Naval Academy

Portuguese Navy / IBM

Superior Institute of Naval War

Instituto Superior Técnico

ISEG - Lisbon School of Economics & Management

Principal Enterprise Architect at Amgen

Thousand Oaks, California, United States

Align technology strategies to business imperatives, optimize the value of our technology investments, and govern IT architecture standards and practices across the data, application, integration, and infrastructure layers; creating value for our staff, business partners, shareholders, and most importantly – our patients.

Accountable for the overall Enterprise Architecture practice; synchronizing business needs with information technologies and capabilities, implementing the “City Planning“ principles and practices, and managing the Enterprise Architects.

Leader to advance Amgen’s digital innovation goals, effectively govern application, integration, and infrastructure technology ecosystem, and collaborate closely with the Shared Services, Functional architecture, and engineering communities to deliver world-class enterprise architecture capabilities.

Amgen

Principal Enterprise Architect

Support Enterprise Architecture initiatives for Molina Healthcare client conducting the integration between Alfabet and ServiceNow’s CMDB as the repository for Enterprise Architecture and ensuring the mapping and alignment between business capabilities and IT infrastructure on-premise and cloud (Azure).

-  Defined and developed catalogs, data flow diagrams, communication plans, and training enforcing the overall Enterprise Architecture models, representations, and standard components to deliver business capabilities and IT supported activities.
-  Led the ITAM program to improve the lifecycle of technology assets, ensuring the management of assets within the organization.
-  Led the CMDB restructuration as SCRUM Master for ServiceNow Projects.
-  Led, developed, and executed engagement and communication plans, including training, ensuring the adoption of processes and practices.
-  Developed controls and monitoring dashboards to govern and manage agile initiatives ensuring tracking and alignment.

Infosys

Configuration and Portfolio Manager & Agile/SCRUM Master

Relied upon as the single point of engagement for Allison Transmission business and customer needs. Successfully led high profile transformation efforts by identifying opportunities, evaluating recommended solutions, and expertly resolving challenges while enabling continual improvements. Ensured precise alignment and rapid execution of change management initiatives by defining strategy, required training, and communication roadmaps for all stakeholders. Collaborated cross-functionally to enable sustainable and scalable technology solutions in compliance with all policies, processes, and best practices. Consistently achieved first-ever service and satisfaction scores.

Notable Achievements:
-  19.7% SLA improvement in Service Requests.
-  67.2% reductions in non-updated tickets; 21.5% active tickets; 48.2% aging tickets.
-  11.5% incident reduction.
-  46.8% increase in the recovery of assets within SLA.

IT Consultant Expert

Application Lead for some critical systems, developed the baseline of the existing architecture to support the target architecture defining the roadmap components and identifying improvement opportunities. Led the organizational change by actively engaging and developing relationships with key stakeholders such as C-level executives, business partners, vendors, external service providers, and IT partners. Enhanced and maintained service delivery value and stability while ensuring demand planning and development of solutions aligned with business priorities and corporate strategy.

-  Architected, designed, and delivered technical solutions across multiple teams (on-premise and cloud-based).
-  Conducted business scenarios identifying and validating requirements to deliver business value. Prioritized projects evaluating risk and cost/benefit analysis.
-  Created the appropriate architectural repository that describes systems, integrations, data relationships, catalogs, matrices, diagrams, networking, and other key operational and architectural content.
-  Drove the migration of the architecture roadmap from legacy monolithic systems into distributed SOA web services and microservices.
-  Managed the IT portfolio and agile methodologies delivering enhancements and architecture roadmaps aligned with business needs and priorities.
-  Planned, deployed, and managed projects into production, including business adoption, implementation, and stabilization support.
-  Conducted business cases and PoCs to justify investments.
-  Standardized communication plans, modeling processes and languages (ArchiMate and BPMN), and increased awareness and education of processes and practices (TOGAF and SCRUM).
-  Assisted in negotiating enterprise-level agreements with technical vendors, outsourcers, and contractors.
-  Enabled record-breaking customer satisfaction metrics
-  Created an Advisory Board for governance, providing support and cohesion across defined practices

Eli Lilly and Company

Assoc. IT Consultant

Led, coordinated, and managed cross-functional, dispersed teams, supporting IT global services, providing worldwide 24/7 coordination and support of all projects and initiatives related to solving complex problems. Evaluated major incident business impacts and defined action plans involving emergency decisions, prioritizing, and resolution strategy and activities. Designed and managed emergency restoration activities with local and worldwide teams, effectively resourcing restoration and defining escalation needs, ensuring zero negative business impacts.

-  Served as the single point of contact, deciding upon all business, local, R&D, and the GSD Lead Engineers and stakeholder’s involvement in restoration actions.
-  Led the identification of gaps and developed roadmaps to solve the identified problems.
-  Achieved a 70% RCA delivery time reduction and 50% restoration time at the end of six months by identifying, planning, and leading corporate root cause analysis process change efforts and preventing repetitive occurrences.

Nokia Networks

ERT Escalation Manager

Led, managed, and coordinated teams of 33 professionals locally and remotely.
Led the Enterprise Architecture project, developed the vision, BDAT architectures, and roadmaps.
Enterprise Architecture based on the TOGAF framework from scratch, mapping the “as-is” and designing the “to-be.” A goal was integrating EA and ITIL approaches, avoiding the duplication of efforts and increasing synergies, allowing EA daily as an operational tool. Services and Processes identification using BPMN and ArchiMate as the modeling language along with different EA layers. Adopting a unique approach and common language enabled the rise of a final EA and promoted synergies. ITIL's processes allowed to keep the EA updated. The orientation service approach created allowed the adoption of this approach in other non-IT departments.
Created the architecture repository and conducted business scenarios identifying stakeholders, evaluating risk, and cost/benefit analysis.
Managed and ensured 24/7/365 availability and support to all IT Services services and systems, business services, and operations center.
Led ITIL adoption and continuous service improvement/alignment of strategic directives, IT services, and technologies (11 ITIL management processes and functions).
Managed resources and suppliers, identified new solutions, improved rationalization, and ensured relationships among teams, stakeholders, and business partners, influencing the course of actions.
Served as representative presenting projects and solutions to different audiences at conferences and forums.
Consistently met or beat budgets by evaluating, monitoring, and managing portfolio expenses and needs aligned with the forecast.
Delivered a verified reduction in the IT and organizational gap, by creating a service catalog managing change and implications, subsequently replicated across other ministries and agencies.

Secretary-General Ministry of National Defence

Head of Enterprise Architecture and IT Services

Strategic role setting the direction and approach for the governance of IT systems, applications, and tools to meet required business capabilities and ensuring the alignment with the organization’s strategy.
Provided oversight and governance of IT architecture for applications, infrastructure, integration, and data.
Defined and created the architecture board to oversee the IT strategy and enforce the IT governance policies.
Led, managed and coordinated a 12-person team, accountable for the conception, development, alignment, and management of Decision Support Systems, by leveraging business requirements translated into the technical design.
Served as an innovation and change management leader on disruptive projects by creating innovation management systems to receive and conduct new ideas and projects.
Ensured technical solutions sustainability, risk and cost avoidance, strategic alignment, and timely delivery by creating policies, processes, and new solution procedures for changing behaviors, and by collaborating across departments and stakeholders.
Defined IT Governance policy and processes aligned with the organization’s strategic objectives. Used the Balanced Scorecard to ensure the alignment between IT initiatives with a defined strategy, and defined IT roadmap.
Successfully addressed current and future business needs by defining technology roadmaps, portfolio prioritization, and the end-to-end software development and tailoring solutions that delivered expected services dependent upon legacy solutions.
Enabled critical senior leadership decision-making by conducting business case studies, and PoCs to justify investments and leveraging shared data communications, monitoring capabilities, trend analysis, and reporting tools and processes.

Portuguese Navy

Head of Decision Support Systems Department

Support Teacher and students supervisor and in the following disciplines:
- Organization and Management of IT Function;
- Organizational Architecture of Information Systems;
- Knowledge Management and Organizational Learning;
- Portfolio I, II, III, and IV

Graduate Teaching Assistant

Chief Operations Officer and Head of Customer Experience:
- Planning activities
- Marketing campaigns
- Selection, hiring, and training
- IT development and support

FormNautica, Formação Náutica, Lda

Founder and Managing Partner

Managed a team of eight responsible for planning, development, and the implementation of IT and information systems delivering end-to-end software development across the entire lifecycle, from project conception to deployment and support. Ensured the relationship and collaboration among teams from different departments and identified business opportunities and improvements as well as the maintenance of legacy systems and interconnection between IT systems.

-  Successfully planned and defined holistic and existing principles solutions aligned with future growth.
-  Developed extremely precise project schedule-tailored solutions to address specific needs by soliciting inputs from business and technical team members.

IT Manager

I was promoted to Executive Officer of the NRP " Schultz Xavier." This was a significant promotion as I was elevated above the usual protocol of receiving a promotion based on the next level in rank.  The ship was also assigned a new mission in which a more senior ranking officer would be assigned.

I lead an organizational restructuring that implied a crew reduction of approximately 25%. I had to improve processes and manage the change and convince the crew that a smaller team could deliver the same level of service. Doing more with less was challenging but also very rewarding in leading the service restructuring.

Executive Officer

Tridente Solucoes Multimedia Co was a challenging hobby. Using the practical knowledge of web technologies, I was the founder and managing partner of a multimedia company. I set up the business with a few of my Navy colleagues to follow my desire to create websites and portals, online games, multimedia presentations, marketing campaigns, and software applications.

As an entrepreneur, for the first time, I found out I had to wear several hats.  I was mainly responsible for managing client program development including creating online solutions, defining technical issues, implementation strategies, plan execution, and managing internal design teams.

It was fascinating to realize later when I learned from Agile methodologies that I was using Agile approaches. I felt this was the most efficient way to deliver results aligned with customers' expectations.

Tridente, Soluções Multimédia (Multimedia Solutions)

Founder, Managing Partner, and Development Lead

Managed a team of five people and technical resources in the administration of the communication and data network with the following responsibilities:

-  Conception, implementation, maintenance, and interconnection of navy’s network infrastructure (LAN, MAN, and WAN).
-  Network Security Officer.
-  Manager of the project “IBM SNA to TCP-IP network” from Virtual Telecommunications Access Method (VTAM) based on IBM subsystem that implements Systems Network Architecture (SNA) to a TCP-IP network with OS/390 emulation, and the migration from a Token Ring topology to an Ethernet-based network and providing the definition of policies, processes, and procedures to new solutions.

Notable Achievements:
-  Navy’s network based on TCP/IP.
-  Creation and interconnection of several LANs.
-  Creation and adoption of security policies.

Navy Network Manager

After almost two years as an Executive Officer, I was promoted to Ship Commander of the warship NRP "Argos." This was a great honor as I was one of the youngest ever to be promoted to Ship Commander in the Portuguese Navy.

The work was not much different from my previous role as Executive Officer. However, as a Ship Commander, the sense of responsibility of having an entire crew dependent on you and your decisions 24 hours a day, plus the responsibility for your country's good and taking care of a several million euros warship can be daunting.

Being involved in several stressful situations and having to make quick decisions required to overcome potential consequences provided me knowledge and experience that we can hardly be acquired in other roles.

Ship Commander

When I graduated from the naval academy, and I started my internship in a warship. After a couple of months, I was promoted to Executive Officer in the warship NRP "Rovuma."

As my first role as an Executive Officer, I was assigned a crew of 32 people overseeing all technical, administrative, and operational matters. Reporting directly to the ship commander, I was responsible for the planning and delivery of the services and acted as the liaison between operations and logistics.
I was also responsible for providing the training, education, and on-going career development to departmental personnel.

It was a great, enriching experience. However, I soon realized that not all teams work like a Swiss watch. I had to define objectives and implement timelines to ensure results were achieved based on the ship commander’s expectations.

Nelson Gama

Nelson Gama