Richard Donlan

Background

About Richard Donlan

My background is in Information and Information Systems within Local Government with Tameside Council, specialising in the procurement, project planning and implementation, training and maintenance of systems relating to debt collection, document management, telecommunications, legal systems and on-line claim applications. I acted as a Systems Administrator within the Finance department, running the system jobs, acceptance testing, integrating external products and interrogating the databases via SQL. The major achievement during this time was working a part of Systems Team that replaced the back office system for Finance twice in seven years and introduced, then expanded document management systems and on-line application forms to the Council. I am currently employed as a contractor working with Civica providing Revenues & Benefit Systems support and solutions.I have expanded my experience and my interest in environmental issues by gaining a Masters degree in Geographical Information Science (GIS) focussing on Environmental applications. During my course I gained systems and research experience in Environmental Remote Sensing, Digital Image Processing, Environmental Modelling and Monitoring and Geographical Information Systems Environmental Applications. Additionally I studied Management and Information Systems applying my work experience to the development and changes in the systems field and looked at how systems can aid development in ICT4D. For my final dissertation I worked with Greater Manchester Fire Service using GIS techniques to look at the spatial and temporal patterns of outdoor fires occurring within Greater Manchester, extracting wildfire incidents to address the issue in the region and investigate the biophysical and human causes using the data for all vegetation fires, with the aim of using techniques to assess the extent of wildfires which could then be reproduced as a basis for further analysis.