About
People-first technology leader with 20+ years across nearly every seat in the profession: engineer, consultant, founder, Director of IT, and CIO. I've served organizations from small business to the Fortune 100, in both public and private sectors.
How I think about this work
I build before I advise. New technology gets proven in my own AI lab before I set strategy or policy on it anywhere else. That's how I keep advice honest. You can't tell someone what a tool will actually do to their organization if you haven't run it against your own.
The first ask is usually a solution somebody has already picked. The more useful question is "what are you trying to accomplish?" Start there, and we figure out the how together.
That range is deliberate. In the same career, sometimes in the same week, I've written the Conditional Access policies and defended the budget that funded them, built the multi-agent system and set the governance that constrains it. The title has changed many times over twenty years. Staying close enough to the technology to build it myself never has.
The same rule applies to AI that applied to outsourcing, cloud, and blockchain before it: it shows up with a lot of hype, and the organizations that do well with it are the ones who treat it as an accelerator of the judgment their people already have, not a replacement for it. I wrote more about that in an open letter on AI from the seat of a CIO →
Three things energize me: teaching, setting strategy, and hands-on technical work. Most leadership framing asks you to trade that last one away as you move up. I've never accepted the trade, and my best work sits where all three overlap.
I measure success by the strength of the teams I leave behind, not the size of the deployment. Zero attrition guiding a 60-person IT organization through a first-ever leadership transition matters more to me than the transition itself.
Career
Nearly every seat, from engineer and consultant to founder, Director of IT, and CIO, for organizations ranging from small business to the Fortune 100, the Department of Defense, and the public sector, across construction, healthcare, financial services, retail, and managed services.
First CIO in a construction firm's 100-plus-year history. Built enterprise technology, cybersecurity, and innovation leadership from scratch for a commercial general contractor: a 60-person IT organization and an eight-figure budget. Led the org through its first-ever CIO transition with zero attrition, while promoting two service-desk team members into new roles.
Owned an independent consultancy advising Microsoft partners and enterprise clients on security, Purview, and modern-work practice-building: go-to-market offerings, sales enablement, virtual CISO engagements, and Microsoft Certified Trainer partner-enablement workshops.
Five years as a solution architect and delivery lead across several Microsoft-focused consultancies, averaging multi-million-dollar quarterly solution-architecture sales at 70% margin, migrating tens of thousands of mailboxes to the cloud, and building fixed-bid, API-delivered offerings that opened new revenue lines.
Progressive IT leadership through Director of IT Infrastructure & Engineering at a national distribution company: $750K in first-year savings through vendor consolidation, the Microsoft 365 and Azure migration, and driving server virtualization to 95%.
Full, dated work history: Résumé → · Anonymized detail on how I actually approach this work: Projects →
Certifications
Microsoft Certified Trainer; Cybersecurity Architect Expert; Microsoft 365 Enterprise Administrator Expert; Teams Voice Engineer Expert; plus associate and specialty certifications spanning Security Operations, Information Protection, Identity and Access, Azure Administration and Security, Modern Desktop, Messaging, and Teams.
Teaching & community
Technology only matters if it grows the people around it.
- Cybersecurity Instructor, Microsoft TEALS, teaching high-school students two days a week.
- IT Advisory Board, Audubon Technology High School; former curriculum advisor, Fox Valley Technical College.
- Volunteer educator teaching free computing and security classes for folks reentering the workforce.
- Girl Scout troop leader. ELCA East Central Synod council member.
- VP, Board of Directors, Wisconsin InfraGard chapter (an FBI partnership program); AI Advisory Panelist, Fox Valley Chamber of Commerce.
- Founding 920AI, a monthly AI meetup for the Fox Valley. More on the Community page →
Education
Grand Valley State University, Computer Science.