IT Infrastructure & Operations Leader · 25 years in enterprise IT
IT Infrastructure · Cloud · Security Operations
Twenty-five years building and running enterprise IT — from systems administration to director level, across insurance, telecom, retail and healthcare. The discipline has always been the same: separate what is merely urgent from what is business-critical, then sequence everything else behind it.
Consolidated services and retired redundant MSPs across newly acquired entities at a $1.3B insurance, wealth and benefits broker, on a standardized service model. Replaced legacy HyperV and VMware with Nutanix and Cohesity, and led the organization through a cyber event alongside Palo Alto’s Unit 42.
Created the IT security team and stood up a Security Operations Center, deploying SecOps capability for incident response, vulnerability detection, threat intelligence and risk compliance. Introduced ITSM, CMDB and ITAM, and relaunched Salesforce across the enterprise.
Ran cloud migration and ERP integration as program and portfolio manager, including Citrix Cloud, Salesforce and a new PIM system. Helped develop the modern Citrix Cloud solution with Citrix, Microsoft and an SME partner, and spoke on it at Citrix Synergy 2020.
Success changes the baseline. Once I have mastered a role or landed a major win, I look for harder problems and unfamiliar territory rather than running the same playbook again. I keep a diverse set of inputs — peers, mentors, industry movement — and then pass what I learn on.
Crossing the finish line on a project is not the same as solving the problem underneath it. The outcome has to reduce friction for the team that lives with it, or deliver something an end user can actually feel.
Clear ownership, visible progress, and open feedback loops with stakeholders. Under pressure that means daily stand-ups, direct lines to vendor engineers, and dashboards leadership can read without a translator.
Earlier in my career I led a complex telecom upgrade for an enterprise call center. The vendor’s recommendation for that scope was eighteen months. Business drivers meant leadership needed it fully operational in eight. Then the vendor’s primary project manager fell seriously ill early in the deployment, and every moving piece — vendor coordination, technical logistics, stakeholder alignment — landed on me.
A traditional full-scale rollout on that runway would have caused critical system failures, so I changed the strategy rather than the deadline.
The critical infrastructure launched on the eight-month deadline with zero disruption to call-center operations. The remaining features rolled out over the following months. It taught me to stay calm under pressure, work the root cause, and make decisive risk calls — and it gave me the blueprint for running enterprise-scale programs end to end.
Three tiers. A project has to clear all of them, not just the first.
Did it hit the core KPIs, stay on budget, meet the deadline, and solve the actual business problem?
How smooth was the collaboration? Did the team feel supported, and do end users trust the solution they were handed?
Did the work meet my own quality bar? Did it leave a process better than it found it, or teach the team something that makes the next run cleaner?
I write about technology and entrepreneurship, and I am always glad to talk about infrastructure, delivery under constraint, and the problems that sit underneath both.