Dan Norris

dannorris@dannorris.com

630.723.4212

 

my ideal position

I enjoy working with current Oracle technology and the technologies surrounding Oracle solutions.  My ideal position will allow me to work on a broad variety of very challenging problems and interact with business users on a regular basis.  The challenge of a difficult problem is what keeps me going.

 

employment history

8/2007 – Present

Piocon Technologies, Oak Brook, IL

Enterprise Solutions Architecture Practice Manager (8/2007– Present)

·      Assume leadership duties for the practice specializing in infrastructure-related services. Specifically, this includes Oracle DBA, Oracle Application Server installation and administration, tuning, operating system installation, tuning, and administration. As a small firm, this practice handles many requests for tasks that are not within the development realm.

·      Participate in the pre-sales process to take sales opportunities from leads to closure. This includes creating contract documents and proposals as well as working with customers to refine scope and deliverables iteratively.

·      Define, formalize, and create new service offerings. This includes a description of the service as well as marketing collateral and sample deliverables.

·      Manage a team of consultants focused on delivering Oracle technology solutions. As a delivery organization, these consultants are regularly deployed onsite at clients.

·      Support internal infrastructure systems and development systems. These include customer development environments, internal sandbox environments, phones, laptops, and other internal technology infrastructure.

·      Deliver technical consulting services directly to customers in areas of Oracle DBA, RAC, high availability, system architecture, Oracle Application Server installation, configuration, administration, tuning, and troubleshooting, and operating system installation, configuration, administration, tuning, and troubleshooting.

12/2005 – 8/2007

IT Convergence Support Services (ISS), Naperville, IL

Technology Services Practice Manager (12/2005 – 8/2007)

·      Created and led a practice focused on Oracle technology consulting services, including Oracle DBA (especially high availability and RAC), Oracle Business Intelligence, and Oracle Identity Management. In 9 months, this practice had a run rate of about $1.2mm.

·      Led Oracle Database Administration knowledge capture and distribution. Harvest technical notes, tips, tricks, and other useful procedure documents from the DBA team. Also manage a series of presenters for internal knowledge transfer on DBA technical topics.

·      Manage a team of 20 consultants at peak size. Handle all aspects of the employment process: interviews, offers, orientation, and termination.

·      Assist and support my peer DBAs when difficult or complex technical issues arise.

·      Lead the internal initiative to create a standard database healthcheck deliverable for all ISS DBAs. Also create additional documentation templates for status reporting and best practices documents on all DBA and Oracle Application Server procedures and activities.

·      Provide sales support by meeting with clients in the pre-sales cycle, developing estimates for consulting engagements, and generally establishing technical credibility for ITC.

·      Represent ITC and ISS at conferences by presenting technical sessions and speaking with conference attendees in the ITC exhibit hall booth.

·      Manage internal development systems and coordinate internal training and development activities. Also install, configure, and maintain Oracle Collaboration Suite test environment for internal use and demos.

5/2004 – 11/2005

TUSC, Lombard, IL

Management Consultant (8/2005 – 11/2005)

Technical Management Consultant (11/2004 – 8/2005)

Senior Consultant (5/2004 – 11/2004)

·      Worked onsite with customers to troubleshoot challenging problems and conduct complex implementations.

·      Assisted peers and supported the Remote DBA group with Oracle Application Server and Oracle Internet Directory configuration and management.

·      Developed custom Single Sign-on java code to facilitate integration between PeopleSoft Portal and Oracle Single Sign-on for a client implementation.

·      Led the TUSC internal Database Services Initiative creating a standard database healthcheck for all DBAs.

·      Revised and updated training materials for Oracle Real Application Clusters.

·      Served as primary instructor for TUSC’s RAC class both at client sites and in TUSC classrooms.

·      Provided support for peers via email and phone conferences whenever necessary.

·      Provided sales support by meeting with clients in the pre-sales cycles and developing estimates for consulting engagements.

·      Represented TUSC at conferences by presenting technical sessions and talking to conference attendees in the TUSC exhibit hall booth.

·      Assisted with internal system management projects to build and help maintain TUSC’s internal infrastructure including Oracle Application Server and Oracle Collaboration Suite environments.

2/1998 – 5/2004

Celeritas Technologies, LLC, Overland Park, KS

Senior Consultant (6/2002 – 5/2004)

Consultant (2/1998 – 6/2002)

·      Mentored other consultants on both technical and customer interaction skills.

·      Worked onsite with customers to troubleshoot challenging problems, many under extreme urgent conditions for production down issues. The significant challenges in these situations were the complexity of the environment and interacting with the customer in an appropriate manner.

·      Worked onsite with customers to conduct performance tuning and infrastructure architecture reviews (including security).

·      Worked onsite with customers on implementations large and small, most including database servers and many including high-availability clusters.

·      Engineered most of the components in the CeleritasWorks AdminWorks DBA module.

·      Assisted the infrastructure and sales teams with development and delivery of the Shared Services program providing remote DBA and system administration services to many clients.

·      Developed customized training curriculums for Oracle database administration and Oracle Application Server administration and delivered the training to customers.

·      Built, documented, and maintained Internet services including web servers, DNS server, and SMTP servers.

·      Implemented server-based email spam filtering solution to reduce incoming email traffic by almost 70% (cost of $0).

1/1997 – 1/1998

Tandem Computers, Cupertino, CA

System Engineer III (11/1997 – 1/1998)

System Engineer II (1/1997 – 11/1997)

·      Shared responsibility for Tandem Unix systems running Oracle Financials, internal call center trouble ticket management system, and internet-facing documentation update system for customers.

·      Shared oncall rotation to provide second-level 24-hour support.

·      Stablized Oracle Financials database servers from at least one system crash every 5-7 days to no systems crashes with the only outages due to hardware failures.

·      Wrote scripts to automate almost every aspect of system management.

·      Implemented centralized, network-based backup solution utilizing a single tape library to replace locally attached tape jukeboxes.

·      Wrote a web-based backup tape tracking system to track backup tapes as they moved between offsite tape storage and local vault.

·      Implemented email to pager gateway for manufacturing facility notification system. Also configured web-based interface to paging software.

·      Implemented changes to email handling at manufacturing facility to tolerate network failures and make better use of WAN bandwidth.

·      Implemented menu-based system (written in shell) for account management on Unix systems.

 

 

certification

Certification

Date Obtained

Oracle Database 10g: Managing Oracle on Linux Certified Expert

9/2007

Oracle10g Certified Application Server Administrator (OCA)

10/2005

Oracle10g Certified Professional DBA (OCP)

8/2004

Oracle9i Certified Master DBA (OCM)

9/2002

Red Hat Certified Engineer (RHCE) certificate #809003499508169

6/2003

Oracle9iAS Certified Associate (OCA)

6/2002

Oracle9i Certified Professional DBA (OCP)

6/2002

Oracle8i Certified Professional DBA (OCP)

4/2000

Oracle8 Certified Professional DBA (OCP)

6/1999

Oracle 7.3 Certified Professional DBA (OCP)

6/1998

Solaris 7 Certified Administrator

6/1999

HP Tru64 Accredited System Engineer (ASE)

8/2000

 

education

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, IL

College of Engineering

Bachelor of Science in Computer Science, 12/1996

 

presentations, affiliations, awards

For a summary of my professional activities, presentations, and publications, please see http://www.dannorris.com/professional-activities/.

 

technical skills summary

For a summary of my technical skills, please see the links available on my resume page at http://www.dannorris.com/resume/.

 

references

Available upon request.