The professional record behind one continuing subject: making data useful to the people who serve children.
I have built products and sold them, run delivery and answered for it, negotiated the partnerships that made them possible, and sat on the agency side of the table watching it all arrive. The thread is the same: bring useful enterprise capability to education agencies that count every dollar and often have one person doing the work of five.
Leading the Education Intelligence team for the Education practice at Public Consulting Group and bringing enterprise data governance, analytics, modernization, interoperability, and applied AI to public education agencies.
Served as a subject matter expert on the design of a modernized statewide longitudinal data system and led the mainframe-to-Azure modernization of the funding platform supporting every public school in the state.
Directed student data privacy legislative strategy with state and federal lobbyists, helped shape the statutes governing education data use, built the government affairs business intelligence capability, and led two state-agency data collection programs serving more than 150 districts.
Owned partnership strategy, revenue targets, and operations. Closed the largest contract in the company’s history before its acquisition by Renaissance Learning.
Directed analytics product strategy and enterprise sales. Sold seven state longitudinal data projects generating more than $12 million and led a team of up to twenty developers and support staff building the NIMBLE K12 analytics product. Negotiated the agreement that embedded MicroStrategy’s engine in the product and delivered the resulting platform to the education agencies of the U.S. Virgin Islands and South Dakota.
Sold online and blended learning to state and local education agencies, securing the company’s first blended-learning customers in the Southeast.
Helped bootstrap Otis Educational Systems around an idea named Education Intelligence: take multidimensional warehousing, visual data integration, reporting, forecasting, and statistical analysis used in a large enterprise and rebuild it at a price education agencies could sustain. As Vice President of Sales and Marketing, grew revenue by more than 300 percent by landing the company’s first state education agency contract and building channel programs with Dell, IBM, and Microsoft. Generated more than $5 million annually in new analytics revenue at Follett and integrated a knowledge management suite with third-party business intelligence platforms at Synergistics.
Built and staffed the corporate help desk and managed divisional technology procurement, then moved into solution design and enterprise architecture. The work included a TCP/IP network rollout, a browser on every machine, a Lotus Notes intranet during the commercial arrival of the web, and the multidimensional analytics environment that became the blueprint for later education work. Served as a keynote speaker at an IBM and Lotus symposium.
The technology is rarely the hard part. Products and public systems depend on partnerships, standards, shared definitions, and people willing to resolve the spaces between formal responsibilities.
A4L/SIF, CCSSO Community of Innovation, CCSSO EIMAC, CEDS, and the Ed-Fi Alliance. The consistent idea is that interoperability is not paperwork. It is how smaller agencies gain access to capability that would otherwise remain out of reach.
B.A. in Biology with a Business Management minor from the University of West Georgia, and an A.A. from Truett McConnell College.
Certified Knowledge Management Professional through the Knowledge Management Consortium International and Certified Solution Selling Professional through IBM.