Daniel J. Dick
Skills
Dan has the skills and experience to get things done: Unix/Linux architecture and administration, Oracle, PeopleSoft, Project Management, Management to Director level, Professional Support and Customer Service, Software and Systems Architecture, Presenting Formal and Informal Training, Procurements.
Notable Accomplishments
Centene (US Script)
Before Centene acquired US Script, Centene’s health began using US Script for processing their pharmacy claims. However, US Script was not ready to take on hundreds of millions of dollars of Medicaid claims since it had no state mandated pharmacy encounters systems in production.
In attempts to dodge sanctions and lost reinsurance revenue, programmers drew up some quick and dirty PL/SQL scripts so that some claim reporting could be done. However, most of the programs had serious flaws in logic and output format and lacked logic necessary to handle corrections, audits, parsing and processing error response files and data mining missing pharmacy and physician NPI’s.
Dan inherited this and turned it around. He worked with management at the health plans and US Script to assess and meet immediate and ongoing needs of the health plans getting and meeting commitments on priorities while re-architecting the entire encounters system. In the process, Dan trained three senior Oracle PL/SQL developers, mentored one manager, one lead developer in Perl, and the Unix system administration team as needed. Dan also assisted other groups with finding and correcting problems in the online adjudication system (in C) and the Eligibility system (in Perl), and some of the Oracle Reports and worked with RT, Toad, SpecBuilder, and developed Perl programs to produce Excel Spreadsheets with DBI access to our Oracle Databases.
Clickmarks
As new Director of Information Technology, Dan and the entire company moved into a new office where the network consisting of a borrowed wire hanging over a wall from the company next door. Web and database servers were stored at AboveNet in San Jose.
Within a few days, he received a midnight call from the CEO and a couple Vice Presidents. The load on the corporate website had gone through the stratosphere when an advertisement was prematurely released. Dan and the Vice President of Engineering drove to the colocation facility in San Jose to reconfigure and install additional equipment quickly to alleviate the immediate crisis.
The next day, Dan had a QA analyst set up and fire off Silk simulations against a test web server to identify the culprit and spotted a Perl script that was a 14,000 line CGI program. The engineer modified it to run under FastCGI improving performance by 135 times. The company soon obtained a substantial international contract from Vodafone.
Dan continued to handle technical needs of the company staffing and directing the IT Department through a period of rapid growth and through a transition from being a service oriented company to a software development company as well as the transition from Perl to Java/JSP. His department was responsible for all internal and external networks including desktop support, business systems, development, production, testing, support, and sales. These included several Linux and Windows systems, routers, firewalls, load balancers, VPNs, Apache web servers, and Oracle Database servers, one of which was on Solaris.
PeopleSoft
Dan served customers of PeopleSoft’s Global Support Center as a staff analyst before being selected to help form the e-support architecture team. Using Motive technology, Dan and two other engineers developed a sophisticated automated diagnostics system in Java and Javascript. Dan also developed the integration adapter to connect Motive to Vantive so cases could be logged and tracked through either environment.
Dan and the architecture team were flown to New Orleans to present this new environment to customers at PeopleSoft’s trade show in New Orleans. Dan was also selected to develop and provide formal training to the GSC in the use of this new system. The team was disbanded and the project tabled when Motive adopted one of our innovations designed to overcome a shortcoming in Motive’s base product, and that was the ability to coordinate analysis of a network of multiple systems.
Oracle
Working in the Production Unix System Administration team, Dan managed the project to migrate global print services from VMS to Unix, mentored system administrators in security, participated in evaluation and implementation of disaster recovery systems, developed and implemented numerous EcoTools monitoring agents, and was selected to serve on Oracle’s Security Response Team. Later, Dan was promoted to join an elite team of systems and database experts to form the Enterprise Systems Center where he helped build the Enterprise Systems Center–a data center for applied research in performance, reliability, and scalability on large scale systems from Sun, HP, IBM, Sequent, Pyramid, and SGI. Dan installed and configured several multi-million dollar systems, their storage systems, and database configurations and helped his director staff the department.
Ingres
While serving customers with technical issues, Dan was selected to manage approximately 80 installations of Ingres releases residing on 40 different Unix and VMS variants and later had final sign-off on product before Release Management released product to customers. He trained new analysts to do installations meticulously to give a final QA on the installation packages. After tightening QA this way, customer satisfaction rose dramatically while customer calls to Direct User Support dropped equally dramatically.
Education
BA in Applied Mathematics with Minor in Physics from California State University, Fresno.
27 Units of Graduate Study in Advanced Systems and Database Programs at Stanford University
Competed twice in Mathematics Competition at CSU, Fresno taking 1st place one year and 2nd place the other.
Extra coursework in Engineering, Architecture, Music, and Business.
Professional Training
Advanced System Administration from Sun, Sequent, HP, and USENIX.
Database development, administration, and performance from Oracle and Ingres.
PeopleSoft installation, upgrade, development, and administration from PeopleSoft
BEA Tuxedo development and administration training from BEA.
Project Management from PMI and Microsoft Project from CompUSA.
Professional Software Support from Professional Software Support
Motive eSupport Development
Cray Vector Programming in C from Cray
Other: ITIL, METL, HIPAA, Sarbanes-Oxley, Management courses, IBM Mainframe Programming, via CBT and video libraries.
Current Certifications
For Technical and Management Certifications see Certifications
