Steve Skinner

Steve Skinner is recognized by Continental Who’s Who as a Pinnacle Professional in the field of   Insurance and IT Networking as a result of his role as an Infrastructure Network Architect with Blue Cross Blue Shield of Kansas. From its earliest days in 1942 Blue Cross Blue Shield of Kansas first opened its doors with just three employees and eight members; has now grown into a company that now serves approximately 880,000 Kansans who carry a Blue Cross and Blue Shield identification card. Each day, the company’s 1,450 employees strive to maintain the long-standing tradition of trust the company has developed with its customers.  

Mr. Skinner began working for Blue Cross Blue Shield of Kansas in 1974 as a Computer Operator. In 1988, he moved into Technical Services and Storage Management. A short time after, he made his way into Network Services and has been there ever since to his current position, as an Infrastructure Network Architect. He specializes in aligning IT with business, managing client cost, future direction and strategy, project management, troubleshooting, and more. Steve states the secret to his success is taking pride in his work, and being able to adapt to change along with being open to the ideas of others when it comes time to figuring out the best and appropriate approach to a problem or task at hand. He is self-motivated with a desire to exceed the expectations of those that assign work to him. He is also someone who is willing to help anybody when asked.

Furthermore, Steve says writing is   strong point for him, and that he tends to be a perfectionist within certain aspects of his work, especially as it relates to writing strategies, recommendations, procedures, or white papers. Steve is currently focused more on new technology and its capabilities and thinking outside the box to help match the business requirements of the organization with the technical capabilities available to support those requirements. Some of the highlights of Steve’s career were that he designed, recommended, and installed the first Local Area Network (Token Ring) at Blue Cross Blue Shield of Kansas with the participation of an excellent team of resources in 1991. Since then he has played a major role in the planning and design of network upgrades to include migrating from Token Ring to 10/100Mbps ethernet, to Gigabit ethernet, and recently to 10 gigabit ethernet capabilities. He is veryproud of the dependability, reliability, and performance of our network environment over the years. There have beenvery few problems and very little downtime associated   with the network during his time in this job that was caused by himself or any of his   co-workers.

It has been a very stable environment! In many ways the stability of the environment can also be attributed to the design work he did related to  providing redundant network paths so that if one path fails, there is alternate path that is switched to automatically with virtually no down time to the user community. Steve is also a certified Network Instruments Administrator,ITIL V2 and V3 foundations certified, Network Specialist from NAI University, an Aruba Certified Mobility Associate, and was at one time certified as a Cisco CCNP in Routing and Switching. Steve is also a member of the IEEE   Computer Society. In addition to the Continental Who’s Who, Steve can also be found on LinkedIN and Facebook social networks.

In addition, Steve is very passionate about roller skating, and used to skate as many as 40 hours a week. He worked on and off at a skating rink for nearly 40 years. He loves working with children, and follows local ice hockey, football, and basketball teams. In his spare time, Steve enjoys spending time with his family. He is extremely family-oriented and has two daughters, one son, three grandchildren, and most recently, one great grandchild, which brings him constant joy and happiness.  

During the 1969-1971 school years, Steve attended Kaw Area Vocational Technical School and completed the available courses for the use and programming of Unit Record Equipment, as well as, the COBOL and Fortran Computer Programming Languages. The remainder of his education is based on training opportunities offered by Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Kansas and On-the-Job experience. Additionally, Mr. Skinner received training in his field of expertise during the 9 years he served with the Kansas Air National Guard.

For more information, please visit www.bcbsks.com.