Stephen Jones Email & Phone Number

Spring, Tx, Us

Spring, Us

Directly responsible for strategic planning, budgeting, technology evaluation, and roadmaps for system delivery across IT Infrastructure teams, stakeholder and influencer of overall IT strategic planning and roadmaps. This includes leading, managing, and developing staff along with developing department policies, procedures, and roadmaps for assessing, designing, planning, and advising on efficient, reliable, scalable, and secure solutions for technology initiatives.• Created and oversaw an internal working team to ensure rapid response and solution delivery during the shift to remote work, focused on expanding IT system capacity and response during the unprecedented increase in remote engagement by customers and employees at the height of COVID19.• Established a team of IT leaders to overhaul our change and release management processes, focusing on accelerated delivery and operational stability. Created new processes, established a regular change review cadence, and advised leadership on our path forward.• Managed the operational and innovation budget for all responsible departments, establishing standardized business cases for all initiatives to accelerate leadership buy-in.• Directly engaged with regulatory authorities during audit and compliance exercises to ensure continued alignment to best practices and high IT system security and integrity.• Engaged with auditors, compliance teams, and information security throughout regular PEN test, PCI Compliance, and Risk assessments to establish controls and ensure delivery on necessary enhancements to systems to meet requirements and resolve issues.• Oversaw vendor contract negotiations to establish a competitive ecosystem of partners to deliver optimal cost benefit while managing relationships to build strong strategic partnerships.• IT strategic leader for infrastructure cloud adoption, providing direction through major overhaul of core application and data systems leveraging containerization and Azure PaaS.

Spring, Us

Responsible for overseeing strategic and operational planning to achieve business goals by fostering innovation, prioritizing IT initiatives, and coordinating the evaluation, deployment, and management of current and future IT systems involving all Infrastructure teams. Focused on leading, managing, and developing staff, along with overseeing and managing priority and vision for architectural design, development, and deployment of the organization's IT infrastructure to support business requirements and needs.

Spring, Us

Responsible for strategic planning, technology evaluation, and road-maps for application delivery within the datacenter ecosystem. This includes leading, managing, and developing support staff, and developing department policies and procedures for assessing, designing, planning, and advising on efficient, reliable, scalable, and secure solutions for technology initiatives.• Evaluated priorities and efficiencies and then coached and prioritized focus on automation and efficiency. With the focus on automation, tools were acquired that reduced most repetitive manual tasks resulting in significant improvement in operational efficiency with the existing headcount.• Identified deficiencies in call system capacity causing poor customer experience, analyzed historical data and built datasets on cost impact, presented findings to leadership along with solutions and ROI analysis. Lead implementation team on approved solution and delivered ahead of target date within budget seeing improvements in customer sentiment and agent efficiency.• Established Enterprise skills initiatives through adoption and delivery of Microsoft, CISCO, and Online training libraries and courses. Assisted other IT departments in establishing training programs and acquired entitlements to enable their success.• Engaged with the business to identify persistent problems and needs, created strategies to resolve and oversaw implementation through delegation.• Evaluated the effectiveness and efficiency of existing technology systems and processes; developed and implemented improvement, replacement, augmentation, and optimization strategies as appropriate.• Contributed to the determination of technical and operational feasibility of solutions; evaluated risks and performed cost-benefit and return on investment analyses on options; proposed and documented justification of the most viable solutions.• Negotiated with vendors and contractors for system-related purchases of products and services.

Spring, Us

Spring, Us

Responsible for technology evaluation, road-maps for application delivery, selection of systems and products to meet business needs and implementation of solutions. Worked across IT teams as a technical mentor and lead to build and manage project teams, establish strategy for delivery, and advise leadership on approach and emerging technology.• Designed, planned, and oversaw the migration to a new datacenter to meet the business's operation and business continuity needs with zero impact on operations or customers.• Designed, planned, and supervised primary and secondary datacenter equipment refit lowering power, cooling, and space footprint of server infrastructure while increasing system resilience.• Evaluated, acquired, designed, and implemented a sweeping email and web security suite to meet regulatory compliance needs (DLP, DMARC, DKIM, SPF, and encryption) and improve availability. The result was a system that lowered management overhead with no increase in cost over existing replaced systems.• Conducted research on software and systems products, select the best product for the requirements, and created implementation strategies for the selected solution.• Performed cost-benefit and return on investment analysis for proposed systems, presented findings to leadership, and recommended action to achieve goals.• Gauged the effectiveness and efficiency of existing systems; develop and implement strategies for improving or further leveraging systems. • Provided final escalation point for operational departments for issue resolution.

Spring, Us

• Built and maintained a 3 environment testing lab.• Responsible for implementing and administering all hardware and infrastructure systems and products in our QA lab environment. • Managed and maintained Windows DHCP, DNS and Active Directory.• Installing, configuration, support and troubleshooting of Cisco MDS switches and Hitachi AMS SAN.• Administered a citrix environment for access to the QA labs.• Setup and managed a VMware ESX 3.5 and VMWare Labmanager virtual environment with VirtualCenter 2.5 consisting of 30 ESX hosts and over 300 virtual machines.• Infrastructure consisted of: Hitachi AMS 500 SAN; CISCO MDS fabric switches; HP C7000 Blade systems using Virtual Connect; CISCO 6513, 4510 and 3750 routers and switches.• Evaluated new hardware and infrastructure related software viability prior to implementation in our production environment.• Documented install and configuration information for all new hardware and infrastructure software. Participated in meetings to create standards for server installs and configurations.

Spring, Us

• Provided second tier support and triage for all server and network related issues.• Monitoring critical systems using Microsoft Operations Manager, HP Insight Manger, Cisco Works, and SolarWinds. Performed troubleshooting, triage and resolution on abnormalities, escalated issues as required.• Responsible for monitoring, restoring and taking backup tapes off site on regular intervals.• Documented server hardware specs, OS versions, application requirements, maintenance windows and procedures. Documented daily operation tasks and night processing.• Performed bank processing and system tasks critical to bank operation.• Performed server and OS maintenance, patching (SMS), hardware replacement and service calls.

Spring, Us

• Responsible for procuring; maintaining; managing; troubleshooting and repairing user workstations, laptops and peripherals. • Administered an Altiris Deployment Solution install for remote management of client workstations.• Traveled to off site locations to do repair and maintenance on user workstations.• Maintained life cycle management of user workstations.• Documented install practices for user workstations.

Spring, Us

• Provided technical support by phone and email to end users. Identified, researched and resolved all user technical issues.• Traveled to remote locations to perform install and maintenance on user workstations.• Created and maintained a technical knowledge base.• Utilized altiris deployment solution for updating and managing end user workstations.