Home |Resume |Profile |Videos |Links |Quotes |About

View Mike Baca's profile on LinkedIn		 My Blog: LevelBridge

Hello! My name is Mike Baca, and welcome to my website.   Download VCard file

I have owned this domain name for some time never quite knowing what to do with it. A few years back I started a software consulting company which had its own website, so I never needed to develop one bearing my name. As time passed, I became interested in expanding my online presence. However, while I acknowledge that social networking has forever altered the trajectory of the web, opened up new markets and opportunities for innovation and increased the value proposition in being "connected", I prefer to keep my private life, well, private. Not so with my professional life, however. Instead, I decided to make use of the roughly $10/year I am spending on this domain to supplement my linkedin profile. My desire is not to duplicate my professional history (although there will be some of that), but to complement it and provide a fuller picture of me for my business contacts and customers. Although this is a professional-oriented website, the line between professional and personal in all of us is never straight, and some of my personal qualities and interests will certainly bleed through.

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 IS department of a large chemical company. I had interviewed within several areas of IS 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 16 years, I have spent most of my working life in service to the pharmaceutical and health care industries--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 six of those years, I had provided leadership to a team of technical account managers that I built to ensure that our customers would get the highest return in value from the sales force automation platform they purchased from us. That role was the culmination of several years of hands-on work at our company in each stage of the systems implementation process, from analysis, design, configuration and data, 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 while working with smart, motivated and fun people.

Currently, I am engaged in very interesting work as the director of customer mobile solutions at a large pharmaceutical distributor. In addition to managing our current mobile solutions portfolio, I am developing a comprehensive mobile strategy that will support innovation while being flexible, relevant and risk-aware. Much of my time is spent talking with industry experts, analysts and hardware and software vendors in the hope of making sense out of the emerging and evolving trends in the mobile space. Most importantly, I am spending a good deal of time meeting with our customers to better understand their needs as well as the needs of their customers, to ensure our mobile solutions portfolio supports and propels their businesses going forward. It is a slightly different industry and perspective for me, and I have been leaning 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 have been developing and teaching IT and business courses to adult students since 2000. This work enables me to stay abreast of topics sometimes outside of my day-to-day work, helps keep my presentation skills sharp, and (again!) enables me to fill that ever-present gap between technology and people.

Please drop me a line if you have any comments or would like to chat. Cheers!

Mike



  Copyright © 2012, BacaNet - All rights reserved.