How I think about the work
Technology is one of the most human endeavors there is. When I’m deciding where to invest, I want to hear from the people who do the work and the people who rely on it. What breaks if we get this wrong? What are we paying to keep in place? If someone has to copy data from one system into another every Tuesday, I’d like to know why.
I take the same approach to AI governance. Give people one place to bring an idea, make ordinary requests easy to review, and be clear about who can accept the risk on the harder ones. Document who decided and why. If nobody can tell you where the data came from, start there. You’ll have to answer that question eventually.
Experience
Comagine Health
Director of Data and AI. I joined Comagine in September 2024.
I lead our data and AI strategy. I work with program leaders, security, and compliance to decide which uses are worth pursuing, who owns the data, and what needs to be in place before a tool goes into service. I’ve also led public health modernization work in two states, including the design of a statewide Community Information Exchange.
On one of those projects, I led integration across 15 systems serving 20 federal and state programs. We built and ran new systems in parallel with old ones and agreed on a cutover date so teams could replace old systems in stages; after all, people still had work to do while we made the changes.
State of Utah
Senior Manager of Information Technology, November 2018 to June 2024.
I led technology modernization across 18 agencies, managed budgets of more than $10 million, and led teams of 12 to 20 across agency staff and outside partners. That meant deciding what we could do once for the state and what each agency needed to handle for itself.
- I led the team that built and launched Utah’s governor-sponsored COVID-19 vaccination platform in three weeks. It went on to support more than a million vaccinations.
- We moved more than 600 mission-critical databases to an Oracle hybrid cloud platform in less than seven months. The services that depended on them stayed up, and the state saved more than $1.3 million a year.
- I reworked 52 software contracts, for each one asking whether we still needed it, whether we could consolidate it, or whether to keep it as-is. This saved the state another $1.5 million a year.
- We set up shared cloud platforms and standards across agencies. Adoption grew 40% year over year, and licensing costs fell 80% across major platforms.
- I built Utah’s Google Cloud platform and data engineering function. The work supported programs and systems serving 30,000 clients and 20,000 employees. In corrections, it contributed to a 186% improvement in early-exit success.
Be kind. Reduce.
BioFire Diagnostics
Director of Information Technology, August 2017 to September 2018.
I ran IT strategy and operations for a 1,200-person biotech company and managed a budget of more than $10 million. We brought data from 10 systems together for analysis, rolled out ServiceNow across the company, and used Okta to manage access to 15 critical applications. I also led the rollout of backup and recovery for more than 70 TB of data across 10 systems.
Health Catalyst
Senior Cloud Engineer, August 2014 to August 2017.
I designed and helped build more than $8 million in private cloud infrastructure that ran analytics for seven hospital systems. I led the backup and disaster recovery work for more than 146 TB of healthcare data and set up Splunk so the team could monitor those systems and prepare for HIPAA audits.
Before that (2003 to 2014)
- C7 Data Centers. I built virtual infrastructure. During a $58 million acquisition, I led the work of bringing the financial systems together.
- Bullfrog International. I kept the infrastructure and networks running at a manufacturing company.
- Salt Palace Convention Center. I led the engineering team and managed an IT budget of more than $1 million for the 850,000-square-foot convention center. The work included keeping the Wi-Fi working while the building was full of 200,000 visitors.
Teaching
I’ve taught graduate and undergraduate courses as an adjunct instructor at the University of Utah since 2014. Depending on the semester, I might be teaching systems analysis and design, cloud computing, data engineering, or data-driven decision making. I bring decisions from work into class and ask students what they’d do with the information we actually had at the time. What would they need to know before committing money or putting a system into service? Occasionally somebody asks a question I wish I’d thought to ask at work.
I’m rather fond of online courses. I’ve made some myself for Pluralsight and Udemy, including courses on cloud strategy and Splunk. There’s more on my University of Utah faculty profile.
Education
- I earned a BS and an MS in Information Systems at the University of Utah’s David Eccles School of Business.
- In 2024 I completed the Oxford Artificial Intelligence Programme at Saïd Business School.
- I’m also an Oxethica Certified AI Professional.