Since 2000 I have worked on exactly one problem: making data useful to the people who serve children. Everything before that taught me how systems actually behave.
I have built products and sold them, run the 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. That combination is the reason I am useful. I have been the vendor and I have been the customer, and neither one surprises me anymore.
The thread through all of it is the same. Take the technology built for organizations with unlimited budgets, and get it into the hands of agencies that count every dollar and often have one person doing the work of five.
Standing up the Education Intelligence line of business, bringing enterprise data governance, analytics, and applied AI to public education agencies. Currently delivering data governance modernization for the Georgia Department of Education, and working with our Education CIO on the practice’s AI strategy.
Subject matter expert on the design of a modernized statewide longitudinal data system. 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, helping shape the statutes that govern how education data may be used. 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. Acquired by Renaissance Learning.
Directed analytics product strategy and enterprise sales. Sold seven state longitudinal data projects generating over $12M and led a team of up to twenty developers and support staff building the NIMBLE K12 analytics product. Negotiated the OEM agreement that embedded MicroStrategy’s engine inside it, then shipped the result to the US Virgin Islands and South Dakota education agencies.
Sold online and blended learning to state and local education agencies, securing the first blended learning customers in the Southeast.
I coined the term Education Intelligence in 2001, and then spent years building the thing it described. Helped bootstrap OtisEd around a single idea: take the multidimensional warehousing, visual ETL, reporting, forecasting, and statistical analysis we had implemented inside a Fortune 500 telecom, and rebuild it at a price an education agency could actually pay. As VP of Sales and Marketing I grew top line revenue over 300 percent by landing the company’s first state education agency contract, which led to two more, and built the channel program with Dell, IBM, and Microsoft. Along the way: over $5M annually in new analytics revenue at Follett, and integration of a knowledge management suite with third-party BI platforms at Synergistics.
I started on the help desk and did not stay there. Built and staffed the corporate help desk and managed divisional technology procurement, then moved into designing solutions rather than repairing them, and finally into the architecture underneath: the TCP/IP network rollout, a browser on every machine, a Lotus Notes intranet delivered during the commercial arrival of the web, and the multidimensional analytics environment that became the blueprint for everything I have built in education since. Keynote speaker at an IBM and Lotus symposium in Atlanta. How I got there is a story.
The technology is rarely the hard part. Over twenty-five years I have negotiated and managed the partnerships that made products possible, including an OEM agreement that put MicroStrategy’s engine inside our own analytics platform and then shipped it to two state education agencies.
I lead the Special Education Data Model working group at A4L SIF and serve on the CCSSO Community of Innovation AI workgroup, representing PCG in both. I also work across CEDS and the Ed-Fi Alliance. Interoperability is not paperwork. It is what lets a small district have the same capability as a large one.
Building a business line in analytics, modernization, data integration, and AI for education. Underneath that: data governance and architecture, statewide longitudinal data systems and P-20W, dashboard design people will actually use, and AI strategy with a hard requirement for efficacy, safety, and honest implementation. Azure, Power BI, Tableau, and a long memory for how these systems fail, which is the part you cannot buy.
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. Certified Solution Selling Professional through IBM.