Rajesh Gopinath Kumar
Senior Director - IT
Houston, TX 77007-5624
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Summary
An IT delivery executive leader of a multi-industry business across multiple countries, solution architect and diagnostics specialist with over 25 years of experience in exploratory, confirmatory and qualitative data analysis, utilizing and implementing business intelligence systems, statistical analysis tools and techniques to improve enterprise productivity.
Experience
2016
Feb
-
2021
Jan
Senior IT Director - Cloud Solutions
HCL America Inc / Houston, TX
- Act in both Pre-Sales & Delivery phases of a customer engagement as Solution Responsible driving the program to fulfill the technical targets, with vision of the future trends and creativity
- As a Subject Matter Expert, maintain a level of knowledge to qualify as an authority in the profession within and outside top 2 Corporate Life Insurance practice.
- Collaborate with the broader architecture community to provide input into IT strategies and standards
- Create or review IT plans that manage clear and realistic expectations of what technology can offer in terms of products, services, and delivery mechanisms
- Define and execute cloud automation strategy for enterprise applications and application components
- Engage at customer C-Level during opportunity and Pre-Sales Phase, to align offerings and proposals with their network evolution strategy of our customers
- Executive presence; highly effective communicator
- Include strong knowledge of Secure Development Lifecycle methodologies, Agile based methodologies, middleware platforms, development platforms (Java and .NET etc.)
- Independently formulate direction, design or oversight for the development of major company-wide programs or plans that have significant impact on the success of the organization
- Knowledge payment compliance and standards (PCI DSS, FFIEC, NIST Security Standards )
- Lead and contribute with presentations and discussions in customer workshops, providing solution and technical expertise
- Lead a cross-functional IT Architecture group that reviews designs from an enterprise perspective
- Participate in the design review process and support the overall Enterprise Architecture Management process
- Provide accurate and timely reporting of architectural solutions, risk findings and propose remediation and mitigation options
- Provide and drive solutions, covering several domains and layers in the customer network
- Research and facilitate the development and review of solution, integration, workflow and web service standards
- Scope, define & design solution offerings; driving end-to-end technical solutions
- Selection and review of structural elements and their interfaces, by which a system is composed
- Share and transfer knowledge, presenting to others on audit findings, solutions and new releases
- Taking the technical lead to secure the professional delivery of solutions in the Region
- Understand current security posture of applications including web and mobile specific for Visa's enterprise
- 10% R&D - Strategic Leadership Support
- 20% Supervision of other R&D Program Managers
- 70% Operations / Program Management
- Champion strong governance in the program decision framework/methodologies and mentors project managers in its development and continuous improvement
- Create and manage an integrated timeline for the program. Work with team to maintain the timeline as current
- Creates and facilitates an environment allowing the cross-functional team to deliver projects to meet established goals and objectives
- Develop and mentor team providing frequent feedback and guidance for career development
- Ensure that your teams execute the following staff-related processes: recruiting, training, coaching, mentoring, career development and performance management
- Establish a process improvement culture within the Program Management team
- Foster Teamwork: Work cooperatively and effectively with others to set goals, resolve problems, and make decisions that enhance organizational effectiveness
- Manage and Support People: Responsible for management, support, career development, mobility for team of people supporting portfolio
- Manage human capital resources and provides leadership for all stages/phases of the project management cycle, ensuring alignment with customer expectations and organization strategy
- Provide a work environment that encourages and recognizes participation and success
- Provide program management leadership and set clear goals and direction for the PM team
- Sets productivity pace to reach milestones, uses retrospective methods to ensure continuous improvement, proactively manages risks, issues, status, and escalation
- Shares project management expertise and leadership with others by utilizing and teaching company/industry project management methodologies and tools throughout the project life cycle
- Strong business acumen
- Work with PMO / Finance to create and manage project budget
- Works closely with Scrum Masters and other release managers on US and international initiatives that are managed using the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe)
- Works with Corporate Release Management to provide timely team and train performance metrics
- Ability to run and deliver results on large-scale, complex technical projects across distributed sites under tight deadlines.
- Ability to effectively influence and communicate cross-functionally with all levels of management
- Ability to effectively operate with high energy and flexibility in a fast-paced, constantly evolving team environment.
- Outstanding people management and organizational development skills.
2012
Mar
-
2016
Jan
Director - IT Solutions
HCL America Inc / Houston, TX
- Advises and influences senior management on the marketplace evolution and potential application of information and technology, aligned to the overall R&D IT strategy
- Align with HR to ensure career development for IT staff and progressive hiring practices to ensure diversity within the program
- Defines individual performance objectives and development plans and ensures alignment with project and department objectives
- Develop and maintain platform services and tooling to provide event logging, metrics monitoring and other backend services
- Direct and manage business process re-engineering associated with existing, developing and implementation of systems
- Ensure clear and concise expression of design decisions to development, business teams, and senior IT management
- Ensure market-leading frameworks are implemented with IT operating model (ITIL, PMI, etc.)
- Establish a culture of high performance, transparency and continuous improvement as it relates to the production support of client services and streamlining of the development pipeline
- Establish and Maintain key relationships with strategic software providers (ex. IBM, Oracle ERP, etc.)
- Influence changes and system enhancements to business processes, policies, and infrastructure to deliver the most effective IT services
- Makes decisions regarding resource alignment/dedication and prioritization (people resources, dollars/funding, project criticality) and communicates rationale back to the business
- Monitor overall performance of team and services provided
- Participating in the evolution of work intake and demand management processes
- Partner with the Finance Leadership Team, Global Finance community and local Finance community to further define and deliver against our strategic Finance roadmap
- Perform complex vendor management in delivery of an integrated solution
- Responsible for technology roadmap achieving CIO and divisional goals and ROI
- Select and build strong teams through formal training, diverse assignments, coaching, mentoring, and other team development techniques, along with regular individual and group meetings
- Vendor selection and management along with associated agreements, statements of work, etc
- Work with existing IT functions to monitor, maintain and administer across the infrastructure stack (Development, QA, Staging, and Production)
- Working with Enterprise Architecture, create and deploy the Finance Reporting Analytics Platform
2008
Jan
-
2012
Feb
Senior Program Manager, IT
HCL America Inc / Houston, TX
- Defining performance tuning measures end-to-end, across all tiers of applications being performance tested
- Demonstrated successful working relationships with IT and Business customers
- End to end systems performance analysis and performance tuning, in one or more of the following technologies : J2EE (Tomcat), Oracle, SAP
- End-to-end phases of performance testing, including
- Establish good working relationships with peers in other divisions and explore joint system and process improvement opportunities
- Helps minimize business value lost during project/program execution
- Knowledge of outsourcing methodologies and operating models, and working with professional services firms
- Maintaining positive and professional relationships with all relevant service providers and vendors, ensuring agreed SLAs are met
- Manage and mentor a small team of business analysts in their daily work and professional development
- Network technologies supported includes routing, switching, wireless, vendor VPN, and outsourcer connectivity.
- Performance test execution
- Proactively track and reviews team processes and release metrics and provide recommendations on enhancements
- Proficient at planning and managing project budgets
- Provide ongoing coaching, guidance, feedback and mentoring support to the team
- Provides general system users and management with system analysis and feedback
- Review, identify and provide performance recommendations to delivery, capacity planning and systems administration teams
- Strong technical aptitude in application development and data management is critical
- Supports the reporting of project status to business stakeholders
- Transform the work structure for getting IT work completed, generating increased efficiency to lower the cost of IT projects
- Work with leaders of cross-functional teams sharing process improvements including engineering, system test, product management, operations, and quality
2003
Mar
-
2007
Dec
Manager IT
HCL America Inc / Houston, TX
- Coaching, managing and developing employees by establishing clear goals, expectations, and strategies for employee performance
- Conduct internal trainings in areas of subject matter specialty, assist in identifying other training opportunities
- Defining and facilitating User Acceptance Testing
- Defining and facilitating User Acceptance Testing
- Developing and implementing better processes within the team
- Effectively develop direct reports through coaching, counseling, and performance feedback
- Innovative approaches to applying new concepts and technical capabilities to solving business and technical problems
- Is responsible for managing people, hiring, firing, performance reviews, compensation, and determining promotions
- Is responsible for managing people, hiring, firing, performance reviews, compensation, and determining promotions
- Manage and coordinate vendor activities in the context of services being delivered to and with the Infrastructure Engineering team
- Manage and prioritize multiple assignments, and competing priorities in a rapidly growing, fast-paced environment
- Participate in IT strategic planning, project planning and budget planning efforts
- Participates in the change management process to ensure proper planning, communication and scheduling
1998
Jun
-
2003
Feb
Project Lead
HCL America Inc / Houston, TX
- Assist development managers with process related activities
- Assist in the development of future fuel module products in full coordination with worldwide teams
- Assists in managing projects and provides analysis in support of department and corporate objectives
- Build and manage teams that collaboratively work well with each other as well as other teams (e.g. architecture, business analysts, project management)
- Conceives and designs existing system upgrades and enhancements for high profile events and for projects that are broad in their scope of application
- Develops project plans to address tactical objectives. Partners with business unit managers in identifying opportunities to improve
- Develops strategy and plans for piloting new software, apps, tools, ways of working, process improvements, etc with approach, CBA, and timelines
- Dotted line tactical leadership of the project teams providing critical employee developmental and performance feedback to the administrative managers
- Generate products such as sketches, models, an early user guide, and prototypes to keep the user and the engineers informed and in agreement on the system to be provided as it is evolving
- Make high-level design choices that may dictate technical standards, including coding standards, tools, or platforms
- Make sure documents and other work products are prepared and stored correctly, and that revisions are managed
- Management of Technical Issue resolution through design/development engineers
- Partition large systems into subsystems and components each of which can be handled by a single engineer or team of engineers or subordinate architect
- Proactively interacts directly with Biostatisticians, Data Management, Programmers, Clinical Development staff and management
- Provide technical leadership across the organization, from strategic decision making to project planning and execution
- Provides user documentation for the system. Creates curriculum and provide classes for user training
- Providing oversight to P&W's outsourced invoicing function by ensuring achievement of performance metrics in alignment with continuous improvement efforts
- Recommends/approves final systems designs and strategy
- Strategically design, develop and implement efficient information systems and operations systems in support of core organizational functions
- Supports the CTT by providing resource estimates for programming and timelines for delivery of the work
- To provide expertise in technical design, analysis, performance and solving technical issues during project delivery
1996
Dec
-
1998
May
Infrastructure Lead
HCL Technologies / Chennai, Tamilnadu, India
- Develop processes to maintain operational support documentation
- Execute server upgrade and consolidation projects, systems performance management and maintenance, disaster recovery and patch management
- Lead technical bridges with technology teams to drive triage and resolution of incidents
- Manage and administer code reviews and lead, mentor, and coach senior and junior members of the development team
- Monitor day-to-day operations of the IT infrastructure group including downtime, reporting service levels, defining and tracking IT operational metrics and provide status to management
- Own and Drive Service Improvement Activities across the Digital infrastructure through automation and analytics
- Plan and perform scheduled hygiene and maintenance of the infrastructure
- Provide co-ordination of Incidents, Problem Management and Change Management with our internal IT service providers and partners to minimize impact to the business. Closely liaise with Corporate IT and Capital HQ teams on all Infrastructure operations
- Provide hands-on server side development of applications through to implementation
- Provide leadership and technical guidance to program management office and SMEs
- Provide technical consultation and direction for the development of solutions to team members and project stakeholders
- Provide technical leadership in the areas of systems administration (Windows/Linux), Storage Administration, server patch management, Network management, Database administration
- Report to a Senior IT professional on all aspects of IT operations including IT infrastructure, Communication (LAN, WAN, email, etc.), database, backup recovery, regulatory compliance
- Resolving high priority incident tickets, with potential customer impacts
- Responsible for resolution of issues escalated from Operations or DOJ network issues that affect customer access to and performance of operations, and webhosting applications
- Responsible for the design and development of IT systems. This includes but is not limited to Networking / Telecom / Server administration
- Supports program and project level implementation by providing expertise and hands on assistance
- Track and report service metrics as defined
- Understands and articulates the impact and importance of the Digital channel across our GSO Partners
- Work with engineers and developers to define provisioning, configuration, protocol support, and security for cloud services
1994
Jun
-
1996
Nov
Associate Mgr
Pentafour Software / Kelambakkam, Chennai, Tamilnadu
- Client enquiry management
- Encourage and empower others to achieve, create enthusiasm, and foster the development of a common vision
- Encouraging and empowering others to achieve, create enthusiasm, and foster the development of a common vision
- Ensure close collaboration with the Sub Custodian network and the internal Network Management Group
- Establish employee objectives and administer performance reviews
- Establishing employee objectives and administering performance reviews
- Exception management / resolution
- Foster and champion High Performance Culture where people are empowered to make decisions that affect their work/environment
- Handling multiple projects and adjusting to a constantly changing environment with new approaches that improve overall work efficiency and effectiveness
1981
Jun
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1994
May
Data Processing Supervisor
Bharath Heavy Electricals / Kailasapuram, Trichy, Tamilnadu
- All aspects of processing and delivery for both internal and external data according to production schedule and Product / Commercial requests
- Analyzes all shipments documents for accuracy
- Assist in related training and documenting of the team knowledge
- Assist in the deployment of new data processing workflows
- Carry out data archiving and provide technical support for data users
- Continually innovate, develop and suggest enhancements to gain better work efficiency
- Develop and maintain software systems for data entry, editing, imputation, and analysis for paper based population surveys in developing countries
Education
2009
-
2012
University of Phoenix
Master Business Administration
1991
-
1994
National Institue of Technology
Mechanical Engineering
1984
-
1984
Annamalai University
Diploma in Computer Science
1978
-
1981
Seshasayee Institute of Technology
Diploma in Mechanical Engineering
Skills
