Vincent Watson Email & Phone Number

Greater Minneapolis-St. Paul Area

Greater Minneapolis-St. Paul Area

Owner and Operator of small Minneapolis LLC providing technical support and operational support for small businesses and private enterprises. Responsible for the technical evaluation and management of technology initiatives, upgrades and corporate directives. Also purchased and managed two small non-technical retail operations which includes international importing of live stock from SE Asia and Europe.

Greater Minneapolis-St. Paul Area

Managed the Architecture & Engineering Technical team responsible for the DHS data center and associated infrastructure for the state of Minnesota Department of Human Services. Fully accountable for the day-to-day operations of twenty six million dollar budgeted infrastructure, business environment, and project and portfolio management duties.Design and consolidate technical environment for 9600 internal users and statewide public access network infrastructure. Consult with business units to provide project charter and implementation schedules as required. Work with state agencies to provide consolidated technical environment as well as highly efficient data storage and network transport facilities. By integrating the data facilities across state agencies, I was able to reduce costs, improve network efficiencies and manage process and issues centrally.Reconstituted stagnant project charters and implemented business cases that were previously not resourced due to political issues or lack of funding. Managed a culture change in the architectural and engineering teams to clearly define technical project goals and implemented processes that enabled projects to move along efficiently while meeting anticipated goals and business unit expectations.Lead the operations and application development teams towards utilizing efficient project management techniques while integrating their processes into the engineering process. In this way the operational and application development teams are able to keep projects on schedule by understanding the engineering process before embarking into a technical discussion with the customer that might cause delay or interoperability issues with the infrastructure.

Greater Minneapolis-St. Paul Area

Developed, executed and supported all IT portfolio & technical support areas for several warehouse and distribution facilities. Full accountability for the overall strategy of the IT, and technical support departments, as well as managing external vendor relationships. Performed risk assessments against planned milestones, managed capital expenditures and coordinated web based technical and sales strategies. Successfully executed an IT culture change to increase internal service level agreements. Upgraded technical infrastructure to improve reliability and process efficiency. These changes resulted in a 400% improvement in technical support processing and development time.Spearheaded the design, development and delivery of a company wide upgrade of all hardware, software, network and server operations. Led the technical support divisions through a series of upgrades to capitalize on emerging technologies and reduce development and deployment time.Scheduled and managed external hosting vendors, disaster recovery initiatives and offsite systems redundancy implementations.