Gerald Jarvis

Service Delivery, Service management, Information Technology Manager

Process Improvement –Solution development – Project Management – Relationship Management

Successful Reducing TCO, Increasing Customer Satisfaction, Improving ROI, Optimizing Performance

Professional experience

Prudential Financial, Shelton, CT                                                                                                                                    05/2010 – 12/2010

Director, Information Systems Service Delivery– Annuities Information Technology

Implemented service delivery processes and solutions to improve service performance, service stability, financial management and improve processes for delivery of IT services.

- Maintained and improved IT Service quality, by agreeing, monitoring and reporting upon IT Service achievements.
- Built a Customer Service Catalogue.
- Created more focused IT Service Continuity procedures and improved confidence in the ability to follow them when required.
- Implemented financial management for IT services to account fully for the spend on IT Services and attribute these costs to the services and applications delivered.
- Assisted in management decisions on IT investment by providing a Total Cost of Ownership model for the “run the shop” charges of applications and services.

Job Responsibilities included:

- Processes: Introduced Service Level Management processes, Improved Service Continuity processes, and Financial Management for IT services.
- Cost Reduction: Built a TCO model to expose potential cost savings.
- Staffing and development: Managed team of IT resources. Trained and directed team in ITIL processes. Mentored and motivated team to meet deliverables and manage matrixed resources.

Royal Bank of Canada – Capital Markets, New York, NY                                                                                        02/2007 – 04/2010

Manager, Service Delivery – US Wholesale Infrastructure

Devised and implemented service improvement processes and solutions to introduce accountability, formal structure and improve efficiencies surrounding delivery of IT services.

- Implemented online IT portal for “one-stop shopping” of IT services. Developed online satisfaction surveys and request forms. Re-designed user interface of intranet systems to improve ease of use. Developed executive dashboards for business units and IT to give senior management a single view into operations and status.
- Analyzed standard operating procedures of various IT teams to identify gaps in service delivery in order to propose service improvement initiatives that addressed service delivery, communication and coordination issues among teams. Improved IT operating procedures and enhanced service delivery.
- Devised and created performance metrics and KPI’s to gauge service improvements and provide cost-benefit analysis to USWI and business units. Conducted customer satisfaction surveys to gauge overall user satisfaction with IT performance.
- Engaged with various business units to build key relationships. Served as a liaison between the business units and IT teams and facilitated negotiations of OLAs and SLAs among technical teams and business units. Assisted in addressing documentation issues stemming from SOX audit requirements.

Job Responsibilities included:

- Processes: Improved system reliability by implementing Change Control processes to improve the quality of system implementations, Service Request processes to require business justification and lead time adherence on all IT service requests, and Capacity management to enable the IT infrastructure to scale reliably.
- Cost Reduction: Focused on reducing team responsibility overlaps and redundancies. Introduced efficiencies and focus on process, tool & system rationalization.
- Negotiation, service Provider & Vendor Management: Negotiated service level agreements. Worked with internal service providers, and external vendors to ensure their technologies and services could address business needs.
- Staffing and development: Managed team of IT resources. Successfully managed resources in a matrix environment. Motivated team as well as matrix staff and instituted succession planning.

JPMorgan Chase & Company, New York, NY                                                                                                                12/2000 – 9/2006

Vice President, Corporate Administrative Systems – Systems and Solutions Engineering 02/2006 – 9/2006

Provided technical direction and infrastructure architecture solutions for multiple US based business units and financial application projects within JP Morgan Chase.

- CAS IT Architecture point-of-contact for financial technology solutions. In this role as subject matter expert, was required to understand relationships between technology infrastructure solution capabilities and multiple business unit financial application deployment requirements.
- Personally designed and provided oversight and coordination for the Building, Testing and Rollout of new infrastructure for the JP Morgan Chase US Travel & Entertainment Expense Management system. Drafted design document and presented to customers and architecture board. Assured that system infrastructure fit within company’s system strategy. Drafted DR Plans and performed end-to-end DR testing prior to roll out.  Saved the company over $0.5 Million by utilizing existing IBM systems for the database backend, mixed with Solaris application servers on the front-end. Worked closely with Customer, Application Developers, and Vendors to ensure on-time on budget delivery of Oracle database and Weblogic / Apache, web based T&E system.
- Provided architectural direction for migration of Corporate Reporting systems. Responsible for ensuring that solution aligned with JPMC’s overall Corporate line of business systems, datacenter, and system roadmap. Saved approximately $0.5 Million in annual support charges and improved uptime and redundancy by leveraging a strategic shared Oracle database farm and moving off legacy stand alone servers. Presented solution strategy to application owners and AD team, achieving “Buy-in” and commitment to move forward. Worked with systems engineers, DBA’s, application developers and project manager to enable the successful migration of the application.

Job Responsibilities include:

- IT Governance: IT Governance system that allows for effective management of systems architecture, Communication, Risk & Issue management, and Project Management Office (PMO) for overseeing IT projects.
- Project and Program Management: Effectively managed all aspects of project/program management – Plan & execute IT activities, manage client relationship & communication, people & process management.
- Strategic Planning: Strategic planning for financial systems architecture.
- Customer Relationships: Built relationships with business unit managers at all levels, improved client satisfaction by aligning technology leads with key clients, ensured stakeholder communication with regular reviews of risks & issues.
- Cost Reduction: Updating systems & applications in order to eliminate redundant functionality.

Vice President, Global Finance Technology – Western Hemisphere Technical Services                                   12/2000 – 2/2006

Managed technical services for the US based infrastructure of the Corporate Global Finance Systems. Lead a team of twelve, consisting of UNIX and Windows systems administrators, release managers and Oracle application DBA’s. Provided on-going training and mentoring, gave performance reviews, managed resource scheduling and project delivery for the team, created a strong team spirit and cooperation within the team.

- During the 9/11 attack, ensured that downtown financial systems remained on-line and fully functional. As the support manager for corporate finance systems of Chase, was on location immediately following 9/11 and coordinated efforts to ensure the stability and achieved a 100% uptime of all systems the team held responsibility for throughout the disaster. Subsequently acted as a Business Continuity liaison for the Corporate Finance systems.
- Recognized – by AD teams, managers, and peers – as the “go-to” contact for technical solutions, troubleshooting, advice and support. As the designated Business continuity coordinator, successfully performed multiple BC/DR tests and worked with IT risk, providing technical insight when reviewing DR strategies and BC plans.
- Worked with shared services teams to improve delivery and support of data backups, storage solutions and contingency plans. Ensured that new strategy aligned with Storage roadmap. Presented strategic solution to Customer for approval. Reduced support costs by moving data from tier-1 storage to tier-2 storage where applicable.
- Personally recognized by managers, peers, team members and vendors for having exceptional technical knowledge, people and presentation/negotiation skills.
- Saved almost $0.5 million in annual charges by reviewing internal chargeback billing. When taking over support responsibilities for US server inventory of corporate Global Finance systems. Carefully scrutinized and questioned internal data center charges and found that erroneous billing had been occurring for decommissioned servers. Worked with the customer and the data center financial controllers to have charges corrected.
- Responsible for Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) remediation of much of the Corporate Finance infrastructure. Efforts include upgrading UNIX hardware, Solaris Operating system, Wintel hardware, Windows Server OS, Citrix Metaframe Server software as well as facilitate testing of multiple applications to ensure Hardware/Software/OS compatibility.
- Moved systems from older Sun e10000 systems to newer Sunfire15000 to stay with company’s hardware strategy and ensure continued vendor support. Created strategy and plan to move the PRF system’s Citrix front-end infrastructure from stand-alone farm to strategic shared services environment. Presented plan to customers and architecture board and received approval to move forward. Worked with AD team, business users and shared services team to ensure successful migration of this global system.

Job Responsibilities include:

- Staffing and development: Managed team of IT resources. Motivated Staff and instituted succession planning. Implemented Shift Support Strategies.
- Production Support and Contingency Planning: Implemented 24×7 support models for critical banking production systems, designed and implemented systems disaster recovery and contingency planning.
- Re-Engineering cost reduction: Cross-functional reengineering effort resulting in large cost reductions.
- Technical Support: Provided Technical support for a multi-platform application environment including Client Server, Web applications, Sun, Mainframe, and end user-computing environments.

Passlogix, Inc, New York, NY                                                                                                                                            11/1999 – 11/2000

Director of Information Technology

Provided technical leadership and direction for the company wide computing infrastructure, also devised disaster recovery and network security strategies to address a wide variety of issues ranging from Internet security to internal user policies and network audits. Personally built an Infrastructure support team from the ground up by hiring qualified systems administrators, network engineers and DBA’s while creating a supportive environment with a strong team spirit. Devised and implemented company-wide hardware and Operating system standards to improve support, system performance, and reliability.

- Planned succession by mentoring senior systems support member. Ensured uninterrupted leadership of infrastructure services team.
- Standardized the user’s PC/Laptop platforms, hardened the server environments and added server redundancy, improving system uptime from 70% to 99.95%.
- An external security audit of the customer facing IT systems was performed and passed, enabling the company to secure $20 million in additional venture capital funding as well as enabling the company to close deals with large financial services clients

Guardian Life Insurance, New York, NY                                                                                                                       04/1998 – 11/1999

Senior Systems Integrator, Field Technology Planning

Researched and tested new Web based technologies to provide application development and deployment teams with the most up-to-date development and testing tools and techniques. I conducted application platform compatibility testing to ensure conformity and consistency among applications as well as assuring interoperability and stability of the system platform.

- Led Project to investigate and recommend web based financial reporting application packages for Enterprise-Wide deployment on the corporate intranet.
- Provided critical support to Network and LAN administration teams in problem determination and resolution.
- Researched and developed an upgrade path to Internet Explorer 5.0 to insure a problem free rollout of the Company’s Intranet

Education & Skills

Skills:

Professional: Exceptionally strong written and verbal communication skills. Highly personable and capable of working with IT as well as non-technical professionals of all levels. Proficient in solving problems and implementing solutions under tight deadlines. As a Hands-on technical manager, very capable of efficiently managing IT staff as well as cross functional, virtual teams. Experienced in off-shoring efforts and working with teams distributed throughout the US, Europe and Asia.

Software: IIS, Apache, Visio, MS Office, MS Project, Photoshop, Illustrator, Pagemaker, Dreamweaver, PHP, HTML, Joomla, WordPress

Protocols & Services: TCP/IP, SSL, NDM, FTP, SFTP, SMTP, HTTP, HTTPS, Telnet, DNS, DHCP, SAN, GigE.

Hardware: Sun e5/6/10/15/25000, Sun 1280/480/450/440/240, Fujitsu 680/880, IBM P-Series, Netfinity servers and Thinkpad laptops, HP NetServer, Dell PC’s and Laptops, Standard PC’s, Ethernet, Cisco Routers, HP ProCurve Switches, Hubs, Network Printers.

Languages: English, Norwegian, Swedish, German, Spanish

Certifications & Training:

ITIL v2 & v3 Foundations Certifications

COBIT Foundations Certification

Solaris 8 Systems Administration I & II

Solaris 10 Systems Administration I

AIX/L for Unix Professionals

Citrix 1.8 Advanced Administration

MCP Windows NT 4.0, TCP/IP Network Essentials

Project Management for Technology Professionals

CMMI/CMM/DMAIIC/Six Sigma Courses

Education:

City University of New York , New York , NY . Computer Science Studies

Hvitfeldtska Gymnasiet, Göteborg, Sweden. Liberal Arts