Davalen

Senior Instructor/Consultant

Davalen is a leader in field expertise for WebSphere Portal, Lotus Notes/Domino, and related software. My duties included architecture, design, and development consulting; mentoring; and courseware development and instruction. Work was mostly remote, with onsite travel as necessary.

• Deep software specialties included IBM Web Experience Factory (aka WebSphere Portlet Factory) and Lotus Notes/Domino, both standalone and within portal environments. Other development specialties included web service creation and consumption, layered data transformation, and complex integrations, both with established systems and with home-grown applications.
• One significant and lengthy project was for an entrepreneur in the cardiology space, who wanted not just to manage and manipulate extended CDA medical documents via web services, but also design a flexible and syndication-friendly information architecture and display for the different roles involved (e.g., cardiologists and electrophysiologists, technicians, administrators, and patients), instead of the data-driven organization implied by the complex schema of the source document. My task was to create and permute this vision from one end to the other, from re-layering the web services through temporary object storage, all the way through to the interactive display and process-action toolkit that each type of user would expect to see, all of which could be modified and syndicated for use by different hospitals and/or electronic health record systems.
• I was also useful in having a significant background in education, training, and mentoring; a common practice in engaging me on a project was to bundle education, training and/or mentoring along with consulting and development work. I also mentored new developers for Davalen internally, inherited and maintained courseware development for Davalen's acclaimed developer training course for Web Experience Factory, and taught that course both remotely and in-person.
• Davalen used me at all levels of project engagement, from contributing team member in a multi-tiered team environment, to team and project technical lead, and even as a solo team unto myself, interfacing directly with the customer. I worked with teams and individuals from around the world (e.g., South Africa, India, Brazil, western Europe, and across the US), and projects ranged in size from small business jobs to multimillion dollar engagements with large customers.
• Work ranged across major industries, such as cardiology (Medical Micrographics), heavy equipment (Caterpillar), insurance (ANICO), technology (CSC), telecommunications (NTCA), and utilities (Portland General Electric). I also delivered speaking engagements at conferences such as IBM Digital Experience and Lotusphere, and published content in Davalen's "Masters Series" technical blog.