Scott Michael Binkerd — Principal Consultant
I have spent my career moving between technical jobs and hands-on work. It left me with one habit. When a problem looks like it belongs to one department, I stop. I look at everything around it first. Then I decide what the problem is.
I have worked on help desks. I have worked in factories. I have run Linux and Windows systems and big-company IT. I have worked in network and security operations, in cybersecurity, and in vendor risk. I have done governance and compliance. And I build and run my own servers and automation.
The useful thing all that taught me: companies do not have problems the way the org chart says they should. Every one of those jobs showed me the same thing from a different angle. Good people, in departments that work, getting a worse result together than any of them meant to.
How I work
I look at a company as one connected system: people, technology, information, rewards, rules, decisions, and results. I do not start with a method or a product to sell. I start with questions. What is the company really trying to do? How does work really move from start to finish? Where do decisions get made? Where are people quietly working around a broken process?
Sometimes the answer is technology or automation. Sometimes it is a change to the process, a clear owner, or just letting people think on their own before the meeting starts. Sometimes a weekly meeting can be replaced with a shared document. And sometimes the fix is embarrassingly simple. That is the hardest kind to deliver without sounding like you did no work.
Current work
Right now, one focus is noise: when the same kind of decision keeps getting different answers for no good reason. I am building an Organizational Noise Audit that looks at how decisions get made, how information moves, whether teams pull together, who owns what, whether meetings are worth it, whether the tools get in the way, and what employees and customers actually go through.
The point is not to grade employees or flatter the bosses. The point is to understand the system well enough to change it on purpose.
Outside the technical work
I am also a published children’s author. Trixie the Three-Legged Deer: A Tale of Courage and Love, written under the pen name Jeffrey Lebowski, is a true story about a deer born with three legs who kept showing up in my backyard. It is not a business credential. It is on this page because explaining something real to readers who will not pretend to follow along is the same skill this work runs on, with the difficulty turned up.
My career looks scattered. That is because working out how things fit together has always held my attention better than staying in one lane. Now that is the whole basis of what I do.
The breadth is not random
Each job added another view of how systems fail and how companies really solve problems.
Manual machining & CNC programming
Where a mistake in the process becomes a real part you can measure and throw away. The part does not care about your excuse.
Gateway Computers · GoDaddy
Thousands of calls. People described their problem in words that had nothing to do with what was really wrong. It was the best training for this work I could have had.
LodgeNet · Linux and Windows servers
Where the systems stop being home computers and start having other systems that depend on them, repair windows, and real consequences.
NOC · SOC
Watching everything at once, and learning which alarms really meant something. My first real lesson in telling signal from noise.
Security engineering & operations
Where I saw how often a “security problem” is really a problem with who owns what, or with two teams not talking.
Third-party risk · governance & compliance
Checking other companies for a living, in every industry. I got to see hundreds of companies’ systems from the outside.
Automation · containers · running my own servers
Building and running the whole thing myself instead of renting it: the network, the setup tools, logins, monitoring, and backups.
Trixie the Three-Legged Deer (as Jeffrey Lebowski)
A picture book for children. It is truly hard writing. There is no jargon to hide behind, and kids will not pretend to follow along.
WOPR Systems LLC
Where all of it finally pays off: problems that belong to no one department, looked at as one system.
I am most interested in problems that keep coming back.
Have you tried to fix something three times? Does it keep coming back wearing a slightly different hat? That is exactly the kind of problem to call me about.