new products and close coordination with key business and technology areas to ensure solutions aligned to business and IT goals. Key focus on standardization and new technology directions.Received Chairman's Award for outstanding achievements in 2015 relative to leadership and management of IT Controls (combination of NIST/COBIT) and compliance initiatives.Collaborated with peers to achieve the goals and needs of IT and the business. Created several cross-functional teams to strengthen relationships, enhance innovation and achieve objectives.Implemented a highly scalable, virtualized infrastructure platform to support the most critical clearing applications, realizing significant cost savings in hardware and data center floor space. Achieved 94% virtualization across 700 node server farm consisting of Linux and Windows servers.Led effort to automate the process for disaster recovery start-up and shut down. Reduced start-up time from over three hours down to one hour and fifteen minutes.Played a key role in two data center moves as well as moving the primary production processing facility to another out-of-state location.

Chicago, Illinois, Us

Chicago, Illinois, Us

Chicago, Illinois, Us

Chicago, Illinois, Us

Naperville, Il, Us

Managed a 900+ node network consisting of Cisco routers and Netware file servers.

Began as a design engineer and was promoted after six months to install and manage network and file servers.