Mark Strickland, CISSP
Technical Background and Accomplishments
Generally I have worked as the Director/Manager of small to medium size IT shops and I have been very involved in the technical side of most projects. Because of this I have a variety of technical skills with good hands on competency in most areas of Information Technology and fluency in some specific areas. In the projects listed below outline some of my programming, system administration, and project management skills.
These notes apply below: NewBold = NewBold Corporation
AWHC = American Water Heater Company
SCI = Sud-Chemie, Inc.
Keller = Keller Manufacturing, Inc.
Personal = My own computer hardware and network
Windows administrative skills:
1) Worked closely with a consultant and in-house staff developing a plan to
migrate a global Windows NT domain to an Active Directory (AD) domain including
many of the specific architectural details as well as some of the hands on work
for the conversion. (SCI).
2) Frequently did
hands on NT and AD domain administration and wrote logon
scripts to do such activities as change the Internet Proxy server settings on
each PC at login to make the change from one proxy server to another appear
transparent to the user and save hours of labor for the desktop support staff
(SCI).
3) Did hands on work with
Active Directory administration changing user
permissions and troubleshooting replication issues (SCI).
4) Setup numerous Windows servers and PC’s for production use (SCI, Keller, Personal).
UNIX administrative skills:
1) Occasionally
did limited UNIX administration to help when the SAP Basis
Administrator was out of the office. Generally it involved doing routine tasks
but involved some degree of command line UNIX skills (SCI).
2) Setup several LINUX systems and I am very comfortable at a UNIX command line. I did an extended test on my own PC of a LINUX Red Hat desktop and OpenOffice using VM Ware (Multi OS hosting software) to determine the viability of an alternative to Windows. I setup and administered VM Ware, Windows, and LINUX on my own machine (SCI).
Network administrative skills:
1) Architected the combination of two facilities into one and the change
of Internet Service Providers. I did all of the Cisco Router programming to
set up the new provider. It did not involve extensive Cisco skills but did
require a good understanding of the concepts as well as some level of comfort
with the Cisco IOS (Keller).
2) Closely involved in several Wide Area Network designs ranging
from two sites to dozens of global sites (AWHC, SCI, Keller).
3) Additional experience includes administration of LANs, firewalls (MS ISA, Checkpoint, and Cisco PIX), network monitoring tools (OpenNMS), and other network infrastructure. My fluency is limited by the need for extensive hands on involvement in these areas but my general understanding is more than just high level exposure.
4) Hands on Cisco PIX Firewall experience. Currently using a Cisco PIX as my personal firewall on my own Broadband Internet connection.
Programming skills:
1) Developed a concept and programmed a Web Surf proxy log analysis tool to help control “non-business” use of the Internet. Each day the Internet surfing proxy logs were processed by a utility I wrote and loaded into a MS-SQL Server. A report was generated for each user summarizing their previous day’s Internet activity and it was emailed directly to each user. Once the users realized that their Internet activities were being logged in accordance with the Acceptable Use Policy each had signed, the non-business use of the Internet was reduced to nearly zero without the need for a single employee disciplinary action. This also avoided the purchase of a $25,000 Web Surfing control and analysis tool. Total cost to implement (not including in house labor) was $0.00 (SCI).
Below is a link to a article in Network Fusion outlining this project. My name and company name are omitted for sensitivity reasons but this can be verified with the author of the Network Fusion author, Michael Osterman, if desired.
Network Fusion Article on controling non-business use Web surfing
2) At several employers I have
developed small Data Warehousing projects
(NewBold, AWHC, Keller). Most recently I developed a fully automated system
that snapshots data from the legacy database every night and populates about 15
tables in a MySQL database. Each night the system summarizes sales, bookings,
and backlog and programmatically updates an Excel spreadsheet via ODBC for the
Daily Operations Report containing various key operations metrics for the
company. Each Saturday night it generates and emails several reports to every
sales rep with sales, bookings, and backlog for customers in their territory.
The reports are viewable with a tool that allows zooming, searching, and
printing of sections of the report if desired. The total cost of the system was
$25 for the report viewer utility and $125 for a SQL query tool to do the data
mining to find all of the relevant data in the legacy database and to do ad-hoc
queries in the free MySQL open source database. I wrote all of the programs,
including the batch email client that sends the reports unattended from the job
scheduler and all of the extraction and reporting programs. The batch email
client involved detailed knowledge of TCP/IP and SMTP email protocol.
3)
Developed a tool to extract the current WAN IP address from a small
broadband router and generate an email if the IP address changed due to the DHCP
requirements of the provider. This involved TCP/IP knowledge, including
authentication protocols to get the password protected Web page from the router,
parse off the IP address, determine if there was a change, then generate an
email if a change occurred (Personal).
4) Some degree of fluency using PHP in the development of Websites
for both personal use and for an Intranet (Keller) Most of my programming has
been done with PowerBASIC, a dialect of BASIC for both the Windows GUI interface
and batch oriented projects. It is not quite as “Point and Click” as Visual
BASIC and requires a bit more Windows internals knowledge when doing GUI
projects but it generates very fast and compact code that is much better suited
for applet and utility type programming than huge systems.
5) Developed a complete Retail Pharmacy Package in PowerBASIC using Windows API calls. This package is approaching 500,000 lines of code. The user interface is a multi-tabbed screen that allows management of Patients, Doctors, Drugs, and Prescription refills. It has a custom Internet Browser and interfaces to an industry standard Web based drug information and drug/drug interaction system. Also includes a remote backup module that uses SSL encryption to copy user data to an off-site remote data center.
Database Administrator Skills:
1) My data architect skills are highly refined. I have developed database
structures for many projects and fully understand the practical aspects of
database design, third normal formats, and moderately complex SQL to manipulate the data.
2) Extensive experience with Microsoft MS-SQL and the open source database MySQL. For security reasons I was the only DBA for the payroll database on MS-SQL at SCI. The payroll system was a purchased application from Ceridian but we had several custom applications that interfaced to the database that required detailed knowledge of the data and the security model used by the application. I have some experience with Oracle administration.
ERP Systems:
1) At American Water Heater I had the overall
responsibility for the implementation of the ERP (ManMan/X – Baan variant).
I had hands on involvement in developing an interface to extract sales data for
analysis and reporting. I also architected and developed some of the code for an
interface to a RF (Radio Frequency) Bar Code project. This involved a custom
interface to the ERP system and a Microsoft SQL Server database to store the
live bar code transactions before processing by the ERP system. No direct
interface was available so we used a technique to log into the system with a
programmable terminal emulator on a PC and literally read data off the screen
and simulate keystrokes. Data was passed back and forth to the bar code
terminals through SQL Server and this interface.
2) At Sud-Chemie I started with responsibility for all IT infrastructure and when the IT group was globalized I became responsible for the global SAP business process team. This involved developing a strategy to roll out SAP to additional global business units, developing and refining the architecture of how SAP would be used, and project planning for the rollout.
Project Management:
Project management skills are a blend of formal and informal methods. I generally use tools that are appropriate with the scope and complexity of the project. Typically I am process driven and look for ways to create a process that is reliable and repeatable so it does not require ongoing support re-doing things you have done before. I have developed good templates for various IT tasks such as the selection of a major piece of software like a new ERP, daily operations tasks like backup, and user help desk processes so important requests do not get lost and the experience of break fixes is captured for future reference. I have done project planning and management for numerous programming and implementation projects.
Security:
1) At SCI we implemented SPAM Assassin. Again we did a very low cost but highly effective project to control a serious problem. Below is a link to Network Fusion with the details of this implementation.
Network Fusion Article on the implementation of SPAM Assassin
2) CISSP Certified (ISC2.org)
CompTIA Security+ Certified (CompTIA.com)
Disaster Recovery Experience:
At Evans Paints the business recovered from a major flood with 13 feet of water in the plant. We had IT systems functional after 4 days and manufacturing functional after 7 days (I actually took a boat from the roof of the building on the day of the flood). The plan we had in place was not a formal "play book" to rebuild the business but a document that was more of an inventory of critical path items, critical processes, and external contacts to rebuild these items.