Jeff Mikkelson

/

612-554-3519

/

Professional Summary- (Jeff Mikkelson/ 612-554-3519 / )

Mr. Mikkelson has 25 years of experience that includes management and architecture of large corporate IT programs, systems integration and corporate IT operations. He has demonstrated architecture experience at the enterprise, inter-enterprise, solutions, application, business, data, and technical architecturelevels. He has strong oral and written communication skills including developing and delivering presentations to senior executives. He is customer focused and can understand and appropriately respond to customers' goals and objectives by effectively interfacing and collaborating with clients, peers, and management to develop cost-effective solutions that ensure stakeholder buy-in. He follows formal lifecycle processes and engineering and delivers subject matter expertise within a comprehensive set of software development methodologies, processes, and frameworks. He is adept at ensuring and influencing architectures to be highly scalable, secure and fault-tolerant.

Certification Title / Description and Status / Verification
/ The Open Group Architecture Framework (TOGAF)
by The Open Group
In good standing since January 5, 2009 / 14716
/ Certified Information Systems Security Professional (CISSP)
by ISC2
In good standingsince September 9, 2009 / 352803
/ Project Management Professional (PMP)
by the Project Management Institute.
In good standingsince June 11, 2009 / 1268871
/ Certified Ethical Hacker (CEH)
by EC-Council
In progress. Expected completion May 29, 2012 / TBD
/ Certified Penetration Tester (CPT)
by Information Assurance Certification Review Board (IACRB)
In progress. Expected completion May 29, 2012 / TBD
/ Microsoft Certified Solution Developer (MCSD)
by Microsoft
In good standing with .NET since October 30, 2003 / 335091
ID(859272)
Code (barefoot)
/ Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer (MCSE)
by Microsoft
In good standing with NT since June 7, 1997 / 335091
ID(859272)
Code (barefoot)
/ Microsoft Certified Application Developer (MCAD)
by Microsoft
In good standing since October 29, 2003 / 335091
ID(859272)
Code (barefoot)
/ Microsoft Certified Professional + Site Building (MCP+SB)
by Microsoft
In good standing since October 24, 2000 / 335091
ID(859272)
Code (barefoot)
/ Microsoft Certified Trainer (MCT)
by Microsoft
Retired– Active October 1998 through September 2007 / Retired

Skills Summary

Architectures
  • Enterprise Architecture

  • Inter-Enterprise Architecture

  • Solutions Architecture

  • Applications Architecture

  • Business Architecture

  • Industry Architecture

  • Data Architecture

  • Information Architecture

  • Technical Architecture

  • Service Oriented Architecture (SOA)

  • Model Driven Architecture (MDA)

Notations
  • Unified Modeling Language (UML)

  • Booch Method

  • Business Process Modeling Language (BPML)

  • Business Process Execution Language (BPEL)

Languages / Markup
  • Java, ASP.NET, VB.NET, C#.Net, AJAX, CSS, Transact-SQL, DML, DDL, DCL, TCL, JavaScript, XML, XSD, XSLT,WSDL, HTML, XAML, DHTML, VBScript, HTML, C++, RPG 400

Databases
  • SQL Server (All versions), Sybase, DB2 UDB, DB2 LUW, Oracle, Informix, Btrieve, Several Proprietary.

Platforms
  • Wintel –IIS (All Versions), Windows (All Versions), Linux, HP-UX, AIX, zSeries, iSeries, pSeries, OS/400, SunSolaris.

/ Management
  • National Solutions Practice Director

  • Application Development Practice Director

  • Architecture Manager

  • Project Manager

  • Team Lead

  • Technical Lead

  • SWAT Team Leader

Specialized Skills
  • Cloud Computing Strategy & Implementation

  • IT Strategy & Portfolio Rationalization

  • Development of Intermediate & Target Reference Architectures

  • IT Management & Governance

  • Alignment of Business to a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) Approach

  • Application Performance Scaling & Analytics

  • Business Continuity / Disaster Recovery Planning

  • Service Level Agreement Development

  • SQL Server Performance Tuning of Very Large, High Volume Databases.

  • Windows Scripting (VBScript, WSH, WMI, ADSI)

  • Application Hardening

  • Penetration Testing

  • Application Communications Troubleshooting

  • Architecture ROI Analysis

  • Business Case Development

  • RFI / RFP Development

  • RFI/RFP Response Development

  • Business Process Modeling

  • Business Process Reengineering (BPR)

  • e-Business Enablement (B2B, B2C, B2E, B2M)

/ Industries
  • Financial Services

  • Insurance

  • Healthcare

  • Marketing

  • Loyalty

  • Utilities

  • Electronic Commerce

  • Retail

  • Telecommunications

  • Telemarketing

  • Manufacturing

  • Transportation

Open & Agile Methodologies Processes
  • The Open Group Architecture Framework (TOGAF)

  • Rational Unified Process (RUP)

  • Zachman Framework

  • Rapid Application Development (RAD)

  • Microsoft Solutions Framework (MSF)

  • Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL)

Proprietary Methodologies / Processes
  • Ameriprise Financial (AQMS)
  • Royal Bank of Canada (RBC)

  • Spherion Technology Repeatable Solutions Process
(Author/ Contributor)
  • Daugherty Systems
(Author / Contributor)
Techniques
  • Object Oriented Analysis (OOA), Design (OOD), Programming (OOP)

Skills Summary (Continued)

Tools
  • Visio for Enterprise Architects (VEA)

  • Eclipse
  • Visual Studio.NET
  • Microsoft Project
  • Business Objects Crystal Reports
  • SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS)
  • SQL Server Analysis Services (SSAS)
  • SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS)
  • IBM Rational Software Modeler

  • Gentran Integration Suite - GIS (Like Tibco Business Works, SeeBeyond and Microsoft BizTalk Server)

  • DotNetNuke (DNN)

  • Mercury Test Director (MQC)

  • Business Objects Crystal Reports

  • Fiddler HTTP Capture

  • PuTTY

  • Microsoft Search Server

  • Google Search Appliance

  • CA SiteMinder Single Sign-On Federated Identity and Access Management Solution integration

  • WebTrends

  • Computer Associates Process Continuum

  • Keynote Mobile Quality Test and Measurement

  • Microsoft Office FrontPage

  • Microsoft Office SharePoint Designer

  • Peregrine Systems Service Center

  • Oracle Designer

/ Protocols
  • FTP, FTPS, SFTP

  • SSH

  • Telnet

  • SMTP

  • DNS

  • HTTP, HTTPS, SSL

  • Kerberos

  • SMTP, POP

  • NNTP

  • TCP, IP, NETBIOS

  • SNMP

  • SOAP
  • REST

Technologies
  • .NET

  • J2EE

  • SOAP

  • OLTP

  • OLAP

  • COM, DCOM, COM+

  • DTS

  • ActiveX

  • PGP

  • Digital Certification

  • Kerberos

  • Sockets Communications

  • Serial Communications

  • MQSeries / WebSphere MQ

Related Experience

1/10 – 3/12Ameriprise Financial (via LogiSolve), MINNEAPOLIS, MINNESOTA

Ameriprise acquired Columbia Asset Management from Bank of America for $1 billion which added $93 billion in equity assets, $72 billion in bond fund assets and boosts Ameriprise assets under management to over $400 billion. A $320 million program was undertaken to migrate Bank of America applications and data to Ameriprise data centers.

Ameriprise also acquired H&R Block’s Broker-Dealer business for $315 million in cash which added 13,000 advisors, 376,000 client accounts, and $30 billion in managed client assets.

As an Asset Management PortfolioProject Architect for Ameriprise Financial, was responsible for providing:

  • Plan, design, and delivery of Columbia Asset Management IT capabilities andnew infrastructure at Ameriprise so that it is efficient, stable, resilient, secure, and aligned with the Ameriprise Financial technology standards and strategies.
  • Conceptualization and design of detailed solutions for specific projectsto enable Ameriprise to meet its business objectives.
  • Technical leadership to ensure that business requirements are being met by the technical design and implementation.
  • Asset rationalization and blueprinting of as-is and to-be states to indicate howColumbia Asset Management applications are migrated to Ameriprise.
  • Governance and leadership in application architecture, technical architecture, information architecture, and business architecture domains.
  • Architecture governance and oversight of all Columbia Asset Management application migrations related to Equity Fundamental Research, Equity Decision Support, Quant trading interfaces, environments for Equity Trading, security master, and the implementation of vendor reference data integration and consolidation.
  • Updated asset inventory, as well as asset capability, and health assessment activities.

As aBrokerage PortfolioProject Architect for Ameriprise Financial, was responsible for:

  • Plan, design, and delivery of H&R Block Broker-Dealer IT capabilities andnew infrastructure at Ameriprise so that it is efficient, stable, resilient, secure, and aligned with the Ameriprise Financial technology standards and strategies.
  • Conceptualizing and designing detailed solutions for specific projectsto enable Ameriprise to meet its business objectives.
  • Providing technical leadership to ensure that business requirements are being met by the technical design and implementation.
  • Asset rationalization and blueprinting of as-is and to-be states to indicate howH&R Block’s Broker-Dealer apps are migrated to Ameriprise.
  • Architecture governance and oversight of all H&R application migrations.
  • Performing asset inventory, as well as asset capability, and health assessment activities.

9/09 – 12/09 CIGNA HEALTHCARE (via LogiSolve), EDEN PRAIRIE, MINNESOTA

CIGNA Healthcare reduces claims and healthcare costs by improving the health of its members. Improving the health of members also reduces employer PTO costs and improves employee productivity for the employees of CIGNA Healthcare clients. This is done through a combination of health risk assessments and health and wellness coaching. CIGNA has several redundant online self-directed wellness coaching solutions as well as telephonic solutions that are not integrated and costly to develop and maintain. Additionally, the wellness solutions are developed by separate CIGNA owned companies and divisions and the primary stakeholders have substantially different agendas including time-to-market with a state-of-the-art solution, leveraging existing investments, and waiting years for new and standard technology platform capabilities.

As anArchitect for CIGNA Behavioral, a CIGNA Healthcare subsidiary was responsible for:

  • Performing an architecture assessment of a proposed state-of-the-art solution as an enterprise-wide standard platform for online self-directed health and wellness coaching.
  • Preparing online wellness coaching maturity models, platform alternatives a future state vision, functional gap analysis and architecture impact analysis.
  • Socializing proposed architectures with CIGNA Enterprise Architecture.
  • Producing a proof-of-concept architecture for Web and mobile application delivery.

6/09 – 08/09 SABBATICAL, WAYZATA, MINNESOTA

Professional Development including the preparation and testing for PMP Certification, CISSP Certification and an extended vacation.

1/06 – 05/09 RBC WEALTH MANAGEMENT (via Tech-Pro), MINNEAPOLIS, MINNESOTA

RBC Wealth Management had a business initiative to merge RBC Dain Rauscher retail brokerage operations with RBC Capital Markets wholesale brokerage operations. Creating a single broker-dealer enhances RBC’s revenue growth opportunities through better integration. This $270,000,000 program included the replacement of Dain’s Order Management System, a heavily customized version of Thomson Financial’s BETA Systems, with ADP’s Brokerage Management Solution, Broadridge Brokerage Processing Services (BPS). Many existing systems needed to be retained to support Dain’s proprietary business processes and these resided on a wide variety platforms including COBOL, CICS, Datacom, DB2, MVS, MQSeries, J2EE, WebSphere and .NET.

As a Portfolio Architect for RBC Dain Rauscher’s Products Portfolio and later as a Delivery Team Architect for RBC Dain Rauscher’s Operations Delivery Team, was responsible for:

  • Managing the architecture for a portfolio of applications known as the Products Portfolio. This portfolio encompassed the most business critical systems at Dain including Order Management, Commission Management, Statements and Billing.
  • Managing the architecture for a portfolio of applications known as the Operations Portfolio that accounted for over 50% of a $270,000,000 program to outsource core business process to ADP’s Broadridge Brokerage Processing System (BPS).
  • Reviewing, approving and fine-tuning solution architecture deliverables provided by project team architects within the Portfolio. This regularly involved coaching of project team architects and preparing these deliverables from scratch on behalf of the team when necessary.
  • Application design analysis and review.
  • Evangelization and support of teams implementing Dain’s Architecture integration and data services.
  • Coordination across multiple portfolio architecture and business teams to ensure consistency in approach.
  • Persuade, motivate and support teams in their need to produce RBC standard architecture deliverables.
  • Manage architecture issues and conflicts. This required the preparation of presentations of alternatives and conducting Architecture Decision Committee meetings to explore alternatives, make a decision, and communicate the decision broadly.
  • Prepare and deliver proposed architecture presentations to local teams, cross portfolio teams, executive teams and parent company architecture audiences.
  • Producing sample deliverables and artifacts for the enterprise as well as the delivery of training to project teams that needed to produce similar artifacts and deliverables.

As a Lead Architect for RBC Dain Rauscher during a program reorganization, was responsible for:

  • Performing system impact analysis to the Dain inventory of retained applications.
  • Preparing Dain enterprise-wide application inventory and logical architecture views by business line, business function, network, security, deployment, technology and data repository.

As a Project Manager and Architect for RBC Dain Rauscher’s Intranet Team, was responsible for:

  • Ensuring successful conversion of all of Dain’s Intranet Portal applications to target reference architecture. This included over 200 applications that were spread across 3 Intranet Portals. This project was excessively over budget, behind schedule, stuck on architecture issues and key project personnel were rapidly leaving the company.
  • Managing scope, schedule, resources, issues, risks, and delivery of this $7,000,000 project within the $270,000,000 program described above. This project had business dependencies on roughly 20 business groups and 50 distinct applications and technology groups.
  • Transitioning this project from being flagged by the PMO as one most-likely-to-fail projects (red), to being on-time and on-budget with a successful delivery (green).
  • Finding resolution to numerous architecture and infrastructure issues that were preventing the project from moving forward.
  • Producing OS to app build instructions to migrate into virtualized environments and DR.

As aTechnicalArchitect for RBC Dain Rauscher’s Data Distribution Team, was responsible for:

  • Stabilizing, scaling, securing and enhancing a proprietary business process automation, ETL and integration system. This mission critical application can now process multi-terabytes of data in a short nightly batch cycle and deliver account, trade, transaction, balance and security instrument data to over32,000vendor and client destinations using a flexible variety of technologies and protocols. Vendors included Sungard, Morningstar, Bloomberg, and Advent Software.

2/04 – 12/05 CARLSONMARKETING GROUP (via Quantum Consulting), PLYMOUTH, MINNESOTA

As a Lead Architect for theCarlson Marketing Group (CMG)Visa Loyalty Platform,was responsible for:

  • Scaling and stabilizing Visa Extras,the largestloyalty programs at CMG supporting the largest credit card company in the world. This heavily integrated batch and on-line application needed to scale by 20 fold. The on-line application could only support 150 concurrent users where 5,500 were needed and the batch application had 30 hour runtimes where 4 hours were necessary to meet the Service Level Agreement (SLA). The application needed to support multi-terabyte size databases with over 20 million transactions daily. The previously estimated hardware solution called for 120 web servers instead of the existing 12 and a multi-million dollar investment in other infrastructure.
  • Preparing performance assessments to identify scalability and stability issues.
  • Preparingand delivering executive levelassessment presentations seeking Authorization for Expenditures (AFE’s) needed to fund performance and scalability improvements.
  • Developing project plans for executing performance improvements.
  • Executing tasks identified from performance improvement plan including obtaining vendors and technical personnel.
  • Conductingregular targeted and iterative performance assessments to isolate performance bottlenecks.
  • Preparingand delivering detailed architecture recommendationsto address hardware, configuration and code optimization needs.
  • Providing leadership to the application and infrastructure technical teams for implementing performance improvements.
  • Implementing capacity measurement, monitoring, analysis and reporting processes to provide actionable information to stakeholders.
  • Delivering weekly performance improvement status to the CMG Executive Steering Committee.
  • Delivering weekly performance improvement status to a Visa executive and partner committee.
  • Designing, Developing and Implementinga cloud computing application using Akamai for delivering content to users more quickly while reducing the load on Carlson infrastructure. Akamai consists of over 15,000 servers and typically serves 15-20% of all Internet traffic daily. This solution provided a low cost approach to delivering the static content portion of the on-line site.
  • Completing the final solution which improved performance so drastically that:
  • The entire web server hardware requirement is now 2 servers, not 120.
  • The application easily supports 5,500 concurrent users which can be measured. The Akamai cloud computing solution has not been measured but likely provides support for an additional 15,000 concurrent users.
  • Batch run-times are trending down while transactions are rapidly going up. Batch run times have consistently been less than 4 hours and the trends show support for support well beyond the entire projected load.
  • A dedicated network with a T3 Internet connection, BIG IP load balancers, firewalls, switches, routers and the like are no longer necessary to support projected loads.
  • A multi-million dollar hardware and software investment isno longer needed for the Oracle/Unix and DB2/Mainframe environments to support projected loads.
  • The application runs well within client SLA thereby avoiding SLA penalties.
  • The client and executives cancelled the weekly status meetings since the performance and stability problems were addressed.
  • Visa, CMG’s largest customer, has renewed the contract.

As a Lead Architect for the Carlson Marketing Group (CMG) Certegy Loyalty Platform, was responsible for:

  • Scaling and stabilizing Certegy ScoreCard, the 2nd largest loyalty programs at CMG supporting one of the largest credit card processors in the world. This heavily integrated batch application needed to scale by 12 fold. This application had 30+ hour batch runtimes where 4 hours were necessary to meet Service Level Expectations (SLE). The application needed to support multi-terabyte size databases with over 14 million transactions daily and application support costs were growing exponentially by millions per year.
  • Preparing performance assessments to identify scalability and stability issues.
  • Preparing and delivering executive level assessment presentations seeking Authorization for Expenditures (AFE’s) needed to fund performance and scalability improvements.
  • Developing project plans for executing performance improvements.
  • Executing tasks identified from performance improvement plan including obtaining vendors and technical personnel.
  • Conducting regular targeted and iterative performance assessments to isolate performance bottlenecks.
  • Preparingand delivering detailed architecture recommendations to address hardware, configuration and code optimization needs.
  • Providing leadership to the application and infrastructure technical teams for implementing performance improvements.
  • Implementing capacity measurement, monitoring, analysis and reporting processes to provide actionable information to stakeholders.
  • Delivering weekly performance improvement status to the CMG Executive Steering Committee.
  • Delivering weekly performance improvement status to Certegy.
  • Performing SQL Server code optimization for scaling batch applications.
  • Re-architecting the entire integration architecture for one of the applications using a TIBCO BusinessWorks, SeeBeyond,or Biztalk type tool called Gentran Integration Suite (GIS) that allowed us to automate business processes and remove technology constraints to scaling. This solution provided fast and secure data transfer of multi-GB data sets, data transformation (ETL) and business process automation.
  • Workingwith internal personnel and external clients to develop Service Level Agreements (SLA’s) to institute penalties and incentives for application performance.
  • Developing a Business Continuation Plan, including a Disaster Recovery Plan, for the applications that would integrate with the CMG Master Business Continuation Plan.
  • Performing CISP/PCI security assessments. CISP is Visa’s old Cardholder Information Security Program which is very stringent security requirements for transmitting and storing credit card information. The new standard, PCI, is accepted by Visa, MasterCard, American Express and Discover.
  • Completing the final solution which improved performance so drastically that:
  • The 30+ hour batch run times were reduced to 2 hours while the volume of transactions continues to grow dramatically.
  • The multi-million, exponentially growing support costs were brought in check with application stability improvements. The cost per transaction was reduced significantly and shrinks per transaction as more transactions occur.

As an Architect for the Carlson Marketing Group (CMG) Enterprise Architecture Group, was responsible for: