Clive Williams - Curriculum Vitae

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Clive Richard Williams
Telephone: 01908 561180 / 07713 164110
Email: clive.williams@rectanglered.com

CAREER SUMMARY

Experienced and innovative IT consultant, project manager, architect and developer with seventeen years experience with service, commercial, technical and internet companies, including over four years in the client server CRM sector, and six years with advanced portal technologies and email technologies. Wide, varied, hands-on skills, a "can do" attitude, the ability to learn quickly, and a delivery-orientated mindset. Highly innovative and creative systems architect. Excellent man manager and team leader with a proven track record building and leading teams, working as part of a team, and on own initiative. Experienced and Prince2 qualified project manager.

QUALIFICATIONS

Clive holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Bristol University, in the field of Natural Language Processing and Deduction Engine technologies. He studied under Professor D.H.D.Warren, well known in the Logic Programming field and world authority on Prolog compiler technology.

Clive holds the Prince2 Practioner qualification in project management, and has the breadth of experience to understand how to tailor Prince2 successfully and appropriately to large or small projects, while ensuring time, budget and quality constraints are met.

Clive has extensive experience in a wide range of technologies in various commercial sectors, including state of the art web portal technologies and customer relationship management applications and systems. During his career he has implemented systems in many household name companies in the UK and Europe. He holds a Microsoft Certified Application Developer certification, with specialisations in databases, operating system and .NET technology.

RELEVANT EXPERIENCE

September 2006 - Present: Director and Principal Consultant, Rectangle Red Limited

Clive has founded an innovative IT consultancy, specialising in web and email technologies, and IT project and supplier management. The company already has an established, referenceable customer base, with a track record of successful delivery and satisfied customers.

Jul 2003 - Present: Associate Consultant, DBI Consulting Ltd

As part of his continuing role with Accessible Technologies, Clive works part time (approximately 50%) as an associate consultant with DBI Consulting Ltd, providing requirement analysis and capture skills and technical input into web portal procurement processes. ESRC Information Centre -Clive performed the requirements analysis and wrote the requirement specification for the ESRC Information Centre project - a very complex, comprehensive web portal and multi-million pound project. This involved: This work was delivered on time and to budget despite extremely tight time and budgetary constraints to great acclaim from the project board and the OGC gateway review team.

Clive was then engaged to provide technical input into the supplier selection process of the Information Centre procurement and technical advice to ESRC and the supplier during the build, testing and deployment of the system.

Clive devised and implemented the test management regime for the Information Centre - a highly complex and comprehensive test regime, covering system testing, user testing, security penetration, failover and backup strategy, integrity of migrated data, and load and performance testing.

Following successful implementation, Clive has continued to provide consultancy and advice to ESRC as and when needed.

Feb 2000 - Aug 2006: Head of Technology, Accessible Technologies Ltd, London

Joined Accessible Technologies as manager of the development centre and rapidly promoted to the board. Responsibilities cover:

Recent projects include:

Technical Development and Architecture - He is an extremely capable hands-on developer and systems architect. As Head of Development with Accessible Technologies, he has current active exposure to the following technical skills and techniques: Team Management and Leadership - Clive built a tight, hard-working team in a fun and challenging work environment. For three years, despite not being able to give any pay increases in that period, he retained and developed his team members, losing only one person due to personal relocation. He has overseen the growth and development of his team members by encouraging innovation, mentoring where appropriate, and ensuring training needs are appropriately addressed.

Company Leadership - He has been a member of the Accessible Technologies board for two years, and is fully conversant in the responsibilities of directorship. In March 2003, he took part in a management buyout of the company.

Troubleshooting and Innovative Solutions - Clive was initially hired to troubleshoot a project to deliver the initial Accessible Technologies web portal and business database - this had been outsourced to an external company that did not have the skills to deliver. Within 2 months he had taken the project in-house, hired a small team of 3 people to develop it, and turned the project round, established a firm architecture on which to run it, and delivered a working system that went live April 17th 2000, on schedule. He has since driven the development of this initial system into a world-class portal technology, developed with a small, tightly run and extremely cost-effective team. It is designed to be supremely flexible - becoming a hosted portal solution for resellers and Communities of Interest, providing their members and customers with their own intranet/extranet featuring email, diary, document storage, content management, and many other plug-in applications.

It is designed for the SME market, allowing resellers to offer an online intranet/extranet to their customers at mass-market prices - a hosted solution featuring fully automatic signup and activation of an end-users portal. The most recent innovation allows the reseller to up sell upgrades and their own products through their customers intranets - again, fully automatically - turning the portal offering into a unique sales channel for resellers. The product has been very favourably reviewed by Butler Group, who stated "Butler Group believes that this is the first portal offering in the UK to seriously address the needs of smaller businesses and Accessible Technologies has a significant lead over other vendors of hosted portal solutions in this market." A full copy of the Butler Group review is available on request. BT Wholesale resold the product as "Office Anywhere", and has since been sold into several well known ISPs who rebrand it as their own online office and email environment for their customers.

Apr 1995 - Feb 2000: Managing Consultant, The Customer Engagement Company, Harrow

Team Management and Leadership: In four and a half years, Clive proved myself and rose from joining the company as a software engineer, quickly becoming a consultant, and for the last 18 months managed a growing team of professional services consultants. The team comprised 7 members, and delivered just under £1m a year of revenue to the business. This work used the following skills: Client/Server CRM Application Consultancy: Clive performed consultancy work for retail, technical and financial clients, developing, supporting and integrating customer service applications with other systems and applications. This took both advisory and hands-on form, and involved the entire project life-cycle, from requirements capture, through design, implementation, testing, installation and finally support of the delivered solution. Clive has been personally responsible for delivering customer service focused CRM solutions to customers such as Tesco, BT, Canon, Somerfield and Boots the Chemist. This used the following skills: Post Sales Support: Responsible for provision of front-line support of our customer's applications. Clive's team used a pro-active philosophy with support calls - calling a customer first, if they knew that a customer has an issue that would need discussing, and helping the customer to avoid potential problems that they knew were likely to become important issues later.

Consultancy Pipeline Generation and Pre-Sales Support: Identified opportunities and needs within the existing customer-base, produced proposals for consultancy work, and used them to fill the consultancy pipeline for forthcoming quarters. This role also entailed identifying upcoming major projects and ensuring that suitable skills exist within the consultancy team to deliver them to time, cost and quality constraints. Clive's team was also responsible for providing technical input, demonstrations and presentations into the sales process for solutions. This involved close teamwork with the sales force, producing customised demonstrations and talks for a sales prospect which focused on specific issues for the customer and highlight how the our solutions addressed their business needs.

Oct 1993 - Mar 1995: Software Engineer, CP Business Solutions, Ashby-de-la-Zouch.

Reverse Engineering AS/400 Code into C: Responsible for design and implementation of a highly innovative suite of UNIX/C code generators, extracting commercial applications from an object orientated CASE database and producing Misys Strategix applications in C, on IBM RS6000 Unix machines, driving an Informix C/ISAM database. As part of this role, Clive was responsible for interviewing and hiring of a new member of the development team, and then in training him to take responsibility for continuing the development of the low-level C routines necessary to drive the database and screen. During the later parts of the project, Clive took part in benchmarking exercises using IBM's performance monitoring centre, measuring the performance of the generated applications with large numbers of concurrent simulated users.

Feb 1991 - Sep 1993: Software Engineer, IPSYS Software, Macclesfield.

Reverse Engineering AS/400 Code into C: Provided consultancy to a AS/400 software house, during their project to migrate their business applications into a UNIX client/server environment. In particular, Clive provided expertise in the use of CASE technology to reverse engineer code, and to generate applications based upon Strategix, a Misys business package and toolkit. He impressed CP Business Solutions so much during major on-site consultancy work on the early stages of this project, that they hired him. Maintenance Tools - A CEC Research Project: Responsible for providing the IPSYS input into a pan-European Esprit research project, which involved several collaborating companies and universities across Europe. In this role, he provided front-line consultancy and support about the use of CASE tools to our European partners. Clive also designed, developed and supported tools for this project, including a change management system, and integrated various tools writing by the project partners, using inter-process communication mechanisms and C.

Jan 1990 - Jan 1991: Senior Research Engineer, STC Technology Ltd, Newcastle, Staffs

User Interfaces using X: Clive used Sun's "XView" toolkit to produce a new user-interface to ICL's "ProcessWise" product. Originally developed as a technology demonstrator, this work was so successful that it became a vital part of the product. Process Modeling: Worked as part of a team designing and defining several process models using PML (Process Modeling Language) for use within ICL's Advanced Software Factory. This involved discussing requirements from users in ICL, developing solutions and demonstrating them to management and users within ICL.

SKILLS

Software: Microsoft .NET, ASP and various Visual Basic scripting environments. MS SQL Server (2000, 7 and 6.5), Oracle (7 and 8i) and MySQL – both database administration and writing SQL code. Thorough understanding of Microsoft IIS4.0, 5.0 and 6.0, and HTML. Customisation of, and integration with, Quintus CallCenterQ CRM products. Has used the Windows 2000/XP/2003 family for the last 6 years – has also used Windows NT, 95, Unix (Solaris, HP, IBM AIX and Linux), Unix shell scripts and X-Windows.

Computer Languages: Strong Visual Basic scripting skills, including usage in Microsoft .NET, Microsoft ASP and Visual Basic. Fluent in Prolog, SQL and Unix Shell Scripts. Have also done considerable development work in C and PHP.

Hardware: PCs and Windows platform based servers running Windows and Linux, Suns, IBM RS/6000s.

Relevant Skills: Web portal technology, Web business applications, Client/Server business applications, CRM toolsets, Customer Service applications, Helpdesk applications, Consultancy, Telephony integration, Relational (and C-ISAM based) databases, Code generation, Natural language processing and AI, Pan-European research projects, Commercial applications, Requirement analysis and capture, Development, Project management, Prince2, Pure and applied research, Interviewing candidates, Team-leading, Management and Company directorship.

Languages: Working knowledge of French.

EDUCATION

Ph.D. Thesis - A Natural Language Understanding System: The thesis describes a program designed to understand English text fed to it and reason with the logical meaning of it. It deals with natural language issues (especially the use of Categorial Grammar) and also deduction mechanisms. The supervisor was Professor D.H.D. Warren of Bristol University.

PERSONAL DETAILS