Senior IT and Operations Manager
VIVA
مجموع سنوات الخبرة :28 years, 8 أشهر
- Developed Information Technology Department business plan, budget and resources while ensuring alignment with the Company's overall strategy and direction.
- Developed adequate policies, procedures and processes for the Information Technology Department to maintain efficient operational excellence in order to achieve the Company's overall strategic objectives.
- Approved, coordinates and controls all projects related to selection, acquisition, development and installation of major information systems for the Company.
- Led and managed IT projects through all phases of the project life-cycle, from initial planning phase through implementation and completion.
- Authorized all hardware and software acquisition and maintenance contracts, soliciting involvement and participation of other management team members as appropriate.
- Developed and maintained policies and standards aimed at maximizing effectiveness and minimizing costs related to the acquisition, implementation and operation of IT systems.
- Recommended changes to software applications based on analysis of their impact to all users requirements.
- Gathered and analyzed changing requirements of business and users and develop effective and feasible ways to satisfy business and users requirements.
- Ensured that all information systems and networks operate at optimal levels according to internal and external accrediting agencies’ standards, regulatory agencies, and adherence to compliance certifications, and legal requirements.
- Developed and maintained the systems architecture, defining standards and protocols for data exchange, communications and software.
- Managed reporting needs and data analysis for the Company, and ensures the gathering, processing, distribution and use of information required by top management to take decisions occur in a timely, accurate and effective manner.
- Developed and maintained HA and BC plans.
- R&D to assure having the latest technology and getting the best cost effective solutions.
Network, Security and Controls Compliance:
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• PCI DSS certificate as requested by the Central bank
To enhance payment account data security, I was responsible to get this certificate for the company with its all complications and fulfilling and applying all the controls required by the PCI DSS, through this project I did cost reduction for more than $300, 000.
• ISO 27001 certificate
To enhance and assure secured environment by implementing the ISO 27001 controls and revise it regularly, I was responsible to get this certificate for the company with its all complications and fulfilling and applying all the controls required.
• Handled the yearly Auditing conducted by Ernst &Young for I.S. department
• Handled the centralized Antivirus that is connected to all Desktops with daily reports generated by the system and handling the security incidents.
• Managed security team to conduct continues security awareness for all the employees to raise their security skills and be prepared and proactive to detect any security threats and vulnerability.
• Managed security team to conduct periodical vulnerability scan for all the servers and desktops to remediate it and running the proper patches to remove and mitigate the security threats.
• Managed security team to conduct yearly penetration tests for company services to assure that systems are secured in all the layers (Network, F.W., O.S. and Application).
• Managed network team to conduct Monitor the network performance using colasoft application and generate weekly reports for the usages by systems, employees, protocols.
• Managed security team to periodically revise the Firewalls rules and updating it to assure that it is in sync with the existing requirements and environment.
• Generating periodical reports for the IDS, IPS, F.W. to investigate the logs generated, and trace any suspicious transactions.
• Updated periodically the security policy and process for the Company.
Efficiency and Business process:
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• Organizational Transformation
Created the vision and led the successful transformation of the IT organizational culture and capabilities at Qualitynet. The vision/roadmap defined 5 phases of transformation with 5 sets of attributes for each phase. As a team, we established initiatives focused on culture & technology process improvements. With strong leadership, focus and team support, we realized dramatic improvements in IT efficiency & service delivery, revitalized what had been a demoralized IT staff and created a technically astute, cost-conscious, service-driven and motivated team of professionals that were consistently able to deliver exceptional results. The transformation facilitated substantial successes and results including:
- Technically enabled aggressive business strategies achieving a 200% growth in capacity handling.
- Processed double the volume of application changes & improved service levels with 70% less staff
- Achieved a record of 100% systems availability for 15 months (with the increased workload) with cost effective solutions.
- Improved efficiencies w/process improvement initiatives, supported 2X growth with no "adds to staff".
- Slashed the employee turnover rate from 30% per year to less than 2% per year.
Research and development:
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• Managed a team to drive technology adaptations and research to find the best technology and solution including commercial deployment.
Responsible for IT Directing&Governance, IT annual business plan, IT Infrastructure, Data Centers, Change Management, Billing system, Oracle Financial, Business Continuity, Strategic and Capacity Planning, IT Operations and IT Security
• Representative, Value-Added Results
ITIL Best Practices & Process Improvement:
Realized dramatic improvements in KPI's thru aggressive execution of ITIL based process improvement initiatives for Incident, Problem and Change Management. Quantifiable metrics revealed:
- Impacting Incidents decreased.
- Severity Level 1 Incidents decreased.
- Error-Free Changes improved to a 94% average
Software development and implementation:
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• Successfully led development team for Business Intelligence System (Online Reporting and
Interactive Dashboards) that enables fact-based decision-making and ad hoc analysis and insight generation.
• Successfully designed and led development team for HR and payroll management system.
• Successfully designed and led development team for HR training system.
• Upgraded the Billing system Managed and directed the upgrade of the existing Billing system H.W. and DB version.
• Implemented and Upgraded the ERP (Oracle Financial) Managed and directed with the third party company the implementation and upgrade of Oracle ERP.
• Implemeted and integrate Document archiving system (Xerox Docushare) with the existing CRM and Billing system.
• Migrated Company Email from Lotus notes to M.S. Exchange
IT Infrastructure and Operations:
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Handled the day to day operations and change management with all new requests through approved process and procedures.
• Managed the two data centers with the Disaster recovery site with all its aspects
- Capacity planning
- High availability
- Backup and recovery
- Risk assessments and Business Continuity
• Managed the E-commerce solution
- Online store, with all logistics Applications web servers, payment gateways, redundancy, load balancers, …)
• Handled the Billing system and AAA (Authentication, Authorization and Accounting).
Billing system integration with LDAP, Red back, Radius, shaping the Bandwidth for customer’s sessions...
Guaranteed 24X7 smooth operation with high cost reduction.
• Handled different branches in terms of desktop support, remote access support, connectivity to the main Data center with no service interruption in terms of Network, services SLA (99.999).
• Implemented the Business continuity for all the critical services provided by I.S. dept Conducted Business Impact Analysis (BIA), Business Continuity Strategy, Business Continuity Plan and Disaster Recovery Plan & testing for (Billing system, Web services, Oracle Financial, Payroll, EPM, Document Achieving system).
Successfully designed, developed and implemented full system for automating the Kuwait National Assembly activities with full text search and thesaurus in Arabic.
Successfully designed, developed, implemented full system for automating the Amiri Dewan/Social Development Office activities.
• Rules System
• HR system
• Training system
• GL system
• Working on Master for Hand writing Arabic character recognition using artificial intelligence - Submitted two research papers on character recognition using Artificial Inelegance, Neural networks. • Certified Information Systems Auditor (CISA) from ISACA.