“Everyone has a methodology. Ours drills down to a level that few people ever see.”
“Relationships, experience, teamwork. That’s what makes Blue Slate click.”
“Clients have so much invested in their legacy systems. So we work within those systems wherever possible.”
“Even when automation is the obvious solution, business analysis has to come first.”
“This is the closest team I’ve ever worked with. And that’s good. Camaraderie makes better collaboration.”
“Sometimes the immediate problem isn’t the root problem. Our job is to see the root and fix it.”
“How on earth can an insurer handle 300,000 new members all at once? We face this type of problem all the time.”
“We’ve always found it better to focus on a few industries that we know exceptionally well.”
“If you come to work at Blue Slate, you’ll learn like crazy.”
“The client could go to an offshore supplier. But we get the contract every year.”
“The more complex the problem, the more enthusiasm our people bring to it.”
“We leverage best-of-breed solutions and our experience to come up with a new idea for every client.”
“How do you manage next year’s growth with last year’s system? That’s the kind of thing we do.”
“Each client is slightly different. Each solution should be too.”
“When you write a purge function that shrinks a client’s database by 60%, you know you’ve done something.”
The diversity is extraordinary. It shows in their solutions.
Blue Slate's professionals have spent years solving intractable problems in IT and business process. The ingenuity of their solutions comes partly from the breadth of their perspective. Besides their experience in our core industries—health care, insurance, financial services—they have also taught school, led libraries, and sold cheese, among other pursuits. In all, they have also lived amid diverse cultures on six continents. Read about them here.
Richard Barnett leads the team at Blue Slate, and also spearheads Board and Investor Relations. Since co-founding the company in June of 2000, he has guided the growth and success of our team. Drawing on his operational expertise, he has been the driving force behind sustainable, profitable development at Blue Slate. During his tenure as CEO, he has successfully secured outside investment to lead the team to double digit year-over-year growth and exponential team expansion. Rick also expanded the Board of Directors to ensure outside control of the executive team. Rick's dedication to operational excellence and customer success has served as a model for many areas at Blue Slate. He draws on broad leadership experiences in finance, operations, mergers and acquisitions, business planning, business measurement and business development in order to design high quality, measurable business processes. Rick utilizes a quantitative approach and emphasizes communication to drive positive change in both Blue Slate and client engagements. Clients rely on Rick for his decisiveness, negotiation skills and ability to build and lead teams in high-demand, high-performance environments. Prior to joining Blue Slate, Rick worked for 13 years in management spanning Fortune 10 companies, public accounting, and start-up firms. At GE Energy, Rick progressed through increasingly responsible positions culminating with leading a $400 million dollar global business as the Manager of Finance. His other experiences included cost accounting for a multi-billion dollar manufacturing division, process integration of a $2 billion foreign acquisition, financial leadership for a $300 million manufacturing and engineering division, and multiple special assignments including purchasing two competitive businesses. Rick began his career as an auditor, and subsequently a Senior Auditor with Ernst & Young. There he was engaged with manufacturing, banking, healthcare and public sector industries. Rick is a Cum Laude graduate of Siena College with a BS in Business Administration, and is a Certified Public Accountant in New York State. At A GlanceSkills
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Mary Kay Hayes joined Blue Slate Solutions in February 2003, bringing more than 10 years of progressive accounting, financial modeling and analysis experience. Mary Kay has a proven track record of successfully managing multiple projects and responsibilities while consistently delivering value to Blue Slate's bottom line. Her performance has led her through progressively senior roles starting first as a Senior Consultant, then to Controller, and eventually to the CFO position she holds today. Mary Kay is currently responsible for Blue Slate's internal financial oversight, reporting and analysis, while also lending her expertise to client engagements. Most recently, Mary Kay worked with a multinational manufacturing company to create consistent operational definitions and processes in order for the company to properly measure its manufacturing, engineering and installation operations on operating activities rather than accounting practices. Prior to Blue Slate, Mary Kay worked for Integrail, a start-up healthcare informatics company where she performed financial analysis. For FedEx, Mary Kay conducted financial analysis in support of major capital expenditures. Her financial skills were also leveraged while she was with the Promus Hotel Corporation where she supported business development decisions surrounding new hotels and joint ventures with buy/sell analysis. Mary Kay also managed the receivables portfolio for GE Plastics' South East Region. She began her career at Coopers & Lybrand LLP as an auditor. Mary Kay is a Certified Public Accountant in New York State. She earned her Master of Business Administration from Union College, and a Bachelor of Science in Business Administration from the State University of New York at Albany. At A GlanceSkills
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As Blue Slate's Chief Technology Officer since its inception in 2000, Dave leads the technology consulting team as an advisor for each project. He helps evaluate and determine functional requirements, platforms, products, integration approaches, architectures, QA procedures and implementation processes. He also coordinates with the teams to identify, evaluate and adopt new products, tools and techniques that strengthen Blue Slate's security and technology capabilities. A major component of his success is his participation in client projects, primarily within healthcare and financial services. This allows him to maintain his skills, understand industry trends and real-world application requirements as he evaluates new tools and techniques. Dave’s work is focused on leading teams in the integration and construction of secure and reliable object oriented-based solutions through the appropriate leveraging of client’s existing architecture and previous investments. Examples of his work include the design of a secure high-performance Web-service application for processing sensitive high-volume financial transactions by incorporating a rules and workflow engine with diverse backend systems. Dave also provides leadership surrounding data security including encryption, protocols, policies and processes for multiple healthcare and insurance clients. He has significant data mining experience including data pre-processing, attribute identification, classifier training and ensemble classifier design. For a large healthcare payer he led data services design and implementation, bringing his data masking expertise to bear to help protect PHI and enable the client to be compliant with federal regulations, This included the design and implementation as well as the planning, testing, and installation of a new software program. He has also developed and utilized a proprietary query analysis tool that improves the performance of a Sybase-based backend. For a regional insurance company, Dave reviewed an initial implementation and assisted in re-architecting a system for creating and maintaining commercial and personal line policies. He resolved several architectural challenges such as utilizing the industry standard ACORD XML schema and integrating the solutions into the client’s existing policy system. He has also helped clients as an instructor, conducting training programs on secure web development or Java Application Development for a variety of clients. Prior to joining Blue Slate, Dave had 15 years of IT leadership experience. A significant portion of that experience included various positions within GE, where he was a lead architect for many diverse Web-based applications focusing on a scalable and standards-based infrastructure. His work allowed GE to deploy a large number of applications to their world-wide workforce and vendor network. The success of these applications led to his receiving GE’s Internet Pioneer of the Year award. Dave is a popular speaker at industry events. He has delivered seminars or presentations at the Information Systems Audit and Control Association (ISACA), the Business Rules Forum, Property and Casualty Insurance (PCI) Information Technology Conferences, and presented at Sun Microsystems’ JaveOne developer conferences. He holds a Bachelor of Science in Computer Information Systems from the College of Saint Rose. At A GlanceSkills
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Shawn joined Blue Slate in 2003 and has since taken on many leadership roles at Blue Slate. He has been instrumental in executing Blue Slate’s strategic growth plan and he has been a major driving force behind our client delivery team’s continued success and excellence. Shawn’s experiences in wealth management, insurance and banking provide a broad view into delivering agile and strategic solutions for our clients. Shawn leads teams in taking a strategic approach to assisting our clients solve their complex business problems. His deep understanding of the benefits and hurdles of change within an organization facilitates a successful execution of the change strategy. Throughout his career, Shawn has actively assisted many Fortune 500 organizations in identifying and implementing agile, strategic solutions. His capabilities span the continuum of business performance management. Shawn thrives on collaborating with colleagues, clients and partners to improve business performance in activities from front to back office operations. At Blue Slate, Shawn cultivated multiple partnership alliances that allowed Blue Slate to significantly grow its expertise and footprint in Financial Service and Healthcare organizations. Additionally he has orchestrated an outsourced business process management service for several healthcare payers and a Web-based insurance quoting platform. Shawn graduated from Northeastern University with a Bachelor of Science in Industrial Engineering. At A GlanceSkills
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Since joining Blue Slate in 2002, Christopher Garber has worked with many clients to develop and implement strategic solutions. His strength lies in his ability to blend process design and technology solution to achieve business results. Chris helps clients identify and quantify their most critical business issues and partners with them to design and implement effective and efficient solutions. His domain expertise includes the financial services and insurance industries. When working for a client, Chris concurrently applies his management, technical, and communication abilities. Chris served as the manager for a global insurance provider's large-scale project, overseeing the implementation of a process automation application. Chris oversaw the functional analysis, technical design, and development of the application. Additionally he managed the communication needs of 12 resources, including business SMEs, business analysts and developers. In this capacity, Chris was responsible for weekly status reports, budget tracking, and issue/risk mitigation. His leadership and management skills were an important factor behind the project's success. For the finance department of a major manufacturing conglomerate, Chris led the conceptual inception, design, build-out, and support of seven custom compliance applications. In addition to his client-facing responsibilities, Chris has led Blue Slate's internal project management optimization initiative to help ensure consistent client delivery and high satisfaction. Prior to joining Blue Slate, Chris gained vast consulting experience in management capacities in many areas of the financial services industry. For a global money center bank, he managed the development and implementation of several on-line banking related applications. For a global financial services company, he managed the start-up and build-out of a Global Support Center responsible for Tier II and III support of the bank's ERP system. His experience with investment banks includes the creation of an operating model that defined services to be provided to the business, as well as to identify ways that maximized efficiency of the trade support function. Chris holds a Master in Business Administration in Finance and a Bachelor of Science in Management Information Systems, both from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. At A GlanceSkills
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Since joining Blue Slate Solutions in 2004, David has been highly effective in helping clients focus on the roots of their critical business issues. Apart from designing creative business and IT solutions, he has implemented high quality, long-term measurement controls and highly effective program and project governance. With over 20 years of operations and business management experience, David has led teams of professionals through all stages of growth and change. Using his mastery of quality and business process management tools he has helped clients from a variety of industries like healthcare, insurance, manufacturing, and finance. David draws on his technical abilities and business skills to successfully lead numerous client engagements. He is highly proficient in working with business rules engines and business process management systems. David has optimized and implemented a paperless workflow system by incorporating a business rules engine to significantly increase productivity in all key business areas for a Medicare administrator. He has lead teams utilizing BRE and BPM tools for designing and implementing an automated solution to re-platform an online loan application underwriting and feedback system of a mortgage financing provider. Prior to Blue Slate, David spent 15 years with General Electric in the areas of operations and business management. There, he led teams of professionals through all stages of growth and change. As a Certified Master Black Belt in Six Sigma at GE, David trained and mentored over 300 Green Belts - resulting in significant changes throughout the organization and decreases in operating costs of 14-35% at each of three business units. David is also experienced and skilled in value analysis, design, and project management. David graduated with Distinction from the Concordia University in Montreal, Canada with a Bachelor of Engineering, majoring in Mechanical Engineering. At A GlanceSkills
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Mike Strianese brings over 15 years of experience in strategy and process consulting, along with management of information technology projects, to Blue Slate Solutions. He provides leadership for the practice of business analysis to ensure quality in delivery of solutions to clients. Mike is also a key member of Blue Slate's market intelligence function, a team dedicated to developing market-driven strategy focused on Blue Slate's continued growth. Since joining Blue Slate in September of 2001, Mike has developed strong relationships with Blue Slate clients as a trusted advisor through the effective leadership of complex, collaborative projects to deliver results-based solutions. Much of his consulting experience has been working with clients in the healthcare and financial services industries. Recent projects led by Mike include business process analysis and requirements definition to improve operational efficiencies through the use of business process management (BPM), business rule engine (BRE), and data management (DM) tools within the Provider Audit and Reimbursement department of a large healthcare payer, Medicare Administrative Contractor. He has also performed complex business rules definition, data modeling, and exception identification to facilitate potential recoverable claims payments for a market-leading, dual-eligible Medicare Advantage Organization Special Needs Plan, as well as developed a workflow- and rule-based system to improve the UB-04/CMS 1500 claims processing functionality for a national service center for multiple health insurance plans. Prior to joining Blue Slate, Mike worked as a consultant with the business strategy practice at Harvard Computing Group. In this role, he worked with high-technology companies, in particular those in the semiconductor industry, to align strategy and operations with markets. Prior to attending business school, Mike worked as an analyst for North American Capital Timing. Mike performed technical analysis to make portfolio allocation recommendations on $280 million in assets and maintained a database that provided daily and on-demand analytical reporting. Mike began his career leading Six Sigma improvement projects at General Electric Corporate Benefits Delivery, where he developed valuable project management skills and experience while leading the resource planning, goal setting, and measurement for a 50-person, cross-functional call center handling health benefits inquiries. Mike received an Master of Business Administration, Magna Cum Laude, from the F.W. Olin Graduate School of Business at Babson College where he, and a team of three others, won 1st Place at the National Business School Network Inner-City Field Study Competition in 2000. Mike graduated from Siena College with a Bachelor of Science, Magna Cum Laude, in Marketing and Management. Mike is active in the community and serves as the President of the Board of Trustees for the Albany Community Charter School and is on the Board of Trustees of the Brighter Choice Foundation in Albany. He is a 2005 graduate of Albany-Colonie Chamber's Capitol Leadership Program. At A GlanceSkills
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Jayanath Amaranayake joined Blue Slate Solutions in 2009 as a Lead Consulting Software Engineer. Jayanath is an experienced Java/J2EE developer and a PegaRules Process Commander system architect. His background also includes more than six years experience in object-oriented (OO) analysis, design and programming. Jayanath has served as a software consultant for multiple clients in the records management, finance and printing industries while working for Virtusa Corporation. During this time, Jayanath worked on several long term projects where he gained valuable experience in numerous technologies including Java , J2EE and PRPC. Jayanath has designed and developed Java/J2EE modules for a web-based auction application that handled printing jobs for a large printing corporation. He also helped to design and develop a Java based environment certification application for a leading records management company. Further he has designed and developed validation and web services integration modules using PRPC for a loan origination application. He also helped to design and develop a hotel reservation application, also leveraging a business process and rules management platform. Moreover he has configured and managed complex Unix-based development, serving in roles that include QA and pre-production environments. Jayanath is a 2004 graduate of the University of Peradeniya in Sri Lanka and is certified as a system architect for PegaRULES Process Commander, Sun Certified Web Component Developer as well as being a Sun Certified Java Programmer. At A GlanceSkills
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Poonam Bijlani began working at Blue Slate in October 2004 as a Consultant, and has since been working on project teams to define, design and implement solutions to solve our clients' complex business problems. Her knowledge of varied technologies enables her to create highly useful customized solutions. Poonam is highly experienced in the entire software design and development cycle right from business requirements definition to end user training. She uses the best practices and modular design to implement scalable and easily maintainable workflow solutions. She has also standardized Web and work flow development across client applications. Poonam has been a valuable resource in training Blue Slate's offshore teams on workflow design and configuration. She has also worked with and managed offshore resources to build, implement and test workflow solutions. Since joining Blue Slate, Poonam has been involved in a number of key projects. She architected several claims and correspondence workflow applications at a major healthcare client to streamline and unify operations across departments. In this role, Poonam led the team, which entailed training and providing guidance to other team members, while maintaining a strong working relationship with the client. Her responsibilities included requirements analysis, solution design, build, test, deployment and defect management along with providing end user training. Poonam has also worked with a healthcare client providing change management and production support on a legacy application. Her responsibilities included working with business users to reengineer and improve their business processes and to make corresponding workflow changes. Prior to Blue Slate, Poonam worked with Internet eBusiness Solutions, Inc. in Florida as a Software Consultant. She was responsible for gathering business requirements for implementing the smooth integration of business processes with Microsoft customer relationship management (CRM). She was integral to the entire software development lifecycle including application design, database design, development, implementation, customization, and testing. Poonam holds a Master of Science in Computer Engineering from Syracuse University and earned her Bachelor of Science in Computer Science from the University of Mumbai. At A GlanceSkills
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Stephanie Burgard joined Blue Slate in May 2004 as a Senior Consultant. Stephanie has over 8 years of workflow architect experience and over 12 years of Project Management experience across several industries including healthcare, banking, and financial services. She also has expertise in requirements gathering, design, configuration and testing. These competencies along with her Project Management Professional certification enable her to work with clients across functions to develop solutions that the client can use. Since joining Blue Slate, Stephanie has worked on a number of key client projects. For a financial institution client, Stephanie's contribution reduced mail time, approval time, and errors, when she worked documenting use cases and developing the elaboration document for a financial institution. Her work helped the client aid its branches throughout Canada to initiate, approve, and report on material change items. For a financial institution in the Midwest, she was responsible for the conception and elaboration documentation as well as aiding in the initial deployment of the Smart Adjust application and testing coordination. On another project, she managed the testing function for a Smart Dispute project, testing all functionality prior to going to user acceptance testing for a Canadian financial institution. She was also responsible for coordinating the testing effort with project team as well as making defect assignments, testing fixes and generating testing reports. Prior to joining Blue Slate, Stephanie worked at a large national bank where she was a project manager for the planning and implementation of a national consolidation of operation centers. In addition, Stephanie also worked as a consultant and project manager for a business process management technology company. She holds a Master of Science from the University of Texas Dallas as well as a Bachelor of Arts in Marketing and Spanish from Texas Christian University. At A GlanceSkills
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Since joining Blue Slate in 2006, Erica's experience and expertise in operations, strategic business planning, and project management has made her an essential member of our team. Her dynamic background and breadth of knowledge is especially well leveraged in the banking and healthcare industries. At Blue Slate, she has worked on a variety of long term projects. As project manager she led a multi-faceted team implementing an organization-wide workflow system for a national healthcare payer. This included working directly with the business users, business consultants, IT developers, corporate offices and the executive steering committee to provide direction, project forecast, business development and project execution. For the payer appeals department of a national healthcare payer, Erica led the implementation of a paperless workflow system. This included working with end users, developers, and managers from the requirements phase through the system implementation and training. She also participated in a requirements-driven tool selection process for enterprise content management, workflow, and rules systems for a major mutual fund company. Prior to joining Blue Slate, Erica worked for Blue Rock Innovation, a strategy and innovation consulting company. While at Blue Rock, Erica was charged with developing a market-driven strategy and business plan for a start-up medical device firm resulting in successfully raising $300K in funding. Previous to her work at Blue Rock, Erica worked in marketing and sales at a local gourmet food producer. Erica started her career at JPMorgan Chase (formerly Bank One), managing the cash management service teams. She advanced from project manager to as an Assistant Vice President of Operations on such projects as merger integration, Y2K system conversions and the development and implementation of disaster recovery protocol for three national call centers in the middle market line of business. She earned her Bachelor of Science from Vanderbilt University. Erica also holds a Master in Business Administration from the Lally School of Management and Technology at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. She is also an alumna and participating coach of Program Apollo. This program, implemented by Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, utilizes a strategy lab format to help administrators and physicians think strategically about managing hospitals for economic performance in the challenging and complex healthcare system. At A GlanceSkills
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Laura Cooler began working with Blue Slate in June 2005, bringing seven years of workflow architect experience spanning several industries including healthcare, banking, and financial services. A background in communications and retail banking help her to relate to the challenges and business needs of our customers. An expert business analyst, Laura's primary roles involve working with people at all levels within a customer's organization, from senior management to end users to define current business processes and understand goals and objectives. Laura then utilizes best practices to design solutions that streamline processes to position clients towards higher efficiency. Since joining Blue Slate Laura has leveraged her experience in full life-cycle design and development, applying flexibility and attention to detail. She has gained experience in many areas beyond design and configuration to include project management, testing, quality assurance, training, and production support. Key projects include process engineering a paperless referral system for one of the nation's largest healthcare payers. There, she also configured the solution, tested interfaces, and worked on testing and debugging of application. As a Workflow Architect, Laura has designed screens and workflow conversion for a branch and telephone retail banking system from a PL/1 to a C++ Pegasystem, and designed a web-enabled customer service system in PegaREACH for a pilot group of retail banking centers that leveraged the new graphical system for capturing data and carrying out the legacy functions. Prior to joining Blue Slate, Laura was a Senior Consultant with PegaSystems, working on key client implementations in the financial services and healthcare industries. Prior to that, she was a Client Representative with IBM, performing solution sales to mid-market healthcare organizations. Laura began her career as a Management Associate in retail baking at NationsBank and as a Resource Coordinator with solutions firm Consultec, Inc. Laura received her Bachelor of Arts in Communications from the University of Florida. She has had numerous and ongoing training on workflow and business process management applications such as PegaWorks AIM (Advanced Implementation Methodology) training, and AIM/Pegasystems Project Management training. Laura is also certified in PegaREACH. At A GlanceSkills
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Ryan Gingrich joined Blue Slate Solutions in 2006, bringing knowledge and experience in both IT and business processes. He serves clients in essential technical roles, in particular developing scripts to automate system processes, which provide reporting and maintenance checks to the client. With an expertise in optimizing queries, debugging, and workflow management tools, Ryan helps clients to streamline their overall system management, mainly in the healthcare and insurance industries. He has also established a high standard in customer service for long-term engagements through service level agreement (SLA) with Blue Slate's key clients. Since joining Blue Slate, Ryan has supported a major healthcare payer organization via a SLA that ensures expedient responsiveness in maintaining operational and production stability on systems originally developed by Blue Slate and its partners. The extended engagement of this project allowed Ryan to work on many areas for the client. He debugged the claims processing system, isolating and remediating root causes of system defects, performed database reporting and analysis through the use of Unix query scripting, and developed an automated script using procedural language SQL (PL/SQL) and Korn Shell for deleting old claims from the client's claims processing system. His creation and performance in functional and performance test cases have improved Blue Slate's overall approach to software project execution. Prior to his role as a Consulting Software Engineer at Blue Slate, Ryan was in the Blue Slate intern program. While interning, he developed a fully automated unit test for a Java-based GUI using the code coverage tool Cobertura and integrating it with Apache Ant. Ryan graduated from the College of Saint Rose with a Bachelor of Science in Computer Information Systems and a Minor in Business Administration. At A GlanceSkills
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Neil Gurwitz brings expertise in data warehouse design, workflow design and implementation, and project management to Blue Slate Solutions since becoming part of the team in November 2002. Neil has worked with a number of clients to design, develop and implement strategic solutions. He has an in-depth knowledge and skill in technical issues, which he combines with an outstanding leadership and management ability to achieve consistently successful results. At A GlanceSkills
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Deb joined Blue Slate in 2011 after successfully performing in a wide variety of roles (from business analyst to project manager to development manager to quality assurance and implementation rollout) in a wide range of business settings including healthcare, ecommerce, retail channel management, commercial software development, manufacturing, product development, call centers, and field service organizations.
Deb is a Certified Business Analysis Professional™ (CBAP®), having achieving this mark of distinction from the International Institute of Business Analysis (IIBA) in October of 2010. Deb brings to Blue Slate over 25 years of practical, hands-on business analysis experience. Through observation and focused questioning, Deb elicits business needs, priorities, drivers, and critical success factors. Her favorite question to ask is “why?”
At Blue Slate, Deb leads teams in a variety of business functions and project types —contributing to these projects as both a business analyst and a project manager. Most recently, Deb has been engaged on consecutive projects with a large healthcare payer that is nationally recognized for innovation and exceptional customer service.
Deb is passionate about the practice of business analysis and has served as a mentor and team lead for business analysts of all skill levels. She has a reputation among her peers as a creative innovator. Her focus on process and usability positions her to understand the crucial fit between task and tool. Deb has successfully applied techniques such as use case analysis, customer experience mapping, goal-directed design, personas, and mind maps to discover, define, and communicate business needs.
Deb earned a Bachelor of Science in Management Information Systems – a unique trans-disciplinary program at Union College in Schenectady, NY. She is a member of the International Institute of Business Analysis and serves on the board of directors of the Albany Capital District local chapter.
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Aaron joined Blue Slate in 2010, bringing over ten years of enterprise software design and development knowledge. His experience spans the project life-cycle, from client-focused requirements gathering to Object-Oriented design, implementation, and testing in team-centric environments. At A GlanceSkills
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A founding member of the Blue Slate team since 2000, John Jaster is a senior network engineer with a broad range of experience that stretches far beyond network engineering. His key skills include network infrastructure design and implementation, server and client operating system engineering, large-scale application deployment, internet security, business requirements and all phases of the software development lifecycle. John's expertise is leveraged at client engagements to address critical business needs with a wide variety of technology solutions, both in design and implementation. Most notably, John excels at trouble-shooting in the integration and improvement of databases and Web software. His experience spans Fortune 50 companies, including major banks and healthcare payers. After helping to lay the broad technical foundation at Blue Slate, he went on to be a crucial part of numerous projects for clients. As one of the key developers for a claims and payments management solution, he eliminated payment inaccuracies and decreased inventory for a regional healthcare payer. Working on an extensive national call center for a healthcare client, he improved speed and eliminated defects in the call management system by designing a solution utilizing HTML, JavaScript, and a workflow application. For another healthcare client he significantly improved workflow productivity by overseeing the design, implementation, test and support of a claims adjudication system--the client's core business function. This role involved communication with stakeholders, intense problem solving and defect management. Among his many other projects, John has re-engineered a network for a regional ISP, integrated Web and client/server application with a single sign-on (SSO) system, and implemented a commercial portal platform. John also has significant experience supporting clients via long-term service level agreements (SLAs), troubleshooting technical issues and performing basic software development and configuration. Prior to Blue Slate, he worked with fellow Blue Slate co-founders Joe Raiti and David Read for Integrated Partners, a consulting firm, where one of his major projects was conducting vulnerability assessment for a New York State government agency. He started his career at GE Energy, where he worked for 12 years as a network engineer and security software developer. At GE, John single-handedly built a wide-area network with enhanced user authentication, while working in the central IT department. John holds a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science from the State University of New York at Albany. At A GlanceSkills
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Chris joined Blue Slate in 2003, bringing significant workflow architect experience. His range of knowledge allows him to be a proficient asset to clients involved in any stage of a workflow, business rules or business process management project – from requirements and design, to launch and support.
After a tour of duty with the Navy, Chris spent eight years in the Nuclear Power Industry performing quality assurance analysis of engineering systems and ensuring proper configuration management with system changes. At A GlanceSkills
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Saritha Kothnur initially joined Blue Slate Solutions in February 2003 as an intern while doing her Masters in Computer Science at the College of Saint Rose. After graduation, she joined the Blue Slate staff as a Consulting Software Engineer in the Fall of 2003. She is experienced in developing a variety of technology-based solutions using JAVA, VB.NET, Java Servlets, XML/XSL, CGI, Perl and JavaScript At Blue Slate, Saritha has been working on a number of projects including:
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Richard began working with Blue Slate Solutions in 2002 bringing to Blue Slate's clients a wide variety of experience and expertise in both business and technical capacities. Complimenting his vast experience in financial modeling and analysis, strategic planning, and change management is a strong commitment to the power of technology to transform businesses. As a Senior Consultant, he brings high energy to all client engagements, and has the ability to energize others around him to build a cohesive and efficient teamwork environment. Since working with Blue Slate, Richard has been engaged in diverse client engagements across the energy, retail, and financial sectors. As technical lead on a workflow and business rules engine project, he drove the implementation across multiple departments at a major health benefits administrator. For a financial services company he acted as project manager on an enterprise security master application implementation. The project included business process documentation and product acceptance testing as well as the reformatting of critical business accounting and trading applications. He has also been a functional lead for the deployment of the financial module, Oracle 11i ERP, led a team in financial modeling and restructuring for a global manufacturing company, and worked as a subject matter expert for the support of the integration of an automated transactional tax software solution. Before working with Blue Slate, Richard worked as an FP&A analyst and global leader of manufacturing finance in the finance department of a GE Energy division, where he was responsible for all aspects of inventory management. As analyst, he was responsible for gathering functional requirements, design, development, and deployment of a global financial management database-a tool that became pivotal in all business planning cycles as well as on-going project management for orders, sales, and working capital components. Richard is also a certified Six Sigma Black Belt, and developed Six Sigma training sessions tailored for green belt development while at GE. He is also trained in change acceleration process (CAP) which provides him with tools for personnel and task management. He earned his Bachelor of Commerce degree in Accountancy at Concordia University. At A GlanceSkills
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