I’ve been involved with computers for decades. In the early 90s while in high school I started a company making websites for local car dealerships in the Pittsburgh area. In college I worked at the Penn State helpdesk, was one of the original members of the Penn State Linux User Group and worked for a local computer store selling and repairing computers.
I eventually started working for Penn State full time as a mainframe operator. Working 3rd shift I spent my time reading all of the IBM s/390 manuals and playing with Linux on a spare computer in the machine room. After a few months I was hired as a mainframe systems programmer in 2000 and was responsible for z/OS operating system upgrades, developing middleware software for managing the communications between the student portals and back-end student information systems and installing and maintaining Linux on the mainframe.
Several years later Penn State formed an Emerging Technologies group taking several members from the student computing group, administrative computing group, and telecommunications group. As part of this group, I led several identity management initiatives including developing and deploying a unified web single sign on system, the first federated single sign on system (Shibboleth – where we ran the first production instance of the identity provider on my work desktop Red Hat 7.3 machine), and a federated peer to peer file sharing system for academic use with access controls and a comprehensive permission system.
In 2006 I was hired by an identity management consulting company called Entology. There I focused on Oracle Identity Manager and Oracle Access Manager and was responsible for several of the largest and most successful deployments, helping establish the firm as a leading implementer in the space. In 2008 Entology was acquired by PricewaterhouseCoopers and I stayed on for 3 years continuing to lead successful Oracle Identity Management implementation projects.
In 2011 I joined with two of my former principal consultants from Entology to form Instrumental Identity (originally established as Identity Works LLC), an identity and access management consulting firm which we grew into a successful company partnering with our clients to provide implementation expertise with SailPoint, Oracle, Okta, and midPoint identity management software as well as guidance in high level identity and access management program planning, software selection, and long term security and cloud strategy.
In 2023 we restructured the company, where I briefly served as Interim CEO and we renamed ourselves Instrumental Identity. Shortly after I moved into my preferred role as Chief Operating Officer where I currently sit. Instrumental Identity is now more successful than ever, and we are branching out into additional partnerships and offerings all within the identity management space.
What I Do Today
As Chief Operating Officer of Instrumental Identity, I focus on strategic client relationships, technical architecture, and business development. While I maintain deep hands-on involvement in our most complex implementations, my role has evolved from individual contributor to executive leader overseeing our technical delivery and growth strategy.
Our recent work includes leading SailPoint IdentityIQ modernization initiatives, architecting large-scale migrations from legacy Oracle Identity Manager environments to cloud-native solutions, and helping organizations navigate the complexities of hybrid identity architectures that span on-premises systems and multiple cloud providers.
The identity management landscape has evolved dramatically since those early Shibboleth days at Penn State. What started as academic federation protocols has become the backbone of enterprise security strategy. Today’s challenges involve not just managing traditional employee identities, but orchestrating complex ecosystems of human users, service accounts, API keys, and machine identities across increasingly distributed infrastructure.
I find the technical challenges as engaging now as they were 20 years ago – the difference is that today I get to approach them from both the strategic business perspective and the architectural implementation perspective that comes with running a successful consulting firm.