Case Study - Arts Council Indemnity Project

Requirement

To design a replacement for the Government Indemnity Service project to allow administration, monitoring and reporting of the country's museums, treasures and artefacts.

Solution

A .Net project integrated with SQL Server to record, monitor and report on indemnity insurance records. Project is used by the internal Arts Council Team and museum curators etc. Reports are generated for internal monitoring and measurement and for presentation to Parliament for sign off every 6 months.

Technologies

The solution was originally a .Net Web forms Applications written in C#. As of end 2020, the solution was migrated to a .Net Core 5 Blazor application. The solution was hosted and deployed internally by the Arts Council IT DevOPS team hosted on IIS and using Sql Server as the datastore.

Challenges

There were several challenges:

1
Access to the client Public Safety network can only be done locally or via secure citrix session with monitoring and restricted access. This required that the solution worked straight out of the box and could integrate with exisiting systems and security requirements without causing the local IT ops guys issues or sleepless nights.
2
Monitoring of issues could not be accomplished remotely in real time so extra efforts were made to record problems and audit database changes to allow subsequent investigation, reporting internally as required.
3
Clear lines of communicated needed to be instigated to ensure successful remote working of all parties. This was achieved with a combination of Microsoft Teams and Citrix remoting.

Skills Required

Skills & Tools

Back End

All projects in the solution used C#. Upgraded from web forms to Blazor .Net 5 project types. Visual Studio 2019 integrated with Git

SQL Server

Sql Server data store, accessed via Dapper db layer with custom wrappers.

Front End

Completely written in Blazor .Net 5 with custom Blazor control suite.

A bit about me

I've always had a fascination with electronics and software. From an early age I'd study schematics of books I borrowed from the library and built my first walkie talkie and metal detector from parts scavenged from old radios and tv's I'd found dumped by the roadside. I also loved making model aircraft.

That led me to join the Royal Air Force as an avionics engineer where I spent many happy years working on various systems culminating in a 7 year posting working on 51 Sqn.

After my tour in the RAF and benefiting from their excellent training in both avionics and accompanying software I left to join a start-up developing one of the first UK tax filing systems (if you've filed a tax return you've probably used some of the software I helped design with a great team at Digita - now part of Thompson Reuters).

I then decided to start my own contracting and consultancy business. I have held a number of senior positions, interviewed, recruited and built teams of software engineers and developers of various sizes. I consult and contract out my services to various companies and organisations mainly in the UK but have also completed projects for companies in Europe, USA, Canada and Australia. I have experience in many sectors including finance, insurance, recruitment, government, NHS, engineering, public safety both in the private and public sectors.

I have NPPV3+SC clearance to work with government agencies.

I mainly work remotely from my home office (seems very popular these days!) where I have all of the tools, servers and software required to design, develop and deliver software-based solutions for companies that maybe don’t have the expertise, equipment or programmers to create and deliver the solution themselves. I work closely with the project lead or main sponsor, can travel overseas if required and work as part of a team or individually as the requirements dictates.

Besides architecting, designing complete systems or upgrading existing solutions I have extensive business knowledge, and work closely with companies to get the most out of their systems, be as efficient as possible, automate where possible, integrate disparate systems, migrate data, break up monolithic systems into microservices, innovate and look at ways of reducing costs through IT.

I now focus on helping businesses take advantage of Cloud based solutions via Microsoft Azure and other Microsoft based technology solutions.

If I can help, please feel free to give me a call, lets talk: 01621 835002

Clients have included:

7 Layers

Affinity Sutton

Allen Vanguard

Anderson Consulting

Arts Council

BiTEA Ltd

British Transport Police

Calorex

Deutsche Bank

Digita

Dorset Police

DPS software

Graham Sykes Insurance

Henderson Global Investors

MOD Devonport

MUSC

Museum of Modern Art

Nexus

NHS

Portland Financial

Retail Locations

South East Tankers

Spinnaker Global

TEEC

UBS

Work Request