Twenty-four years turning complicated systems into software that actually works.

Nobody Assigned Me the Vision.

I didn't start in IT. I started part-time in accounting, doing invoicing, at a company that went by the name WIRB — already the largest IRB in the world then, long before it became WCG, and just as much the largest IRB now.

A few weeks in, my manager handed me the manuals for our Solomon accounting system on a Friday and said he thought I might like to read through them over the weekend. I don't think he expected what happened next. I came back Monday with a list of changes — workflow fixes, template redesigns — that ended up shaving real, measurable time off our monthly close. Nobody asked me to fix the accounting system. I just couldn't leave it alone once I understood how it worked.

That got noticed. The IT director came down and asked if I'd build an interim time-tracking system in Access while they figured out a permanent replacement for the one they were phasing out. It was supposed to last a year. I built something that tracked hours, ran weekly and monthly timesheets, and generated reports for every hourly employee in the building — and it was still running five years later, long after I'd moved on to other things.

That "other thing" was a junior developer role in IT. They assigned me straight to a consulting team from Arthur Andersen, brought in to help build what would become IRIS. Weeks later, Enron happened, and Andersen dissolved around us mid-project. We kept a couple of their people on just long enough to get the project across the finish line. At its peak, that team had 22 developers and engineers on it. I was the only woman in the room for every one of them — and years after go-live, I was the last one still standing.

Along the way, I took a detour that turned out to matter more than I expected. I spent about eight months in Bermuda, consulting for a bank, helping migrate their operations off a mainframe and onto .NET — reconciliation logic, check-type microcoding, reporting, a global payment system juggling currencies, exchange rates, and fees that shifted by card network, location, and time of day. It was proof, to myself as much as anyone, that what I'd built wasn't specific to one industry or one company. The instinct traveled.

I came back and kept climbing — senior engineer, then manager, then director. As director, I created the architect role that the org had never formally had, hired for it, and still reviewed and signed off on every piece of architecture that came through it. Over the following years, I reshaped how the core system could scale across acquisitions without erasing anyone's identity, how it could be segregated hard enough to satisfy contracts as sensitive as Department of Defense work, and how the organization could reorganize itself without ever needing to tear the system apart to do it.

Twenty-one years, one system, four titles, and not one of them was ever assigned to me before I'd already started doing the work.