I grew up in Wyoming and Montana in a ranching community where neighbors depended on and trusted one another. I remember what was important was to get the job done right the first time especially if it involved your neighbor's property. Those lessons learned while building fence, herding cattle, harvesting hay, fighting prairie fires, and rebuilding a neighbor's barn are the same basic lessons as supporting computer systems in a networked community.

I graduated from Grand Rapids School of Bible and Music and from Missouri Institute of Technology. My hardware design technology degree focused my learning on both engineering design and system integration processes. I applied this training initially in the medical health care industry. I daily managed the safety issues of using electronic equipment in the care and monitoring of critically ill patients. I worked closely with the surgical, recovery and long term care teams to insure that we were not putting patients at risk with the use of cutting edge technical equipment. Later, I provided installation and daily support for medical imaging equipment including CAT Scanners and Gamma Ray Cameras.

After the 24 hour, 7 day per week support (24x7) of the medical industry I moved into the hardware and software integration industry where I learned to reverse engineer existing designs of hardware and software and to design, code, and test Basic Input and Output Systems (BIOS) for several military applications. This activity brought me into opportunities to support and program database systems and supporting programming in several languages beyond assembly code programming. All of this work invariably caused me to have to learn to design, build and troubleshoot network systems, and to become familiar with various operating systems. From the 90's on I have deployed customer care systems in the telecommunications industry and provided tiger team support for system deployemnts and data center moves.

The common thread through all of my technology experiences has been my constant involvement in customer care and support. I have typically been a working supervisor of technology teams and these teams have always had the assignment to be the primary and secondary support for our clients and customers. I have a broad base of experience allowing me to be a generalist and a successful systems person. I have regularly shown I can specialize when and where needed, but I usually come back to the overall systems support where I use my broad based experience to analyze and support my customer's systems.

  tknelson@altekmg.com