Education
- MBA — Aurora University
- BS, Information Technology — University of Phoenix
- Graduate Leadership Certificate — Aurora University
About
Technology. Business. People.
But not necessarily in that order.
My career has been built at the intersection of technology, business and people—but the order depends on the problem.
Sometimes the starting point is a business objective. Sometimes it is a technology constraint or opportunity. And sometimes the most important issue is the people who have to make the change work. Over time, that perspective has expanded beyond technology leadership into writing, research and practical education.
How do we turn technology capability into meaningful organizational results?
U.S. Army
Leadership principles formed early.
Long before technology became my profession, eleven years in the U.S. Army gave me some of my earliest lessons in leadership, readiness and responsibility.
During the Cold War, I was stationed in Germany and worked at a rapid-response communications station designed to support operations in the event of a Soviet invasion. I was there during the historic period surrounding the fall of the Berlin Wall. Later, I deployed to the Persian Gulf and participated in Operation Desert Storm. My service also included leadership, instruction and recruiting assignments.
Those experiences shaped principles I have carried throughout my professional career: understand the mission, prepare before the moment of need, make decisions when information is incomplete, take responsibility for the outcome, and never lose sight of the people doing the work.
They also provided perspective. Very few business situations rise to the level of being under fire in combat. That does not make business problems unimportant. It means leaders need to distinguish genuine urgency from organizational noise, remain focused when circumstances become difficult, and help others do the same.
Follett Software Company
Building a foundation in technology—and business.
At Follett Software Company, I built the technical foundation of my civilian career and began learning how technology decisions become business decisions.
I progressed from product testing into network engineering and technical leadership while enterprise infrastructure was undergoing significant change. I earned my first major professional certifications there—Certified Novell Engineer (CNE) and Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer (MCSE)—and continued updating those specialties as the platforms evolved.
Just as important, Follett introduced me to the business side of technology: developing project proposals for leadership, evaluating return on investment and total cost of ownership, and explaining why a technology investment made sense beyond its technical merits.
Knowing how a technology works is different from understanding why an organization should invest in it.
That shift—from evaluating the technology itself to understanding the organizational case for it—became increasingly important as my responsibilities grew.
Furst Companies
Leading technology as an organizational capability.
At Furst Companies, those technical and business perspectives came together at the organizational level.
Over seventeen years, my responsibilities expanded across a multi-entity, multi-location professional-services organization. Infrastructure, enterprise applications, cybersecurity, service delivery, governance, vendors, financial stewardship and organizational change increasingly became interconnected parts of the same responsibility.
The work reinforced something I had begun learning much earlier: technology is rarely the end in itself.
A technically sound solution can still fail if the organization is not ready for it. Security depends on people and processes as much as controls. Reliable services create trust. Governance helps organizations make better decisions. Technology investments need to be understood in terms of business value, risk and capability—not simply features.
That perspective continues to shape how I approach technology leadership today.
Author • Founder • Practitioner • Educator
Experience creates questions worth examining.
Why do technically sound initiatives sometimes struggle? Why do organizations repeatedly encounter similar leadership challenges even as the underlying technology changes? How should organizations govern increasingly powerful AI capabilities? And how can people use AI not simply to create faster, but to understand a problem more clearly before deciding what to create?
Those questions increasingly inform my writing, research and educational work. I am the author of Technology Isn't the Hard Part and 250 Years of Accelerating Change, and my work on technology leadership and service value has been published by InformationWeek and ITSM.tools. I also write about artificial intelligence, governance, service management and organizational change.
I am also the founder of Zusammen Group, an advisory practice that starts with the business problem and helps organizations determine what technology, governance or change actually makes sense. That work may take the form of fractional leadership, AI readiness, a workshop or focused technology advisory.
My educational work follows the same practical philosophy. Whether the subject is AI-assisted career-market discovery, small-business market research, cybersecurity or workplace technology, the goal is not simply to explain a tool. It is to help people understand the situation, examine the evidence and make better decisions.
AI can accelerate discovery and analysis. Human judgment still determines what the evidence means.
Continuous Learning
Keep learning as the environment changes.
Continuous professional learning has been part of my career since earning and updating my early CNE and MCSE certifications, and it continues as the technologies and disciplines surrounding technology leadership evolve.
Selected Professional Development
- ITIL 5 Foundation
- Microsoft Azure Fundamentals
- Google AI
- Vanderbilt University — Copilot for Leaders
- Vanderbilt University — Copilot for Personal Productivity
- AWS cloud learning
Still Curious
The questions keep changing.
The technologies have changed considerably since my first years in the profession. Many of the leadership questions have not. How do we prepare people for change? Which investments actually matter? How do we manage risk without preventing progress? How do we create reliable services while continuing to improve them? And how do we keep technology connected to the people and organizations it is supposed to serve?
Technology changes. The responsibility to lead it well remains.