Profile
I'm a process and framework technology leader, deliberately agnostic to the technology underneath. Not because the technology doesn't matter, but because I've owned enough different stacks to know it is rarely the variable that decides whether something holds.
The instinct came early, and it came before the necessity. I started in December 1996 as assistant to the lead developer at the Center for the Application of Information Technologies at Western Illinois University, a state-recognized center built out of a satellite distance-learning network and partnered nationally in distance education. I built its first web presence with dynamic content refresh, when most of the web was still hand-edited static pages. And I was drawn to structure and framework extensively: business analysis, detailed design documentation, project management. Nobody assigned me that. It was the part of the work I kept moving toward. And the pull kept extending, into infrastructure, into ITIL, into master data management, into analytics, each one absorbed because I kept following the same instinct.
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Eventually it pulled me out of the trenches into management, reluctantly, because leaving hands-on work was never the goal. Structure was, wherever it could be applied. Once I was in the seat, the same instinct fed forward into the leadership itself: process improvement, automation, and building people. Writing job descriptions not as documents to file but as a level set, the baseline that training, feedback, accountability, and reward all have to tie back to or they are decoration.
That is the causal claim, and it is the whole thing. I didn't arrive at method because I never did the work. I arrived at method because I have done the work for nearly thirty years and learned that method is what makes a build survive.
Which is why the first deliverable is never the rebuild. It's the assessment: an honest picture of what is there, what it depends on, and what it will take to make it enterprise grade. Then the plan. Then the documentation. Then the execution, and then a base the organization can actually run on. Then continual improvement, so it never quietly drifts back into being unmapped.
The pattern holds. Established a CIO function where none existed. Rebuilt an enterprise systems environment in forty-six days following an international cyberattack. Built a business intelligence department from nothing. Owned ERP and the manufacturing planning stack across two multi-plant food manufacturers. The founder's seat isn't new to me either. I've built and run my own ventures since the 1990s, which is why I read technology from both sides of the table: the founder who builds from zero, and the executive who has to make it scale and keep it secure.
What I bring is the seat where the pieces come together. Applications, infrastructure, data, security, process, vendors, budget, and the business held as one estate rather than eight functions that happen to report to the same person. Specialists are findable. People who can see the whole board and then build the teams to run it are not.
What makes that foundation rare is the depth underneath it. I lead security at a level most CIOs delegate: identity, vulnerability, governance, and the layer most programs reduce to a checkbox: awareness and training, built so that people stop being the softest control in the building. Because an organization's risk appetite sets its security posture long before any control does. And I treat AI the way I treat any production system: provenance, source-of-truth governance, and verification, so it's a capability an organization can stand behind rather than a liability it can't see. Design it right, secure it, sign your name to it. One discipline, three layers, one signature.
That standard has a date on it. I signed up during Desert Shield and Desert Storm, and specifically because of them. What I ended up on was a U.S. Air Force Boeing KC-135 Stratotanker, the aerial-refueling platform that gives American airpower its global reach, extending the range and endurance of fighters, bombers, and airlift wherever they have to go. That same airframe carried crews through Vietnam and through the air campaign that put me in uniform, and it is still flying today, more than six decades into continuous service. I was an operational crew chief on it, holding Red X authority: the aircraft flew or it sat grounded on my inspection and my signature, and by technical order no one could direct me to change the call. Rank could not overrule it. The systems have changed since. The standard has not.
The discipline is old. Only the system is new.
Capabilities
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Manufacturing & ERP
ERP ownership across two multi-plant food manufacturers: Infor Adage owned outright, Oracle JD Edwards operated, Infor M3 selected and implementation underway at my departure, and with it the supply chain planning stack the plants actually run on: MRP, production scheduling, capacity planning, materials management, procurement, product costing, inventory, and order fulfillment. MES and PLM alongside ERP, warehouse management, EDI integration, enterprise HRIS, and the OT/SCADA production networks that make plant-floor security a manufacturing problem before it is an IT one.
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Assessment & Enterprise Rebuilds
Stand a function up from nothing where none has existed, or walk into an environment nobody has fully mapped, establish what is actually there and what it depends on, then document, plan, and execute the rebuild to a standard that holds. Either way the assessment comes first, because no one can approve a plan for a system they cannot see.
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Enterprise IT Leadership
Established the CIO function and led incident response and enterprise recovery, rebuilding the systems environment in forty-six days following an international cyberattack. At a ~$150M manufacturer, grew the IT budget by roughly 55%, because the investment case was argued in the business’s own terms, not IT’s.
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Cybersecurity at Depth
Identity and access management, threat and vulnerability management, governance, risk, and compliance, and security awareness and training, so the human layer is a control rather than the gap. Built and led, not delegated. I identified and documented a critical exposure with supporting data ahead of the incident that proved it, owned the recovery, and established the security program, vendor strategy, and cyber-insurance posture that replaced what failed. ISC2 Certified in Cybersecurity; Google Cybersecurity Certificate.
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Cloud & 24/7/365 Operations
Amazon Web Services owned and operated, alongside Microsoft Azure and Microsoft 365; the cloud migration executed as part of a full enterprise rebuild. And operations that do not stop: three organizations run at 24/7/365, a county sheriff's office spanning courts, corrections, police, and the executive branch, where the facility never closes, and two food manufacturers whose plant floors run continuously. Availability targets, escalation paths, and on-call coverage sized to environments with no maintenance window, because a change calendar built on nights and weekends does not survive contact with a plant running three shifts.
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Data & Business Intelligence
Built a business intelligence department from nothing and led it, inside a ~$12M six-unit public-sector IT bureau: data warehousing, reporting, and predictive analytics that moved the organization from describing what happened to anticipating what came next. All of it resting on the source-of-truth discipline that decides whether you are measuring reality or measuring your own assumptions.
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Governance & Assurance
ITIL-disciplined service management. Version control, provenance, and source-of-truth governance applied to AI exactly as they are applied to any production system, so what it produces can be traced, verified, and stood behind.
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Higher Education & Learning Systems
Nine years inside a university technology center, across two tenures. I built and maintained its first web presence, then returned years later as IT Systems Manager to run enterprise online-learning programs and custom learning platforms for the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services, Metra Commuter Rail, and Fortune 500 clients. Full lifecycle, for institutions that cannot tolerate failure. I also supported the graduate Instructional Technology faculty and their students, owning the web-based content and instruction behind the same program that granted my degree.
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Founder & Operator
Building and running ventures since the 1990s: brand, infrastructure, and product from zero. The founder’s instinct for building and the executive’s discipline for scaling and securing it, in the same pair of hands.
On Security
Every organization already knows its risks. They sit in a register somewhere, documented, ranked, signed. The breach almost never happens in the gap between the threat and the control. It happens in the gap between the risk that was written down and the remediation that was funded.
Controls don't accept risk. Architecture doesn't accept risk. People do.
That gap is not a technical failure. It is a decision, made by someone, in a room, with a budget in front of them. Closing it is the work I care most about.
Perspectives
- What technology means
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Why the system everyone files as an application is the operating model of the company.
- How it should be governed
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Why forbidding a failure is not the same as catching one.
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What holds when the framework is the only thing still standing.
- How it should be assessed
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The Assessment Is the Deliverable
No one can approve a plan for a system they cannot see.
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The deeper risk is not a wrong answer but one you cannot trace.
- How it behaves under pressure
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How an organization’s risk appetite sets its posture long before any control does.
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Why downtime in a plant is measured in product rather than minutes.
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Why the plant floor breaks every assumption the enterprise playbook is built on.
- How the standard carries forward
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What mentorship actually transfers, and why a standard outlasts the person who set it.
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Career ladders, headcount justification and delegation. Building capability that survives the leader who built it.
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Eleven essays in, the thing they were all arguing turns out to be one claim.
Contact
A true north on the wall is easy. The will to follow it is not. Those are the only companies I'm interested in, and if the technology underneath yours doesn't yet match the ambition, that's the problem I want.