Michael Jeays

Phone 613-276-1887

Email : mike.jeays@rogers.com

Profile

Mr Jeays has over 40 years experience in the development of information systems, and 30 years experience of management of system development staff. His professional abilities include the development of software systems within team environments, architectural studies, high level design methodologies and development of mathematically oriented software. He has special experience in the design and development of large database systems, and was responsible for the first implementation of a database of all businesses in Canada, for use by business surveys conducted by Statistics Canada. For much of his career, he has concentrated on the management of teams of application software developers, and has been responsible for up to six sections, with a total staff of up to ninety information professionals. In his last three years before retirement, he was an advocate for the use of open-source software, and gave several presentations on this topic.

Experience

Education

Representative Activities

From August 2001 until retirement, he was responsible for managing the operational and infrastructure aspects of Statistics Canada's informatics services. This included the management of a large computer room with several hundred servers, an IBM mainframe, and power delivery systems capable of continuous operation during electrical supply failure.

He has been a strong advocate for the use of open-source software, and has given several presentations on this topic, including two presentations at a public conferences. He was a member of the government-wide committee on the use of open-source software within the Government of Canada.

He was a member of the selection committee for Informatics-related materials for the Statistics Canada library.

From April 1996 to July 2001, he was responsible for the Research and General Systems subdivision, which designs, builds and maintains software for use in all surveys across Statistics Canada. He was chairman of the Informatics Research and Development Committee. He was responsible for the initial stages of the Year 2000 conversion that would ensure that software would operate correctly through the turn of the century, and was co-chair of a government-wide committee on the Y2K problem.

From 1985 to 1996, he was responsible for the management of up to six application development sections, with a total staff of up to ninety people. These staff have designed, built and maintained applications to support a wide variety of Statistics Canada's operations and surveys, such as the Business Register and the Census of Population. These have been implemented on many different types of equipment and within several software and operating systems environments. These include large IBM mainframe systems, using the MVS operating system, UNIX systems, and Windows systems.

He was a member of the Methods and Standards Committee and of the Communications Committee at Statistics Canada. He was responsible for the first local area network installation in the System Development division, using the 3+Share network operating system. He was responsible for the management of the division's mainframe computing budget, valued at over $1 million in the early years of this assignment, and of the FTE budgets for projects serviced by the division.

He has represented Statistics Canada at a number of international conferences, including the ISIS seminar held in Bratislava, the EDP Working Party held by the United Nations in Geneva, and a seminar on statistical computing in Rio de Janeiro. As Assistant Director of the Special Resources Subdivision, he was responsible for the development and support of general-purpose software for use throughout the agency. As Assistant Director in the Business Survey Methods Division, he was responsible for early development of the Business Register. He was also the principal designer of the software to produce the first automated version of the publication "Inter-corporate Ownership in Canada", which required relatively new mathematical techniques for the determination of ownership in large groups of corporations which own one another's shares.

As a Systems programmer at Computing Devices of Canada, he developed a minimum-size special-purpose operating system for a Xerox Sigma 7 machine, and was responsible for designing and writing signal detection algorithms.

While employed as a mathematician at Nuclear Design and Construction, he designed and implemented one of the first digital programs for studying the nuclear and thermal behaviour of large nuclear power reactors in fault conditions.

Publications