Stephen Westerfield

Background

About Stephen Westerfield

Hello World, I'm a passionate and intense Technical Analyst at Oracle. I self led Support training across three continents to over 100+ engineers and chosen to present my solutions in front of Oracle Executive Town Halls. I won individual awards (Pacesetter, Town Hall Presenter, Solutions Specialist) and resolved executive escalated issues. I've held Oracle Cloud SaaS financials stabilization calls to the director of finance for a top 20 USA university and wrote queries to quickly find data inconsistencies across Procurement setups saving weeks of time on a post production SAAS pod through a new technique I created, never done by Oracle Support. Just on this project, over 950 data points were found and updated in days rather than weeks. I also created a new technique to gather customer logs without having to ask customers and gather UI screen information without asking customers for screenshots, saving time and unneeded communication. The tools have been there, it was just a matter of utilizing the tools we already had in a way we've never done. These two techniques were put out to over 1500 support engineers around the world. I have also created 80+ custom queries to identify known issues which help support engineers immediately find known issues and wrote customer recommended knowledge management documentation. Support is forever changing due to automation and the IT buzz word of the year, AI. Automation and AI will take care of the lowest hanging fruit first: known errors found by carefully crafted database pattern recognition and functional walk-throughs that are the easiest to find and resolve. The next step for support will be creating the automation to find known issues through SQL patterns. After this step, which will be an ongoing process, the easy problems will be solved and the harder problems will be left. It will take a hybrid engineer who knows system administration like DevOps and can read code like a developer. This is where I shine. My background in System Administration and as a Network Engineer have given me an edge not usually found in the support world. The coursework for the Computer Information Systems Master's degree is a business degree, not a technical degree, which has helped drive those big picture/business requirement conversations with ERP consultants and project managers. I can talk functional, but I also love discussing project requirements.