From a DOS manual to keeping a children's hospital running.

It started with a DOS manual in the 1980s. I was a kid with a computer and no plan - just curiosity. That curiosity turned into 12 years in the U.S. Navy, serving on three aircraft carriers as a Disbursing Clerk and the unit's go-to IT resource. The Navy taught me how systems work under pressure, and what it means when something breaks at 3 a.m. and there's no one to call.

After the Navy, I went to Lockheed Martin. Eight years, starting as a Systems Administrator and working up to leading a team of 12 Windows engineers. I ran the local data center for the HUD HITS program in Lanham and authored technical content for contract bids valued above $200M. There was a nine-month interval at Infinite Group as a VMware consultant - my first real dive into virtualization, which became a decade of certifications.

Then nine years at Accenture. I started as an infrastructure cloud consultant - IRS, then PHH Mortgage - and moved into delivery management. I consolidated 17 data centers to 10, a 41% reduction, while growing a distributed engineering team from 16 to 32 across four continents. 800,000 users. $10M+ budgets. Twelve time zones.

Oracle brought me in on the Cerner contract at Children's National Hospital in August 2023. Four months later, the hospital recruited me in-house. Now I direct the data center and infrastructure operations — a Kyndryl-managed Tier 1/2 team and a $10M+ estate, through overlapping enterprise platform transitions. In a pediatric hospital, infrastructure downtime is a patient-care event, not a service ticket.