Infrastructure & Operations Executive
Jacob Behnken
Built for Complexity. Grounded in Execution.
Twenty years leading infrastructure and operations in high-consequence environments — regulated industries, critical infrastructure, and organizations where failure carries real financial and operational costs.
20+
Years leading infrastructure and operations in regulated, high-consequence environments
$80M+
Annual infrastructure budget under active management
20,000+
Endpoint infrastructure environment under active management — network, OT, and data centers
3
Publicly traded companies covered by business continuity programs
Areas of Expertise
Four areas. All grounded in real programs.
Each area comes from leading these programs at scale — not studying them. The framing is business-first: leadership outcomes, governance, and decision-making under real operating conditions.
01
Practical AI for Better Work and Smarter Decisions
How leaders adopt AI with discipline — improving decision quality and work output without creating the governance gaps and rework that careless adoption produces.
02
Operational Resilience by Design
How organizations reduce fragility before disruption forces the issue. What it actually takes to build continuity programs that hold under real operating conditions.
03
Reducing Risk in Legacy and Critical Environments
How leaders modernize constrained environments without gambling on unsafe change. Practical risk reduction where replacement is not simple and downtime is not acceptable.
04
Leadership in High-Consequence Technology Operations
How executives make sound decisions, drive transformation, and maintain accountability in environments where operational and financial consequences are real.
Selected Impact
What this kind of work produces.
$10M+
Recovered annually through TEM platform modernization and vendor renegotiation across a large distributed infrastructure environment.
Best in Resilience
Everbridge recognition for business continuity governance covering three publicly traded companies and 160+ departments.
20,000+
Node infrastructure modernization across network core, SD-WAN, OT systems, and data centers — executed without operational disruption.
Why This Perspective Matters
Most organizations carry more operational risk than leadership realizes.
The gap between what infrastructure and operations teams understand about risk and what executive leadership has visibility into is one of the most persistent governance problems in complex organizations. Boards and senior teams often don’t have reliable signals until something fails.
Closing that gap — building governance frameworks that surface risk in business terms, creating structures that make continuity and reliability measurable, leading change in environments where moving fast is not an option — is the work Jacob has done for twenty years. The perspective comes from that operating experience, not from observing it.
Perspectives
Writing on infrastructure leadership, resilience, and practical operations.
Available for conversations worth having.
Leadership opportunities, speaking engagements, peer connections. Use the contact form to get in touch.