Ray Makenbach Email & Phone Number

Toronto, On, Ca

Canada

Oversee Corporate Applications, Production Applications, Service Delivery and Solutions Centre teams,driving for continuous improvement and growth of the teams, the processes and the services provided to the organization.

Toronto, Canada Area

Providing platform roadmap guidance and direction, prioritizing work, liaising between stakeholders, removing roadblocks, increasing efficiency for Enterprise Solutions. Key Stakeholder in the ITIL process, including the Change Advisory Board (CAB), and Stability (Incident & Problem Management). Lead the evolution of resiliency across the organization as the Business Continuity Planning Champion, Crisis Management Team Director and DR Exercise Project Manager.

Richmond Hill, Ontario, Canada

Assist in the growth of the organization by leading the transformation to Service Delivery excellence.

Toronto, Canada Area

Coach and Mentor teams supporting the maintenance and advancement of Loyalty One computing assets.

Toronto, Ontario, Canada

Lead and Manage a transformative team of platform and application administrators to provide best-in-class service for LoyaltyOne's Business Technology (IT) including: Operating Systems (RHEL, Solaris, Windows), DBs (MSSQL, Oracle, MySQL, DB/2), Applications (Internal and External facing), Storage, Networks, Desktop Engineering (Mac, Windows), Cloud Computing and Data Centre (Co-Lo and On-Prem) in an Agile culture.

Toronto, On

Lead and manage a team of Support Analysts to provide efficient and effective 2nd level support for LoyaltyOne external and internal applications.

Toronto, Canada Area

Providing 2nd level support for all LoyaltyOne web properties and back office systems, managing a team of (currently) seven System Administrators, both Unix and Windows platforms. Responsible for the efficient and proactive implementation, maintenance and monitoring of application and infrastructure hardware and software. Lead the team to implement automation and efficiencies totaling almost 2,000 hours or $120.000 cost avoidance. Raised team engagement scores from 3.43 to a high of 4.56 out of 5.

Toronto, Canada Area

Planned / managed IT support for multi-tiered online client investing and insurance portals within Online Brokerage and Insurance Solutions section of one of the largest banks in the world, as measured by market capitalization.Managed projects, provided capacity planning, supervised internal and external third parties, resolved technical problems, and led implementations to lab, QA and production environments. Deployed code releases to test and production environments with 99.9% success rate. Ensured that systems complied with security and audit guidelines.Managed server farms using UNIX and Wintel platforms. Reduced capital costs of farms 15% through coding efficiencies. Achieved resolutions within SLA guidelines of outage severity levels 1 through 4. Reduced outages with internal root causes by 50%. Led domestic and globally outsourced teams of up to 20. Controlled $6.3M budget.Standardized and streamlined release management process. Created standard checklist to ensure compliance of all applications to production, subsequently expanded into formal release process that included pre-production environments. Almost doubled releases from 25-to-30 to 50 per anum.Ensured that relational database access complied with audit requirements. SQL database access had become widely available without adequate audit controls. Created process that properly restricted and granted access, and tracked and logged all actions. Exceeded audit requirements while facilitating necessary access.Slashed outage reporting response time. Due to lack of proactive monitoring of system health, outage reports were delayed. Created real time dashboard. Enabled maintenance team, production services, operations and service desk to react quickly to system performance anomalies. Shortened delay in reporting from 15 minutes to one minute.

Provided first level support within Production Services section for 15+ applications supporting client-facing online portals and back office platforms. Maintained liaison between application groups and production services for production, application and hardware installations / upgrades.Produced failsafe financial data access system. Ensured clients’ access to financial information through system redundancy within 24 hours of main data centre disaster. Implemented Cisco Global Site Selector (GSS) to provide intelligent failover, guarantee data centre availability, and maintain business continuity. For less than $1M, delivered bank’s only hot-hot client-facing application, with either one of the two production sites able to handle all client traffic.Prior: Senior Technical Systems Analyst, Technical Systems / Network Analyst, Technical Systems Analyst, Programmer, all with RBC Financial Group.

Cert. Apm, Agile Project Management, 80

Certified in Agile Project Management (PMAC - Cert. APM)

Diploma Of Technology, Information Technology, 4.0

Activities and Societies: Student Representative for all classes at the Student Council

Dipl T. (Honours), Computer Systems Technology, 4.0

Activities and Societies: Student Union Class representative for every Semester, Peer Tutor Recipient of Canadian Information Processing.