I make organizations and systems work more effectively. Here's how: most useful knowledge is stuck — in people's heads, social systems, team silos, processes nobody interrogates, or data waiting to be shaped into a decision. I find it and work with people to restructure how the organization stores and represents it, making that knowledge useful. The goal is always to support people in making and measuring better decisions.
Cisco, earlier work, civic roles, and how I work
At Cisco, that meant leading content strategy and information architecture for security products, treating technical content as a problem of business systems and team alignment, not a pile of deliverables. I served on a cross-organizational tiger team transforming Cisco's technical communications into an AI-native content system, collaborating on content modeling and context engineering that structured institutional knowledge for accurate, efficient delivery by generative AI products. This built on earlier work documenting Cisco's LLM-powered assistant and prototyping AI generation of identity-based technical content.
Before Cisco, I built databases of European Parliament voting patterns for multistakeholder forest policy campaigns, designed donor data systems for a rapidly growing Haiti-focused nonprofit, constructed the knowledge base that cut support call volume by 20% at a software company, and wound down an unprofitable service line at an IT business.
In civil society, I lead data and operations on the board of The 'MPOWER Project, and serve on a planning board, an energy committee, and two school committees in Western Massachusetts. Nonprofit capacity, municipal budgeting, policy analysis, performance evaluation, and community needs assessments all drill down to trapped knowledge, and the value is making it legible to the people responsible for decisions and communicating to the public.
How do I do it? I walk around and talk to people. Sometimes I get lucky enough to help a group rope a grant, and my walking and talking becomes facilitated group work with mixed-methods research, followed by a dense but charming report and rounds of public interest communications.
I've deliberately pursued a wide range of work. Organizations get stuck in knowledge tarpits — knowledge trapped in silos, legacies of practice, in-group dynamics that hush some voices, complexity outrunning management structures, decisions starved of information that already exists somewhere in the building. The whiteboard-and-dialogue work of getting unstuck transfers across domains. The trick is getting the group to trust the process enough to try something new.
