Robert Bryan Email & Phone Number

Mason, Oh, Us

Mason, Ohio, United States

The small insurance technology startup I worked for, Terrene Labs, was purchased by the Dutch company Friss in March of 2021. Friss is a worldwide company that specializes in Claims fraud detection and Claims investigations workflow management. Adding the Terren Labs underwriting risk assessment platform delivers a unique suite of risk/fraud products to the insurance industry. > Developed enterprise event model and middleware components using Azure Event Grid, Functions, Blob Storage, Key Vault, Service Bus, AWS API Gateway Lambda, SQS, and Cognito to integrate Friss’s three main products in a very loosely coupled manner. This allows for the mixing and matching of product offerings to meet specific client needs without heavy point-to-point cross cloud integrations.> Given expanded responsibilities for the architectural direction of the second of Friss’s three main products – Investigations. This product was purchased in early 2022 from an Australian company. It is a legacy system on an extremally old technology, application framework stack, and infrastructure that needs significant re-engineering. Considerable performance issues and P1/P2 outages occur. A plan was developed to break up the system functions taking advantage of AWS hosting and out of the box functionality like Elastic Search, Elastic Beanstalk, API Gateway, SQS, and SNS. > Exposed existing underwriting risk service components across AWS and Azure cloud implementations to enhance the core Friss claims product.> Lead the expansion and transformation of the underwriting product to support international customers. This aligned the product offering with the rest of the Friss product suite.

Mason, Ohio, United States

Terrene Labs offers a set of products which profile any business enabling insurance underwriting and risk analysis processes. The main risk engine collects data from hundreds of sources, combines and aggregates data, runs dynamic decisioning rules, conducts image analysis, and invokes machine learning models to determine business type and function. All of this is done in about 10-15 seconds. > Applied graph theory concepts to data relationship discovery for developing reliable data object keys from various open data services. This led to far greater accuracy in data association and reduced false positive relationships.> Created event-based error notification system utilizing AWS SNS, AWS Elastic Cache (Redis), and Lambda. This led to greatly increased systemic reliability and enhanced customer service.> Created decision engine that processes business rules against raw data to determine risk decision insights. > Created synchronous and asynchronous integrations with third party providers utilizing pre-signed AWS S3 buckets to exchange data files and asynchronous results.> Developed highly parallel processing solutions with inner process messaging for performance optimization.

Cincinnati, Ohio, United States

Worked on a program to modernize pharmacy systems. I was given the architect lead role on the customer relationship and back end processing projects. The customer relationship project involved tracking prescriptions through the various stages of the pharmacy process using an underlying state engine to mange requirements and gating before allowing movement to the next phase of the process. It gave call center representatives a view into where a prescription was in the process and managed communications with the customer. The back end project was about managing the flow of prescription fulfillment in the warehouses. This included pharmacist review tracking, interaction with packaging machinery, and visualization tools to facilitate drug verification. In both projects I was responsible for developing the scope, high level design, interaction models, and cost estimation.

Cincinnati, Ohio Area

As phase one of the Mercury program struggled to get off the ground, Kroger made the decision to make changes to several major roles within the program. A new business lead and a technology director were assigned and the program was transitioned to an agile development methodology. At the same time, I was given the position of principal architect of the program. We greatly simplified the design approach and became very prescriptive about how we leveraged the TIBCO product suite. The prior solution relied way too heavily on MDM. We made changes to the MDM data model to limit MDM relationships (and thus data bundling within rule processing) and moved much of the business rules logic out of MDM and into Business Works and Business Events. This gave us much greater control of performance and scaling levers. In January of 2015, Kroger almost canceled the program. In January of 2017, the Mercury program is ending as a success.> As principal architect over 8 agile teams, it was my job to provide roadmaps, high level designs, POCs, decision documents, and general runway to keep the program moving efficiently. Over the 13, ten week iterations, I created architecture features which ended up accounting for 40-50% of the development work. These features included acceptance criteria, non-functional requirements, “point” allocations (scope of work), and cost of delay assignments (critically/prioritization of work). > Offload our data to Cassandra for UI and web service requests. I designed and developed a prototype BW process that efficiently extracts our master data from MDM and pushes it to Cassandra. I developed a flexible model within Cassandra to limit development effort as the underlying MDM model changes. We put SOLR indexing on top or Cassandra for robust searching. We also implemented a blue/green table space swapping model for optimal up time.

Cincinnati, Ohio Area

Kroger’s Mercury program is a 6 year, $150 million plus information technology program aimed at implementing an industry leading item acquisition and item master system to give Kroger a competitive advantage in customer insights, e-commerce, and legacy business processing. It is built on a TIBCO technology stack – MDM, BW, BE, Active Spaces, Active Patterns, and EMS. At the time I joined the program, Kroger had experienced many setbacks, moving from TCS to TIBCO processional services for design and implementation. Having no internal TIBCO experience, they brought me in as a check and sounding board against TIBCO architecture. At the time of my arrival they were attempting to roll out phase one which was experiencing major performance and stability issues.> Established data purge and data management/persistence rules within workflows to minimize the growth of the underlying MDM data store.> Designed and developed a series of complex data derivation processes using TIBCO’s Business Events product. These derivations include a complex algorithm for coming up with 45 character shelf tag descriptions that would be human readable. These tags included data and abbreviation logic for a variety of item attributes such as scent, color, flavor, brand, organic, etc. > As the program struggled to get phase one implemented several “tiger teams” were formed to get various function points working. I lead several tiger teams in a concentrated effort to meet delivery dates. This involved analysis of complex workflows with hundreds of steps and hundreds of possible execution paths. > I was given a team to focus on “design optimization”. It was our job to analyze the work of the past two years and determine how to make is stable and performant. We wrote specialized tools to analyze the MDM workflow and rule base logic to detail out execution paths, repetitive code execution, excessive database activity, and quantify bundling/message sizing.

Cincinnati, Ohio Area

In this role I am responsible for the architectural oversight of major North American projects in terms of the systemic application environment. This includes governance of the middleware components utilized, product versions, adherence to the “gold configuration” standards, and any performance and deployment tuning. I work closely with infrastructure architecture on sizing, bill of material documentation, component level deployment diagrams, and COB designs. I am also the global reference architecture owner for the area of Event Architecture and Complex Event Processing (CEP). This defines the tools/components to be used, a break-up of function points, and various working reference examples. > COPs (Common Offer Palette System) is a marketing system that utilizes TIBCO’s Business Events as it’s foundation. As the product was transitioned from Singapore and other smaller Asia markets to the US, issues arose in scaling and COB design. I worked with TIBCO Architecture and Engineering groups to develop several options for deploying in a Hot/Hot manner across two datacenters as required in the US market. > Wrote a series of Java programs to parse the TIBCO Business Events artifacts and create a metadata repository for impact analysis and clarity in terms of execution run path. Large CEP applications can quickly become complicated and difficult to manage. This metadata gave great insight into tuning opportunities. > Worked with multiple development teams on tuning their TIBCO Business Works services for our Rainbow US project. This is a billion dollar effort to bring various back end systems into a common servicing platform across teller, call center, back office, etc. > Lead an R&D effort to create a “Run to Run” POC solution. The objective was to use TIBCO Business Events to monitor and track processes across multiple systems to ensure proper processing.

Cincinnati, Ohio Area

In this role I investigated products and built working POCs to de-risk the introduction of new technology into the development cycle.> Developed a POC called Real Time Customer Communications (RTCC). This comprised two components. First was an ESB component built on TIBCO Business Works and TIBCO Enterprise Messaging Service called the Event Cloud. It served as a generic clearing house for event messages, allowing for the decoupling of producer and consumer in terms of transfer protocol and message construct. The second component was built on TIBCO Business Events. It correlated credit card authorization transactions over time to determine and send real time customer offers. For example, if you used your card at a gas station three times in a month and it was not a credit product optimized for fuel rewards, we text an offer for a new product that optimized consumer rewards. You would get the text as you were still filling up. There were two other use cases implemented centered around bank offers.> Investigated the Appcelerator’s Titanium product using it to write some components of a mobile wallet application. > Created a legacy integration mechanism for our transaction processing system (TPS). This utilized TIBCO Business Works and needed a custom parser to understand the proprietary message construct and exposed it as standard XML. It also used socket connections with a proprietary protocol for session management written on top of the standard TIBCO pallet offering.> Created a real time monitoring solution for event processing leveraging HTML 5 web socket functionality. I wrote the web socket protocol on top of TIBCO Business Works socket pallet, enabling a plain HTML page to directly connect and receive unsolicited messages from the ESB. This allowed us to eliminate the cost of an application server and simplified the implementation environment.

Cincinnati, Ohio Area

In this role I was responsible for the oversight of integration activities within major Citi Bank North America projects. This included development of high level design documents, determination of MLI and communication protocols, security controls, and governance of the development group’s low level design documents.> Provided architecture guidance and oversight for the Enterprise Fraud Detection initiative. This included 40 real time feeds and integration points. The most critical of these revolved around scoring ATM withdraw requests and responding to the legacy transaction processing system with a fraud decision in under 200 milliseconds on throughput of around 600 transactions per second. In analyzing network packets, we discovered the SSL handshake between two components was in a wait state for over 40 milliseconds. We had to work with the vendor and tune the interface to meet the SLA considering both a product enhancement and kernel change which would allow us greater control over the handshake process.

Cincinnati, Ohio Area

In this role I was responsible for looking at the security controls applied at the ESB layer in general, coming up with standard security practices. I also engaged in major initiatives as the security architecture lead primarily focused on security controls.> Authored the security standards for TIBCO EMS.> Served as Security Architecture Lead for the Rainbow US project. This is a billion dollar, multi-year effort to bring various back end systems into a common servicing platform across teller, call center, back office, etc. I was responsible for establishing our Single Sign On strategy, as well as, session management across multiple systemic components.

Cincinnati, Ohio Area

In this role my responsibilities included representing Citi's information security policies and practices to various development groups within the CBNA organization. This primarily comes through conducting the Information Security Review Process (ISRP) on assigned projects. The process involves interaction with development teams, doing technical analysis of project design documents, and providing guidance in the implementation of appropriate information security controls.> Conducted technical information security reviews on approximately 200 projects ranging in size from multi million dollar major initiatives spanning multiple years to smaller maintenance projects.> Responsible for assuring compliance of the CBNA IT organization with the corporate requirements pertaining to functional Id management. This required coordination with all application owners within CBNA. > Participated on corporate level working groups concerning database security, access control standards, and functional Id management.

Cincinnati, Ohio Area

Responsible for implementing established security architecture principles and leveraging security middleware products for all applications and web service implementations for the IT organization. Worked with development groups on security requirements and implementation activities. > Conducted a proof of concept and gained purchase approval for RadiantOne Virtual Directory and Synchronization and Correlation services for corporate identity management solution. This product combined Active Directory, LDAP, HRIS and other data authority sources to form a single identity repository for the corporation. Architected data movement and caching strategies. > Designed and developed extensions to SoapStation to manage web service security down to the service operation level, leveraging SiteMinder as our authority source for security policy information. > Designed and developed custom agents for SiteMinder, which were implemented as web services, enabling application groups to gain greater access to security policy information for developing pre-page rendering logic based on security rules.> Facilitated single sign-on (SSO) environment for web applications utilizing SiteMinder.

Cincinnati, Ohio Area

Enterprise application middleware group was responsible for introducing middleware components into our technology environment to provide service oriented architecture (SOA) development capabilities. This includes a JMS messaging layer as well as Sonic’s Enterprise Service Bus. Additionally, monitoring and governance responsibilities fall into this area and are provided by various tools. > Designed and developed a group of enterprise service bus service types (a bus process basic building block) to allow for MIME and DIME attachments when invoking web services from the bus or when exposing a bus process as a web service. This was a deficiency within the standard product.> Developed a working knowledge of SOA architecture principles as well as JMS messaging and enterprise service bus (ESB) technologies. > Served as a member of the architecture review council representing my functional area

Cincinnati, Ohio Area

Lead development groups responsible for maintaining the back office corporate service areas within the American Financial Group of companies. Areas of responsibility included Human Resources and Payroll, Corporate Mail / Distribution, Facilities Management, and IT Services products for resource time tracking and disaster recovery. > Initiated Facilities Management data consolidation and integration project. > Created a web based work order management system for Facilities Management to track, monitor, and plan work requests.> Created a web portal for the Facilities Management area combining data from their Facilities Management system, Archibus, and their Real Estate rent and cost tracking system, Yardi. > Developed and implemented project to bring the benefits open enrollment project to the web.> Designed and developed a web application development framework conforming to standard model/view/control design patterns.

Cincinnati, Ohio Area

Lead development team responsible for building and maintaining the Human Resources and Payroll application and related sub-systems for the American Financial Group of companies. I served as a relationship manager between the business users and the technology division, set goals and priorities, managed expectation, communicated status and progress, developed strategic direction, and managed to a budget. > Created web front-end employee and manager self-service integrated to legacy system.> Participated in the data rationalization strategy for corporate directory services.> Worked on Human Resource system selection project; investigating build verse buy. Created total cost of ownership documents and cost and gap analysis documentation. > Participated in corporate Human Resources data and policy standardization project.

Cincinnati, Ohio Area

Responsible for leading project groups within the Human Resources and Payroll applications area. Aided in setting system direction and strategy.> Implemented payroll ability to prorate deductions based on effective dating.> Implemented Cognos Impromptu tool for ad hoc user reporting.> Designed new payroll processing scheme for greater flexibility and accuracy.> Designed and implemented new benefit eligibility rule processing.

Cincinnati, Ohio Area

Responsible for the design, construction and implementation of system solutions within the enterprise Human Resources and Payroll application.> Designed and developed a time and attendance tracking system.> Re-designed underlying Human Resource data model and implemented full effective date processing.> Created application security module to allow users to administer their own security.> Created reporting data structure to allow dynamic grouping of employees (such as an organizational chart type structure).> Developed an ACH system for electronic funds transfer.