Stephen Karanja

I'm a professional with over 10 years of experience delivering large IT solutions for a leading manufacturing organization. Highly organized, passionate, persuasive, and articulate, able to achieve results others believed impossible. I am experienced in team development, service-level delivery management, solutions design, and delivery management. 

WORK EXPERIENCE

JAN 2010 – JAN 2015: Crown Paints Kenya Ltd

ICT Officer (ICT Depot Representative Dar es Salaam Road) 

• Monitoring ICT service desk delivery issues to ensure quick resolution of user related incidents enhancing customer service delivery.
• Undertaking the day to day management of the information technology platforms to facilitate the efficient delivery of customer service and processing all transactions
• Maintaining and updating the organizational ICT systems across the organization to retain current information.
• Ensuring the smooth running of all ICT systems including web applications, email system, firewall and spam filter.
• Support roll out of new applications and hardware as well as maintenance of inventory for the organization’s IT hardware and software both at the main offices and in regional offices
• Providing user support on ICT hardware and network infrastructure and carrying out preventative maintenance of ICT equipment through regular updates of operating systems.
• Participating in timely preparation of the ICT department budgets, work plans and reports
• Helping to audit, prevent, respond, and  remediate security incidents
• SAP HANA End user support

• Monitoring the Wide Area Network and the Local Area Network and ensuring optimum output performance within the organization to enable smooth internet and network connectivity.

JAN 2016 – 2019: Crown Paints Kenya Ltd

INFOSEC Officer

• Identifying vulnerabilities in the organization’s network.
• Developing and implementing a comprehensive plan to secure the organization’s computing network.
• Monitoring network usage to ensure compliance with security policies.
• Keeping up to date with developments in IT security standards and threats.
• Performing penetration tests to find any flaws.
• Collaborating with management and the IT department to improve security.
• Documenting any security breaches and assessing their damage.
• Educating colleagues about security software and best practices for information security.

JAN 2019 – 2022: Crown Paints Kenya Ltd

ICT Projects Coordinator

• Reporting to the Head of Departments on project status, progress, budget, as well as on team members performance and procurement status.
• Analyze project requests from management to identify project goals and objectives
• Responsible for preparation of project reports and briefings, correspondence and responses to allow the timely exchange of information
• Manage deliverables, resource calendars, and expense reports.
• Maintaining and monitoring project plans, project schedules, work hours, budgets and expenditures.
• Ensuring project deadlines are met.
• Determining project changes.
• Ensuring projects adhere to frameworks and all documentation is maintained appropriately for each project.

September 2006 – May 2008

Jomo Kenyatta University of Agriculture and Technology

Diploma in Business Information Technology (DBIT)

January 2009 – April 2011

Kenya Methodist University

Bachelor of Business in Information Technology (BBIT)

CERTIFICATIONS

• Sophos End User Protection
• Fortinet NSE 1
• Fortinet NSE 2
• Fortinet NSE 3