Brinton Sherwood
Executive Director of IT, Public Sector
Brinton Sherwood
What is your role at VSO?

As the Executive Director of IT, Public Sector, I have the privilege of providing technical leadership and support to the VSO delivery teams who are in daily contact with our clients. Combining the technical expertise of the team with their knowledge and understanding of the real-world problems of our clients allows us to create leading-edge technical strategy and delivery that satisfies our client’s needs both now and in years to come.

Closely related to this, I have the satisfying task of helping people develop their technical career path, clarify their goals, and coach them along their way. As they develop and mature technically, I look forward to seeing who will advance and take over my current role in the next couple years. A large part of this development requires staying in close contact with our industry partners for information and education to ensure we stay on the leading edge of their technology and services. This also has the fortunate side-effect of encouraging delivery teams to implement best practices and improve on the solutions we already deliver.

My vision as a VSO executive is to continue removing structural problems for the delivery teams, and to create strategies and processes that they can use as building blocks as VSO’s public sector, defense and intelligence business continues to grow.

What experience did you have before joining VSO?

Originally started out in data protection, and now have 30 years working in enterprise-class IT. After a decade of data protection and storage, stepped up into business continuity and disaster recovery.

A year-long contract at Google showed me how seriously disruptive an Agile, bottom-up culture can be, how most enterprises can never truly embrace that model, and how cloud-style IT could eventually overturn the business world. After a few years in top-5 consulting and data center architecture, I then made the leap from physical infrastructure to virtual infrastructure.

The last seven years have been focused on assisting public sector and defense clients navigating cloud-oriented executive and legislative mandates and successfully embracing cloud infrastructure.

What brought you to VSO?

A mutual acquaintance recommended VSO as a good company to network with and introduced me to some of the executive team. After learning about the consulting DNA and getting to know the culture and the people; I made the decision to come on board and help grow VSO’s federal practice.

What is something you love about VSO?

Coming from a large extended family with an extensive military background, I value the veteran mission and actively participate in mentoring and developing those who have recently transitioned into the private sector.

What keeps you busy outside of VSO?

When I am not wrangling or wrestling children, you will usually find me either in my library exploring a new subject, or in my shop developing a new skill. Of those, the newest, still developing skill is blacksmithing and the most esoteric is probably Boullework marquetry and inlay.