As Head of Professional Services I took over responsibility for a number of software integrations written by a bioinformatics consultant who had previously left the company. One of these integrations was supplied to a parnter organisation and had been reported to have an undetected design flaw which raised a ‘highest severity’ ticket. No-one in my team was familiar with the code, so I had to reach out and coordinate with DevOps and Engineering for assistance.

Through bargaining and persistance I secured some time of one of the lead bioinformaticians to take a look at the code, review the clients requirements and make the changes. This was the easiest part – I recognised the issue with the code myself, but as I wouldn’t understand the genomics interpretation part, I did not want to make edits myself. The second part of the issue was with clinical decisions that had already been made with the flawed code. There was little that I could do here, but it was down to me to make sure that the right resources were aware and assigned to figure out which decisions had been impacted to report back to the client.

The code fix was done within SLAs, finding the impacted clinical decisions took longer. My final action was to ensure that the application was correctly documented for future support and ensure that the client sign off on the new implementation of the code (to ensure that there is record of agreement that it now worked as expected – which was missing before).

I was also engaged with this partner through organising a resource to work on custom reporting, using a combination of python and flask. I acted as liaison and project manager with the customer ensuring that the code was developed to specification and that milestones for delivery, test and sign off were met.

The post NHS Genomics Partner – Integrations & Software Development appeared first on fitzmoskal.

I was technical lead on a project worth $40k to implement the Helix Discovery SaaS solution. Since scanning hybrid infrastructure requires on-prem components there was still substantial Solution Design work required.

At this time the SaaS product was less than 18 months old and there were gaps in features and functionality in how it worked compared to the on-prem version. This led to challenges with unkown behaviour and bugs in the collector/outpost components which had to be resolved whilst maintaining client confidence in the solution they had bought.

An example challenge was in deploying shared outposts (documented as supported) between prod and dev SaaS instances. During deployment, an update was made to prod which delivered a change in key management to the outpost, and caused it to stop communicating with dev. The issue was resolved a week later when dev was updated, however it did mean that future architecture had to be updated to avoid this type of issue. Thankfully it did not impact delivery of the project.

The customer was also given value added data quality reporting allowing them to identify various gaps and misconfiguration across their estate.

The post UK Non-Profit Organisation – SaaS Solution appeared first on fitzmoskal.

I was the technical lead on a project worth $170k to migrate the on-premise Discovery solution to to Helix Discovery SaaS.

This was a significant project as it was the first migration I had been asked to architect, so I had no templates or documentation to work off. I created the SOW, Solution Design and Project Plans. I decided that the best approach was to conduct a gap analysis and then work out what needed to achieved from there. As I had already worked several project with the SaaS platform, I was not totally in the dark.

The SaaS migration in some was would be technically easy because it was about determining what functionality would be decomissioned as it was not avialable in the cloud. However this needed to be carefully navigated with the stakeholders to reassure them that the functionality was either not needed for the SaaS platform, or there would be an alternative method/workaround for them to achieve the same results they got from the on-premise solution.

One of the interesting things turned up from the gap analysis was that they were under-licensed. As well as my company as a partner company being affected, we had a fiscal duty to report this back to the vendor. This did trigger a discussion with the client which was not initially well-recieved.

After many discussioned had taken place at the c-level I was asked for technical input as to whether there was a way they could be brought back into compliance. Fortunately, I did have an inelligant workaround solution which required a slightly more hands on approach to managing the scanning schedules and data collection. It did however provide satisfaction of the client and vendor, allowing the migration to continue successfully.

The post US Insurance Firm – Cloud Migration appeared first on fitzmoskal.

I was technical lead on a project worth $200k to implement the Helix Discovery SaaS solution. Since scanning hybrid infrastructure requires on-prem components there was still substantial Solution Design work required.

At this time the SaaS product was less than 18 months old and there were gaps in features and functionality in how it worked compared to the on-prem version.

This led to challenges with unkown behaviour and bugs in the collector/outpost components which had to be resolved whilst maintaining client confidence in the solution they had bought. All bugs were logged and tracked with the vendor, but thankfully sufficiently minor that they did not delay implementation of the solution.

The customer was also given value added data quality reporting allowing them to identify various gaps and misconfiguration across their estate.

AI Led Operational Improvements

I worked in presales to present insights into their ITSM operations gathered from Talos back to the client. My involvement was in data cleansing and preparation for injesting into Talos for supervised and unsupervised learning. Once Talos had created the reports, I would then import these to PowerBI to develop the insights. With AI we were able to identify:

• Issue candidates for automation e.g. “password reset”
• Categorical data located in unstructured notes fields
• Under-utilisation of knowledge and overuse of top 5 knowledge articles suggesting need to break down into multiple topics
• Poor knowledge tagging to incident correlation, impacting the performance of the chatbot
• High MTTR for self-service leading to higher phone-resolved issues with shorter MTTR
• Discovery of sensitive (GDPR) information in unstructured text fields

This was followed up with an offer to the client to deliver the recommendations such as service desk training, restructuring categories, data cleansing, and knowledgebase improvements.

The post US Steel Manufacturer – ITAM & AIOps appeared first on fitzmoskal.

A major UK retailer was looking to perform a datacenter assessment to understand the infrastructure currently deployed within the DC and the relationships between the infrastructure. This was in preparation for a cloud migration.

The chose ITAM solution for discovering their infrastructure was BMC Discovery. The requirements included deployment, data gathering, knowledge transfer, and application architecture modelling. This was delivered over a 6-week period.

The end result was that the retailer were able to identify their application dependencies in order to plan the move and identify assets such as servers which were in decommissioned status but still live. As a value add I also provided them detailed reporting into single-point-of-failure devices (servers configured with only one switch) and valuable software lifecycle data.

The post Major Retailer – Datacenter Cloud Migration appeared first on fitzmoskal.

Over the years I have worked with a leading online betting brand to facilitate various technical and digital transformation requirements including straightforward software configuration to cloud platform migration.

My first engagement was to assist in improving their scanning performance and software license reporting which was accomplished within a three day deadline.

Later, I architected a move of their ITAM discovery solution from on-premise to a new cloud platform. I assisted in a number of areas which needed security clarification, particularly with the storage of credentials and data transfer. This did cause some delay in the migration but the client was grateful for our due diligence and went ahead with the move.

I also delivered corporate training to this customer, and worked on some customisations of their scanning solution with population of the CMDB. As a Principal Consultant at the time I oversaw the technical aspect of managed services solution that was provided to them.

The post Online Betting Platform – ITAM & Cloud Migration appeared first on fitzmoskal.

You’re not actually allowed to have any personal interaction at all, but you can enjoy their reaction all the same.

Recently I have taken up a part-time contracting role as an Online Assessor for a training partner supporting the University of Oxford’s Aritificial Intelligence Programme.

The post Exam Assessment & Vigilation appeared first on fitzmoskal.