As Head of Customer Support I led a sizeable, highly skilled and multi-disciplined team spread across two continents and was responsible for a substantial revenue stream. The team provided 2nd and 3rd line support services to IFS Defence’s tier-1 system integrator and OEM customers globally across the Aerospace and Defence market. The solutions were generally an integral part of a wider offering, and collectively supported over 15,000 end users. As such, it was vital to be cognisant of the “big picture” and to be responsive and flexible to meet customer demands.

My role as Head of Technology included overall governance for the use of technology in IFS Defence solutions. As well as managing a team of skilled technical staff, I acted as technical authority for the company’s bids and implementations and was regularly involved with sales presentations and proof of concept demonstrators. As a globally recognised expert, I was also regularly called upon by other IFS regions worldwide to provide expertise to their own major programmes.My role included staying up to date with emerging technologies and trends, understanding how these would affect the industry and how we could leverage them to provide competitive advantage and customer value. I authored a number of internal white papers to brief the wider organisation on topics such as cloud computing, mobile solutions and the impact of new technology on secure networks. I also spoke on the subject of solution performance and system scalability at “Defence IT”, a major industry conference.I was heavily involved in the introduction of formal processes to the business, supporting the achievement of CMMI accreditation. As process owner for the Software Configuration Management (SCM) and Technology Management areas I devised and implemented practical and proportional formal processes culminating in the award of CMMI Level 3. I was also involved in a Measurement and Analysis working group, analysing operational data to understand and improve corporate performance. As part of a new professional certification programme I authored and peer reviewed a number of examinations.As a side project, completed mostly in my own time, I implemented a company-wide intranet and collaborative working environment utilising Sharepoint. This was embraced by the organisation and was later expanded to provide a number of additional services and business automation solutions, greatly increasing back-office and operational efficiency.

As the company expanded and demand for technical and system engineering skills grew I extended the team to include two further technical staff and a Configuration Manager, and took on responsibility for building and managing the service. I continued to be heavily involved in implementation programmes, but also gained valuable team leadership and line management experience developing talented staff to achieve their full potential. I became involved in pre-sales support, presenting complex technical subjects to non-technical customers and writing responses to RFI and RFQs. I also provided graphical and textual copy for use in sales collateral and promotional material.As a recognised technical authority within the market, I was a member of several internal IFS global working parties. This included sharing experience and best practice amongst colleagues world-wide and development of the IFS Implementation Methodology (IIM), a best-of-breed formal process for the successful implementation of complex ERP solutions.

Joining the newly formed IFS Defence (originally called BAE Systems-IFS) as a Systems Engineer, I worked on a number of programmes and gained exposure to an extremely wide variety of technologies, customers and solutions. I was initially responsible for implementing the complex technology platform underpinning the IFS Applications solution for the Eurofighter Typhoon aircraft on representative internal test rigs, then working with our implementation partner to build the production environment. Building, documenting and supporting test environments and hosting formal customer acceptance tests, I built an excellent working relationship with people across the business.I later became involved in system design, technical training and post go-live technical support as well as implementation and was involved in every one of the company’s programmes. During this time I gained experience of many enterprise IT technologies such as virtualisation, thin client technology, Oracle RDBMS, web and JEE application servers.I also designed, authored and delivered formal administration and technical training courses on IFS Applications 2001, 2003 and 2004 to customers and system integration partners, and was involved in the administration and improvement of the company’s internal IT infrastructure.

Image Industries developed advanced embedded image processing hardware and software for industrial applications such as manufacturing, supply chain and security. Newly introduced 2-dimensional matrix codes were presenting exciting opportunities to store much larger quantities of data than conventional 1-dimensional barcodes, at the expense of vastly more complex detection and decoding requirements. In particular, systems needed to successfully and accurately decode matrix codes of varying quality including multiple defects such as misprints, partial occlusion and physical distortion in near real-time. They also needed to cater for the many different formats and sizes of code permitted by the fledgling standards.I developed a fully functional technical demonstrator and proof of concept, writing all image processing functions in C and packaging them into an encapsulated DLL. This was specifically written to be directly transferable to the company’s embedded hardware platforms, utilising only a limited permitted subset of C functionality and focussing on tight, efficient code which would perform well on low powered embedded devices. For demonstration purposes, I also produced a PC-based Visual Basic front-end which utilised the processing code from the DLL.I successfully completed the demonstrator on time within a short fixed-term contract during my University holiday, and despite my short time with the company was awarded a bonus for the quality of my work and a firm offer of employment on completion of my degree. Today, matrix codes are commonly found on everything from food packaging to computer hardware.