Will Raymond for Town Council 2007

Overview:

Attended East Carolina University in the ’80s where I graduated with a degree in Computer Science/Math.

Worked for

• Law Engineering – Soils & Materials Engineer, enviro-tech
• NorTel – Software Engineer. Project Manager. Chairman’s Award for Innovation. Two Presidential Awards.
• Blast Software – CIO/CTO
• Reged.com – CIO/CTO
• Tibco-Extensibility (downtown Chapel Hill) – Software Architect

Town Advisory Boards

• Technology Board
  - push to bridge digital divide
  - proposed significant technological improvements to drive cost of delivering Town services
  - proposed WIFI/municipal networking initiative
  - proposed use of F/OSS (free and open software) to replace costly proprietary software
  - proposed use of open standards for public records
  - proposed use of list-serves, email, ‘blogs, online video and other mechanisms to open up public participation
• Horace-Williams Citizen Committee
  - drafted response to Chancellor Moeser’s letter
  - worked with environmental sub-committee to establish environmental goals, methodologies and best-case strategies
• Downtown Parking Task Force
  - using my Downtown experience proposed low or no-cost Downtown parking improvements

Other recent activities

• Community Independent Expansion Committee

Here’s a quick narrative of the last 27 years of my professional life:

As a student in Greenville, I worked many different jobs to pay for school: cucumber picker, hammock weaver, assembly line worker, industrial painter, commercial construction inspector, printer, freelance software developer and a bit more.

Taking a break from school, I became a commercial construction inspector for Law Engineering. Most of my projects were “Down East” – east of I95. My largest projects were water treatment facilities, industrial, commercial, school and military sites. The “Little” Washington sewage treatment plant, which pioneered some new treatment techniques, was my first major project. The Tarboro Sara Lee/United Refrigeration Services facilities was one of my last.

The Tarboro URS site was quite incredible – it was a refrigerator the size of a warehouse kept unbelievably cold and dry.

I was also “borrowed” by the Charlotte office to do testing on the (then) new coliseum, various highways and other large-scale commercial/industrial developments in the western part of our State. I also did occasional assignments – drilling test wells, looking for soil contaminants – for Law Environmental.

I worked for Northern Telecom (NorTel) from the late ’80’s to the mid-’90’s.

While there, as a recognition of my accomplishments in promoting innovative uses of technology to streamline our business processes, I was the first IT worker to earn the Chairman’s Award for Innovation. During those years, I also was awarded two Presidential Awards for Excellence.

A NorTel director used to bring me in on “troubled” projects – introducing me as a “change agent” – because I had a way of looking at problems from a different angle, rallying the troops and moving forward to a solution.

I worked on quite a diverse portfolio of projects; simplifying telephone switch software to allow a front-line operator to setup phone service instead of a highly-trained technician, streamlining our labor-intensive “build-to-order” process for configuring telephone equipment, automating/monitoring our $3.5 billion manufacturing systems, eliminating costly “legacy”systems and business processes.

Leaving Nortel in the late ’90’s I became a bit of an entrepreneur taking a hand in building two successful DOT.COMs – Pittsboro’s Blast Software and Chapel Hill’s Reged.com.

As both Chief Information and Technical Officer (CIO/CTO) of Reged.com, I helped propel our company to multi-million dollar status. Anticipating the Internet revolution in education, I pioneered the use of on-line teaching and testing technology for securities broker/dealers and insurance agents – a business discriminator that made our operation stand above and beyond the competition.

Reged.com has since been acquired by FiServ.

For the last 6 1/2 years, I’ve worked in Chapel Hill as a software developer for Tibco-Extensibility, a company persistently located in our great Downtown.

Our company is a key player in the “enterprise application integration” and “business process management” marketplace.

Our integration software facilitates construction of seamless, enterprise-wide, business operations from already existing and newly developed information support systems. Our management software automates reproducible business events and processes.

I currently work on a variety of technologies – including software that decomposes and classifies XML – the new lifeblood of business-to-business communications.

Because of my expertise, I have participated as a member of international “open standards” committees.