William Shier is a professional IT consultant contractor and developer, specialising in Websphere COBOL JAVA DB2 UDB V8 and CICS system and database design. These platforms and languages provide the best mix for business applications and OOP object oriented design. William Shier recommends Websphere as the application server of choice supporting robust Internet based enterprises. He recommends COBOL, DB2 and ORACLE for processing large volumes of business transactions, providing high-speed online turnaround and supporting mission critical testing. William Shier programs in JAVA, JSP, and Enterprise JAVA Beans and DB2 for GUI based development because they have a strong base of Business Object Oriented design and OOP support. He designs and deploys Web Sphere DB2 UDB SQL and ORACLE because he has found them the most versatile, dependable and scalable data base platforms in the industry.

As a contractor, William Shier also supports IMS DL1 DLI CICS and ORACLE for legacy systems. Although Websphere COBOL JAVA and DB2 UDB are becoming the highest selling industry standards, CICS is still prevalent on mainframe communication systems and ORACLE is widely used in the industry. Mr. Shier has also become adept at transferring systems between Oracle and DB2 and DB2 UDB, and finds conversion of CICS Green Screen 3270 legacy applications to GUI JAVA screens an interesting prospect. VisualAge COBOL as a modern OOP object oriented development tool is also presenting interesting opportunities. Programming in mainframe assembler or assembly and PC MASM Windows Machine code is usually undertaken to support an ongoing legacy system without regard to progressing it to more user-friendly development platforms.

William Shier has considerable contractor experience in designing, maintaining and testing business IT and data migration systems and employs the latest UML, SSADM , and DSDM methodologies. However, while proficiencies in technologies such as WebSphere IBM VisualAge COBOL C++ JAVA DB2 UDB and VSAM are important, experience has proven that the most important consideration is knowledge of the business application and a seasoned view that can only be gained by deploying these technologies in the field. Knowledge of Accountancy, accounting systems and auditing practice is also paramount, as double entry accounting is the basis of all business applications and must be considered at the core of a system design.