Resume of Sean Phillips

Summary

I am an innovative executive with over 20 years of increasing responsibility in company / university-wide strategic software engineering, product development, IT operations, and technical innovation. With expertise in aligning business and technology priorities and bridging gaps between cross-functional teams. And a builder of high performing teams that consistently meet or exceed expectations, usually under "stretch" conditions. I have an MBA and a Masters of Science in Technology Management.

 Specialties: IT Strategy, Software Engineering, Project Management, Product Management, Building High Performance Teams, Executive Leadership, Strategic Planning, Higher Ed, SDLC, Agile, Scrum (Certified Scrum Master), Process & Quality Improvements, Technology Evaluation & Application, IT Service Management, Infrastructure Operations, Architecture & Planning, Mentoring and Coaching, Merger and Acquisition, Systems Integration, Google Apps, Salesforce, CRM, Cloud Computing, AWS, SaaS, PaaS, IaaS, Business Intelligence, Analytics

Experience


  • Senior Technical Architect / Education Practice Lead

    Coastal Cloud

    Jun 2016 – Present


    1 yr

    Washington D.C. Metro Area

    Senior Technical Architect helping clients unlock the power of Salesforce and refine existing Salesforce implementations. 
    Mr. Phillips serves as a trusted advisor helping to drive conversations with customer’s enterprise architects and business stakeholders following best practices for enterprise architecture such as security, performance, maintainability, development process, and application governance. This includes communicating technical solutions and design tradeoffs effectively to business stakeholders and identifying potential issues and risks, and developing mitigation strategies to alleviate these challenges.
    Mr. Phillips advises and mentors diverse teams, which include customer and partner resources, using influence and adaptive communication strategies where he does not have direct authority over all the resources. 
    Coastal Cloud is an award winning, disruptive force in the technology services industry featuring a unique delivery model that brings together the power of leading edge cloud (SaaS) solutions and a cost-effective, highly efficient, domestic network of skilled technology professionals and delivery centers. Our high touch consulting model is built on long term relationships. Some of the services we offer include:
    • Business Process Re-engineering
    • Enterprise Architecture Planning
    • Design & Development
    • Training
    • On-going Support & Continuous Innovation
    We believe that a high touch, nimble, affordable, 'easy to work with' delivery model powered by leading edge SaaS platforms such as Salesforce.com is the future of IT consulting. We recruit and retain our exceptional team of 100% onshore consulting professionals by offering a unique combination of attractive lifestyle and engaging, rewarding, continuously-learning careers. We have hubs in Florida, Kentucky and Colorado where we can deliver on-demand skills at an affordable cost.

  • University of Maryland 
  • Jul 2012 – May 2016 
  • AVP, DIT Enterprise Engineering
    University of Maryland, College Park

  • As the Assistant Vice President for Enterprise Engineering Mr. Phillips was responsible for leadership, vision, planning and operation of all activities relating to enterprise applications, including enterprise systems, software engineering, data networking, telecommunications, video services, and collaborative technology infrastructure. Mr. Phillips reported directly to the Vice President of Information Technology and CIO at the University of Maryland and runs a group of over 80 FTEs. Some of the applications supported by Enterprise Engineering include the Student Information System (SIS), Data Warehouse, Faculty Activity Reporting (FAR), Financial Aid, Hobsons, Kuali Financial System (KFS), Kuali Student Curriculum Management, PHR, Series 25, Student Accounts, U.Achieve, along with enterprise networking, wireless in 270 buildings serving approximately 50,000 customers, unified communications, servers and storage. Mr. Phillips was also the co-chair on the Enterprise System and Data Policy Committee that helped set the priorities for the DIT Enterprise Engineering group. Recent strategic efforts include the broader adoption of agile development processes, the engineering to move to the cloud (AWS), evaluating alternative Student Information System (SIS) solutions (e.g., Workday), and the adoption of Salesforce as the platform of choice for migrating the other non-SIS related applications off UMDs mainframe. Previously, as Development Manager for Kuali Student, Mr. Phillips led an international matrix’ed team of 85+ FTE’s in diverse roles from multiple institutions in the US and around the world. Mr. Phillips was responsible for all technical staffing, software methodology and delivery. Mr. Phillips improved the delivery process and methodology (Agile Scrum), the QA process, and the UX processes. All development was done on the AWS platform.
  • For a short period of time Mr. Phillips also lead the Kuali Rice development effort.


  • Sourcefire

    Aug 2010 – Mar 2012
    Sr. Director

  • Mr. Phillips was recognized by the Executive team as integral to improving communication between IT and the rest of the business leading to increase trust and better internal relations. Mr. Phillips, with the VP of IT, leads monthly strategy meetings with the Senior Executives within Sourcefire and managed the IT roadmap and budget. 
    Other highlights include:
    • Led the effort to replace the enterprise phone system from the RFP process, down selection process, contract negotiation, all the way to the seamless implementation and roll out to 4 global offices initially over one weekend. And subsequently to 3 additional offices within the first year.
    • Data center migration, including moving key applications to AWS
    • Lead the effort to migrate the Customer Service group to Salesforce
    • Replaced the Help Desk ticketing system used by IT to improve response times, improve customer satisfaction, and to provide better visibility and reporting capabilities
    • Increased Help Desk coverage from 8 to 5 Monday - Friday to an outsourced model providing 24 / 7 / 365 support for the cost of less than 1 FTE. This greatly improved customer satisfaction of the employees, while staying within reduced budgets
    All this was done with no additional headcount as Sourcefire approximately doubled in size and added 3 additional international offices.
  • Mr. Phillips managed the Web Development team, the internal Help Desk, and the Server and Networking infrastructure (SNI) groups within Sourcefire IT. Sourcefire, the creator of Snort, is a leader in intelligent cybersecurity solutions with solutions from a next-generation network security platform to advanced malware protection (now part of Cisco). Mr. Phillips implemented best practice business processes replacing the ad-hoc methodology that was used previously. This included standardizing and documenting policies and procedures. Standardizing both employee laptops and desktops and the server and network infrastructure. 

Clarabridge, Reston, VA

July 2008 - Jan 2010
VP of Product Management
Mr. Phillips led the selection, prioritization, and specification for the features and functionality in the Clarabridge text mining platform. Clarabridge is the leading provider of text analytics solutions that improve customer experience management (CEM). Mr. Phillips' responsibilities included leading product strategy, product development initiatives, key vendor OEM relationships, sales curriculum development, and product training. Since Mr. Phillips has been in his role all of Clarabridge's software releases have been on-time and on-specification. Mr. Phillips helped Clarabridge triple revenue in 2008.
Duties include:
  • Mr. Phillips was the first Product Manager ever at Clarabridge. Managed daily activities of the product management group. This included implementing accepted best practice business processes in the Product Management group from an ad-hoc methodology that was used previously
  • Mr. Phillips hired and built up the Product Management department from scratch
    • Interfaced closely with sales, strategy, and services to help prioritize new product features and offerings and refine marketing strategy
    • Translated deep customer and market understanding into a clear product vision & road map 
    • Worked closely with Engineering to deliver the best releases possible - meeting the needs of customers and prospects while aligning to the overall company vision
    • Worked closely with other corporate functions - marketing, support, etc. - to deliver an excellent end-to-end customer experience
    • Actively analyzed data (business, usage, market) to make informed product decisions 
    • Made formal presentations and conducted group discussions for a broad range of technical and customer audiences.
    • Led the customer steering committee and responsible for the online customer forum

        Vetinsite.com, Silver Spring, MD

        October 2005 - May 2008
        CIO / CTO
        VetInsite was a true start up with only eight (8) employees when Mr. Philips joined the team.  Mr. Phillips was responsible for product management (PM), QA, software development (SD), IT infrastructure, customer support and day-to-day operations of VetInsite. Mr. Phillips built up the development team from 3 “hobby” developers to a full-time professional team of 8 onsite developers, varying number of onsite consultants depending on the development load and an offshore team (offshore team ranged in size from 2 to 8 depending on work load). Mr. Phillips also built up the QA and customer support groups.  Duties included:
        • Managed daily activities of the software development group
        • Ran business intelligence projects and defined BI products
        • Managed daily activities of the QA team 
        • Lead the team from processing 80 ad hoc client data feeds daily to over 1,200 data feeds Converted all data feeds to utilize a standard ETL tool, Pervasive, to allow the team to handle the increased volume while only growing the team by one head count. 
        • Standardized the data storage and archival architecture and policies to handle multiple orders of magnitude increase in data while improving up-time and response time
        • Implemented standard APIs to support our partners and vendors
        • Set and managed performance metrics for the Product Management and Software Development groups to ensure the best possible service for PetPortals clients.
        • Launched multiple new SaaS products in 2007 that now add over $1.8 million a year in revenue
        • Migrated and upgraded IT infrastructure to an enterprise level solution
        • Supported all corporate IT including the public web site, corporate email, upgrading and converting the phones to a VoIP solution, SFA and CRM
        • Implemented accepted best practices business processes in the PM and SD groups while growing the business 100% year over year.

        Edmunds.com, Los Angeles, CA

        September 2004 - September 2005
        Executive Director of Software Engineering
        Ran the Software Engineering Group for Edmunds.com with a team of 35 reports in an J2EE, BEA Weblogic, and Oracle 9i environment. Responsible for the technical architecture, design, and vision of Edmunds.com web site. The efficiency of the group increased while also increasing the quality of the code released into the production environment.  In addition average page load times decreased from an average of 7 to 10 seconds to less than 3 seconds. Duties include:
        • Managed day-to-day activities of the software engineering group
        • Set the technical vision and direction of the group
        • Assist the business with the selection and prioritization of features and functionality for all Edmunds.com online properties, including SEO and Web 2.0 solutions
        • Set the technology and methodology followed by the Software Eng group
        • Responsible for all hiring and vendor relationships

        Digex, Laurel, MD

        November 2001 - September 2004
        Director of the Software Engineering Group
        Ran the Software Engineering Group (SWE) for Digex. Managed the developers, project managers, graphic artists, and SEs for a total of 36 direct reports. Responsibilities included the technical architecture, design, and vision of Digex’s Customer Portal, ClientCentral (CC), and all proprietary software used by Digex’s customers. While under my guidance the Customer Portal was consistently ranked in the top 2 positions in TierOne’s rankings of XSP customer portals and was also ranked most functional by TierOne. 
        After MCI acquired Digex, I took over owning marketing, product mix, and technical strategy and vision for the Commerce Line of Business (LOB) for Digex. Ran a portfolio of over $40 million a year with a matrixed organisation to drive revenue and profitability for the Commerce LOB. Duties included:
        • Lead the selection and support of strategic alliances and partners for the LOB
        • Create and price B2B and B2C commerce solutions for Digex
        • Responsible for marketing and demand generation for  all Commerce solutions

        Etensity, Tysons Corner, VA

        August 1999 - May 2001
        Chief Technology Officer (CTO)
        Provided technical strategy and vision for the company. Lead engagements utilising Microsoft technologies (CMS, Commerce Server, MS SQL, etc.), Interwoven, MicroStrategy, and other solutions. Duties included:
        • Lead the selection and support of strategic alliances and partners (i.e. Microsoft, BEA, Interwoven)
        • Executive sponsor of the Microsoft strategic alliance
        • Lead the Sales Support Group (SSG) providing the technical and business support to the BDMs required to successfully sell a technical services solution
        • Created Etensity’s development methodology and standard operating procedures (SOPs)
        • Lead the Technical Architecture Committee (TAC) whose purpose was to create and maintain the coding and development standards
        • Opened multiple branch offices including Etensity’s NYC and Munich, Germany office

        NDC Group, Alexandria, VA

        October 1997 - August 1999
        Senior Manager
        Senior Manager in NDC’s eCommerce business practice. In less than one year, the business practice grew from approximately $125,000 in monthly billings to over $700,000 per month. Responsible for managing all aspects of the practice including:
        • Ultimately responsible for the delivery of all products and services
        • Client management 
        • Managed teams of 4 to 8 consultants who working on multiple development projects. Responsible for the full SDLC of e-commerce applications. 

        Gateway, North Sioux City, SD

        January 1996 - October 1997
        Manager Internet Department
        Managed the Internet Department from near inception to one of the most successful sites on the Internet. Hits to the Web site increased to over a million a day, online sales increased 6 fold, and the number of Web pages developed doubled. Managed a major facelift to the site even while the Department downsized from 22 to 12 personnel. Duties included:
        • Developed the strategy to leverage the Internet to improve the customer experience
        • Managed the web development / maintenance process
        • Defined the department’s vision and direction based on market and company requirements

        Earth Technology, Inc., Alexandria, VA

        April 1991 - January 1996
        Senior Environmental Scientist
        Senior Scientist in charge of individual field projects. Led field site visits to large Department of Defense sites, with teams of two to twelve members, to assess environmental compliance with federal and state laws and regulations.

        BCM Engineers, Reston, VA
        May 1989 - April 1991
        Environmental Scientist
        Scientist participating in multiple field visits to commercial and government locations within the continental United States. Participated in the collection of building material, soil and water samples during environmental feasibility studies and site assessments.

          Education

          Masters of Science of Technology Management

          University of Maryland, UC - 2008


          BGS in Environmental Studies
          University of Kansas, Lawrence, KS - 1989

          Certifications and Training

          • Pragmatic Marketing Certified, 2009
          • Salesforce Administrator Workshop, 2007
          • Microstrategy Certified Project Designer, 2007
          • PMI member
          • Graduate level Certificate for the Strategic Management of Technology and Innovation, 2007, University of Maryland

          International Experience

          • Traveled bi-annually to Kiev, Ukraine to work with off-shore development group for Clarabridge
          • Opened branch office in Munich, Germany for Etensity
          • Lived in Frankfurt, Germany from 1978 to 1984

          Technical Expertise 

          Platforms/Middleware 
          • J2EE
          • MS .NET
          • Web Services 
          • B2B/B2C eCommerce platforms
          Methodologies
          • Extreme Programming and Scrum
          • RUP
          • ITIL
          • Enterprise Architecture
          • SOA


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