Case Studies

The Challenge

Following Broadcom's acquisition of VMware, the City of Albuquerque faced dramatic cost increases on its existing VMware licensing agreements. With a large virtualized infrastructure underpinning city operations, staying on the platform was no longer financially sustainable. The city needed a migration plan that could be executed without disrupting critical municipal services.

The Approach

As Deputy Director of Technology & Innovation, I led the decision to terminate VMware agreements and managed the full migration effort to an alternative hypervisor platform. The initiative required careful sequencing to maintain uptime for city-critical systems throughout the transition.

• Evaluated alternative hypervisor platforms and led vendor selection
• Developed a phased migration plan prioritizing critical systems
• Coordinated cross-department IT teams to execute with zero major service disruptions
• Established new monitoring and systems management tooling on the new platform

The Results

The migration was completed successfully, eliminating $500,000 in annual licensing costs. The city now operates on a modern, cost-effective hypervisor environment with improved management capabilities, including integrated patch management, remote support, and software deployment for all city servers and devices.

The Challenge

The City of Albuquerque was running Exchange 2013 — an end-of-life platform — for all 6,000 city employee email accounts. On-premise infrastructure upgrade costs were significant, and the aging system was creating growing security and reliability risks across city operations.

The Approach

I led the planning and execution of the full migration to Exchange Online, eliminating on-premise email infrastructure entirely and moving the city to a modern, cloud-hosted platform.

• Assessed existing Exchange environment and identified migration sequencing by department
• Coordinated migration with minimal disruption to city staff operations
• Implemented SSO and MFA capabilities alongside the migration to improve security posture
• Eliminated ongoing infrastructure upgrade and maintenance overhead

The Results

All 6,000 accounts migrated successfully. The city eliminated capital and operational costs associated with on-premise Exchange infrastructure, improved security through SSO and MFA deployment, and positioned itself on a platform with a clear, Microsoft-supported roadmap.

The Challenge

Monroe County Clerk of the Court had no mature IT function when I joined as CIO. The organization faced serious operational, compliance, and resilience gaps — including slow records turnaround times of up to six weeks, no disaster recovery capability, and a fragmented technology environment operating in a hurricane-prone region.

The Approach

I was engaged to lead a ground-up IT strategy and operating model build, managing a $2M budget for all IT expenditure while overseeing daily operations, security auditing, and monitoring.

• Migrated infrastructure to a 100% virtual environment with a new backup system and data center replication strategy
• Achieved a Recovery Point Objective of 15 minutes and Recovery Time Objective of 10 minutes for all critical systems
• Ensured public records compliance ("Sunshine law") by transitioning email to Office 365 with cloud backup retention
• Reduced records turnaround times from up to six weeks to next-day or same-day delivery
• Implemented firewalls, patch management, a helpdesk, and a ticketing system from scratch
• Automated all nightly repetitive tasks, freeing the IT team for higher-value work
• Partnered with finance to implement Workday for HR and finance on a strict 16-month deployment schedule

The Results

A full IT function — infrastructure, governance, security, service delivery, and disaster recovery — was built and operational within the engagement period. The organization went from high operational risk to a resilient, compliant, and service-oriented IT capability.

The Challenge

When I joined McAfee to build out the DevOps function, the SaaS platform was achieving approximately 95% uptime against a 98% target — creating customer experience problems and revenue risk. The engineering organization lacked integrated IT operations support, and there was no automated testing environment in place.

The Approach

I was appointed to build a new DevOps function and then progressed to Senior Director, SaaS and DevOps, responsible for aligning IT operations and engineering across a growing global organization.

• Built an automated testing environment for SaaS platforms, eliminating manual regression failures
• Set clear uptime goals and objectives, creating accountability across teams
• Grew the DevOps team from 7 to 80 people through structured recruiting and training
• Delivered a worldwide build environment supporting 1,500 engineers with multi-branch build structures
• Partnered with VMware to develop a new self-provisioning model to expedite product development environments
• Achieved a 99% on-time delivery rate for development environment provisioning

The Results

Platform uptime improved from 95% to 99.9% — exceeding the 98% target. The integrated DevOps model became a competitive advantage for McAfee's SaaS offering, which remains a significant revenue generator for the company today.

The Challenge

The City of Hollywood, Florida needed a full restructuring of its IT department. The function lacked clear governance, stakeholder trust was low, project delivery was inconsistent, and there was no visibility into program status for city leadership or business units. I was appointed to restructure the department and establish program and project governance, managing a $15M combined OPEX/CAPEX budget with a team of up to 25 people.

The Approach

• Restructured IT into three focused units: helpdesk & desktop support, systems operations, and applications development
• Implemented agile Kanban methodology and a reporting structure with clear KPIs
• Deployed a Jira project tracking system, enabling 100% project transparency for all stakeholders
• Launched an IT outreach program to educate business leaders on IT's capabilities
• Project managed the city-wide phone system upgrade, delivering on time and within budget
• Assembled a learning center to support staff adoption of new technologies

The Results

The restructured IT department earned praise from the Police, Building, Code, and Fire departments for improved service delivery. 100% project transparency was achieved across all programs, enabling collaborative priority-setting with key stakeholders and eliminating the conflict that previously arose from competing demands on IT resources.