Portfolio

John Tomczak's Professional Portfolio

The following sections provide an overview of some special projects and accomplishments in my professional careers.

Life 3.0

Technical Account Manager

The following is a brief summary of my customer-facing duties and responsibilities as a Technical Account Manager with inContact.

Direct daily operations to ensure success for 12 "Premier" clients generating $1M+ in annual recurring revenues. Optimize cloud environment performance and availability through delivery of best-practices and technical-resolution recommendations. Interface with client representatives to review current platform status and to ensure future development strategies meet or exceed business requirements. Partner with sales and product management teams to analyze client needs assessments and enable satisfaction of customer growth objectives through development of strategies and roadmaps. Collaborate cross functionally with voice and network engineering, research and development, technical, and other specialized technical resource teams to efficiently troubleshoot and resolve issues.

inContact Report Selector

About 6 months into my tenure as a Technical Account Manager, I recognized a dire need for a way to locate and understand the reports available on inContact's platform. The task for inContact employees and new inContact customers was daunting. The inContact platform has nearly 100 standard and customizable reports, each with several to dozens of different reported metrics. Knowing "where" to find "what" requires an encyclopedic memory. The process was very taxing for new inContact employees and frustrating for new customers. In the first six months of a customer's journey, approximately half of all support inquiries are related to finding the right information in the right report. There was a glaring need for report finding "tool" to aide inContact employee and new customers.

Without prompting, I embarked on an effort to create such a tool. Over the course of 3 months, I invested approximately 300 hours of personal time to create the application below. I call it the inContact Report Selector. The response from my fellow TAMs as well as others at inContact has been extremely positive. The feedback I've received from my customers and other TAMs' customers has been overwhelming.

My inContact Report Selector is the latest in a long line of projects that demonstrate one of my defining characteristics.

Specifically, my ability to internalize customers' hardships and impediments, and create imaginative, liberating solutions.

Time and time again, my gift for recognizing and improving customers' experiences has resulted in greater satisfaction, loyalty, and referenceability.

Feel free to "play around" with the inContact Report Selector application below.

Use the drop down list boxes to filter list of reports.

You can also enter key words in the "Search" box.

Life 2.0

Technology Educator

Employer:

District 92½, Westchester, Illinois

As an educator and technologist, it was natural for me to want to create a unique educational experience for my students. To do this, I tapped into the fact that today's students are born and raised in a mobile computing world. Studying math by dragging heavy textbooks around is antiquated.

At this point in my professional evolution, I had fully embraced Google's suite of cloud-based tools. The tools I relied heavily on were Google Sheets, Forms, Sites, and Fusion Tables. I used Google Forms to capture student assignment responses, auto-scored the responses with Google Sheets, provided assignment analytics with Google Fusion Tables, and controlled student assignment and teacher analytics through Google Sites. Over the course of a few years, I created several grade levels worth of curriculum, all conveniently cloud-based and accessible to students and teachers 24x7. I named my cloud-based math curriculum system Math's Best Friend™.

The following Google Form is a live, tryable demonstration assignment.

Principal Schema for Math's Best Friend

Do I Know SQL? I KNOW SQL!

Google Docs uses its own version of SQL called Google Query Language. Google Query Language is a combination of SQL and spreadsheet functions. In the Teacher Dashboard above, there is a set of "FILTER" and "SORT" options. This is just one example of the areas where I used Google Query Language to allow teachers to customize their Dashboard. Unfortunately, because the Teacher Dashboard above is embedded in an <iframe>, the drop down options for filtering and sorting are not functional. Below is a screen shot of how they appear in the functional Teacher Dashboard.

Life 1.0

Sales Engineer > to > Configurator Developer > to > Development Manager

Employer:

Andrew Corporation, later acquired by CommScope

Andrew/CommScope is an original equipment manufacturer of all things related to mobile communications infrastructure. Founded in 1939, Andrew has been involved in wireless from the early days of radio to today's 5G personal communications. Then and now, every wireless systems have required similar components. These include radios, antennas, towers to install the antennas on, and transmission lines for carrying energy between the radios and antennas. Andrew/CommScope manufactures all these components, with the exception of radios. Configuring dozens of components into a working system required the efforts of many systems and sales engineers.

After a few years in the role of Sales Engineer and success writing software to help automate the process, I fashioned and presented a plan to the executive committee at Andrew. The plan involved creating customer-facing, self-help configurator tools for each of the product line. I was certain that configurators were the key to locking in customer loyalty, provide greater sales opportunities, and significantly increasing revenue. I was selected to stand up the new department charged with this mission. Configurators delivered the results I anticipated, far beyond my expectations. At our peak, I was managing the five developers creating standard and customer specific configurators for Andrew's product lines.

Distribution of these configurators exceeded 500,000 units world-wide. They were available in several languages and dozens of currencies.

Below is an article highlighting Andrew Configurators winning an award at the Microsoft Windows World Open.

Here are some examples of promotional materials for the System Configurators we created.

The "model" in the AASP Promotion is me.

The "model" in the AMSP Promotion is my Best Friend and developer, Frank Elton.

My Traffic Estimate