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| Hello! My name is Mike Baca, and welcome to my website. |  Download VCard file |
The Resume tab on this site highlights my professional history and qualifications, so at the risk of being redundant, here is a quick thumbnail of me. I have always felt most at ease as an intermediary between business (i.e. "people") and technology. I believe I have good interpersonal skills along with an ability to see things from both perspectives. In my first job out of college, I joined the MIS department of a large chemical company. I had interviewed within several areas of MIS and was given the opportunity to pick my first assignment. After some thought, I had whittled my choices down to two: A traditional application development position which historically was considered the "smart" choice for recognition and advancement or a new position called "End User Consultant" which was considered "risky" and "new". The EUC's role was to introduce information technology into the hands of non-technical users in the business areas in ways that maximized business value and minimized disruption. Remember, this was the mid-80's, when PCs were just starting to be recognized as legitimate business tools in corporate America. Fortunately, I chose the EUC position and have remained in that type of role, one way or another, ever since. I get a kick out of helping people use and gain value from technology, whether it be in the role of consulting, developing, support, relationship-building, training or documentation (all of which I have done successfully). Over the last 15 years, I've spent most of my working life in service to the pharmaceutical industry. First as a designer and developer of custom software applications in my own business, and then as a project manager and implementer of off-the-shelf solutions for a highly-regarded software company. For most of the last six years or so, I provided leadership to a technical account management team that I built to ensure our customers were getting the hightest return out of the sales force automation platform they purchased from us. That role was the culmination of several years of hands-on work in each stage of the software implementation life cycle, from analysis, design and configuration to data loading and management to testing, deployment, training and support. I really enjoyed this phase of my career, as it focused on what I like to do: "bridging the gap" by bringing technology solutions to bear on business opportunities and working with smart, motivated and fun people. Currenty, I am engaged in very interesting work as an application architect for a major financial services company as they undertake an exciting effort to build a sustainable, governable application and data architecture . It is a different industry and a different perspective, and I find myself learning a lot, but my core mission of "bridging the gap" still remains. I am also continuing in my adjunct professor role at Muhlenberg College's Wescoe School, where I develop and teach IT and business courses to adult students. This work enables me to stay abreast of topics sometimes outside of my day-to-day work as a consultant, helps keep my presentation skills sharp, and (again!) enables me to fill that ever-present gap between technology and people. Cheers, Mike |
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