John F. Bauer III
Short Version
Going on 20 years of IT experience in and around Cleveland, OH working for large and small companies where the core products and services of the companies were not IT but rather needed heavy support from IT to deliver those products and services. Of those 20 years, about half were in an IT engineering capacity with the other half being in managing a team of IT engineers.
I have a BS and MBA from Case Western Reserve University, Weatherhead School of Management.
I am an Adjunct Professor of Computer Network Security at Cuyahoga Community College (Tri-C)
I’ve spoken at the following conferences:
- Speaker, 2008 CA World, Identity and Access Management
- Speaker, 2008 Oracle World, Identity and Access Management
- 2007 NACHA ACH Data Security Rules Working Group member
- Speaker, Nov. 2007, Gartner Identity and Access Management Conference, Los Angeles, CA
- Speaker, Nov. 2007, Oracle OpenWorld, Online Real-time Fraud Detection
- Speaker, Aug. 2007, Oracle NEO Enterprise Architecture Quarterly
- Speaker, June 2006 NACHA Authentication conference, Reston, VA
Long Version
I’ve been involved in the IT industry in and around Cleveland, Ohio for going on 20 years. It is hard to imagine that my hobbyist interest in computers in middle/high school would sustain me through a 20+ year career. I should have known when my interest in computer software in the mid 80s motivated me to setup a BBS (yes, Bulletin Board System running Qboard on an Apple IIe with a 10MB hard drive and a Prometheus 2400 baud modem called IntelliSystems) as a legitimate front to get my hands on software to review and post for the board. I was able to get my hands on plenty of interesting titles at the time.
After graduating high school, I attended Case Western Reserve University and majored in Computer Engineering in the early 90s. The computer bug was still with me and I morphed the IntelliSystems “business model” into a small business by which to sell computer hardware and software to college students and small businesses. Slight flaw in the business plan … college students don’t really have tons of disposable income. Thus, to keep paying the bills, I spammed local Cleveland companies for an internship. I landed an internship at British Petroleum whose US headquarters was in Cleveland at the time. I ended up working at BP for 8 years holding various IT engineering and low level management positions. From their retail stations to refinery engineering to oil trading, I was able to get great exposure to all kinds of business units within a large organization from an IT perspective. I also rode the wave of IT outsourcing in the 90s and have great first hand experience on what worked, what didn’t, how people reacted and accommodated the changes. During that time span, BP went from thousands of internal IT employees to 108 across the entire US. When BP bought Amoco around 1998 and announced they were moving the headquarters to Chicago, I felt it was time to find another employer to stay in Cleveland.
Thus, off to Key Bank I went. Key was my first truly full time software development position. I was part of the team that developed their first Internet online treasury management suite of applications. Although I enjoyed software development and Java as a programming language, I wanted to get back into IT management/leadership. Thus, when the vibe at Key was a major IT re-org was on the horizon, I hooked up with a past BP co-worker and jumped to Cleveland-Cliffs, Inc. (now Cliffs Natural Resources, Inc.) Cliffs was a great size for an IT shop. They had a headquarters in Cleveland with remote locations in exciting US locations such as North Shore, MN and Hibbing, MN (birth place of Bob Zimmerman, aka Bob Dylan). I was the lead guy in charge of all of the distributed systems and applications.
Well, as the story goes, all good things must come to an end. NAFTA was passed and the steal industry tanked. Cliffs decided to outsource all their IT functions to their ERP provider. Thus, in the middle of the dot-com crash, I was out on the street looking for a job.
I ultimately landed a job at National City Bank (NCC) after some brief part time consulting gigs at variety of small and medium businesses in the area include a stint back a Key. I ended up in their corporate security group focused on Internet single sign-on and customer focused security across the enterprise. It was a great opportunity to get BP-ish exposure to all of NCC’s business units. Plus, IT security presents a completely skewed perspective on IT. Balancing technology delivery with security compliance is a great mental challenge. Plus, analogy-wise, everyone likes to know the police will come when someone robs your house but no one wants the police to pull them over. It was quite interesting be the proverbial police yet having to partner in order to provide engineered security solutions.
In late 2008, PNC buys NCC in the height of the great recession. Having had the experiences I have had in IT in Cleveland, I weighed the option of sticking around and seeing how the takeover would pan out versus jumping to another opportunity. I ran across an opportunity to take a yet another path and manage an in-house development team at a legal services company that was privately held with only around 400 employees. I took the risk and accepted the offer to join this new organization in early 2009.
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