I never set out to work in enterprise architecture. That makes it sound like I had a plan, a roadmap, or even a hint of foresight. I didn’t. What I had was a series of jobs that kept handing me bigger problems, and a personality that couldn’t leave anything broken. Everything else unfolded from there.
I started in 2001, in Bay City, Michigan, working cable internet tech support during one of the most chaotic moments in early broadband. Cable internet was finally becoming mainstream — the first time people could actually see the value compared to dial-up — and then the @Home Network collapsed. Entire regions went offline. Call queues stacked to the ceiling. People were frustrated and demanding answers, and they wanted someone to make the internet work again. I didn’t know it then, but those days taught me how to stay clear-headed when nothing around me was calm.
In 2004, I moved into healthcare IT without realizing it would become the defining decade of my professional life. DR Systems hired me during the height of the PACS boom — when hospitals everywhere were abandoning film and rushing toward digital imaging.
On my very first day as a Field Service Engineer, I stepped into what would become my eventual employer: Elmhurst Hospital. I walked in thinking I’d get a normal onboarding, and instead found myself dropped right into the middle of their PACS go-live. That moment shaped everything that came after.
PACS wasn’t just a software deployment. It was storage, networking, radiology workflow, uptime expectations, and clinical politics all stitched together. You couldn’t touch one piece without affecting five others. And I traveled constantly — Florida, Buffalo, Maryland, Texas, the Pacific Northwest, both ends of California. I spent months in Santa Barbara recovering imaging archives off DVDs after a RAID5 failure, the kind of painstaking, physical data recovery that simply doesn’t exist in the cloud-first world we live in now.
I often went to corporate in Mira Mesa, then down to Hillcrest at night — dinners, drinks, friends who’d moved from Chicago. That whole era had a rhythm to it. It was the perfect job for someone young with no kids: puzzle after puzzle, airport after airport, and the feeling that every week sent you somewhere new.
The project I’ll never forget was Elmhurst’s move into their brand-new hospital. Their Business Operations Center acted as the replication site. We used MirrorView to replicate the SAN, stabilized it, and then loaded every rack into a moving truck — with a decoy truck behind it — and moved the entire infrastructure across town. We brought everything online, replicated back, and would’ve had zero downtime if the replication journal hadn’t filled mid-cutover. Even then, the downtime ended up being unbelievably small. It was one of the most beautifully executed, high-pressure transitions of my career.
After a decade of travel, hotel keys, and countless late-night cutovers, I joined Edward Hospital — the same Elmhurst system I’d supported for years. I earned my ECSA (Epic Client Systems Administrator) certification there, worked through their Meditech-to-Epic transition, and became the primary Horizon VDI administrator. I’ll never forget the day a storm knocked out power, the generator kicked in, and a massive VDI boot storm collapsed the storage. I was at lunch when my pager went off. We spent hours trying to bring it back before I rebuilt the entire environment from scratch and drove home at one in the morning. After that, whenever storms were forecast, I prepared the environment like a ritual.
Edward was meaningful but the commute to Naperville was punishing. I wanted to be back in the city. So in November 2016, I joined UI Health.
UI Health was at a transitional moment — part legacy, part modernization, the kind of environment where half the work was updating technology and the other half was untying knots from ten years ago. One of the first things I helped with was the BitLocker go-live on a wildly mismatched fleet of old Lenovo desktops. Every model required a different method of enabling TPM, so I wrote one of the ugliest scripts of my career. It wasn’t elegant, but it worked everywhere, and that was the only metric that mattered.
A few months later, I introduced UI Health to Lansweeper — something not everyone saw the value in at first. Then WannaCry hit. Suddenly visibility mattered. Machines, users, versions, vulnerabilities — everything needed to be known instantly. Because we had Lansweeper, we contained the threat. The timing could not have been better.
Those first years were filled with late nights and strange hours. Long calls with Microsoft Support trying to unravel on-prem Exchange problems. Nights where we stayed in the office until early morning because hospitals don’t pause and neither can the systems behind them.
Then came the Cerner to Epic transition, originally planned for May 2020 — and then the world shut down. The pandemic delayed go-live until September. Overnight, we had to figure out how to support thousands of people suddenly working from home, including people who never imagined remote work would touch their job. We scrambled to expand VPN capacity, build new remote workflows, and support saliva-based testing infrastructure that had to be stood up almost immediately. It was a surreal period — half emergency response, half modernization sprint — and it changed how the entire organization understood technology.
During this same window, our move to Exchange Online wasn’t just an email transition — it was UI Health’s entrance into the broader Microsoft cloud ecosystem. Someone had to figure out how to run it, secure it, govern it, and keep it aligned with clinical operations. I stepped into that role and learned the M365 administration stack rapidly because the organization needed it to function.
My path at UI Health grew with the work. I moved from Systems Engineer to Senior Systems Engineer, and in 2022 I became an Architect — a step I had genuinely been working toward, not because of the title, but because the problems I was solving had naturally become architectural in scale.
In hindsight, every stop left fingerprints on me. Bay City steadied me. PACS sharpened me. Edward grounded me. UI Health expanded me. Pieces from each place still follow me into every room.
It’s one of the only parts of my life I can’t say was intentional or planned — it revealed itself over time, as the work grew, and I grew with it.