Our Founder
Systems make more sense when you’ve spent a career inside them.
Mark Hillyard
Founder & Principal Consultant
For more than two decades, I’ve worked at the intersections of technology, security, governance, service management, and organizational operations.
Different industries. Different problems. Different frameworks.
But remarkably often, the same underlying challenge:
The individual pieces made sense.
The system they created together did not.
9th Story Foundry grew from that observation—and from a career spent helping organizations understand the difference.
A career at the intersections
The interesting problems rarely belong to one discipline.
My career has rarely stayed neatly inside a single box.
I’ve designed and administered technical systems. Built and improved service-management practices. Led security and governance programs. Written the documentation that was supposed to describe how organizations worked—and spent enough time with the people doing the work to discover where it didn’t.
That breadth eventually became more important than any individual discipline.
Because the hardest organizational problems I encountered were almost never purely technical, procedural, strategic, or cultural.
They lived in the relationships between them.
The work
Experience matters. Context matters more.
Technology & Systems
Systems administration, architecture, implementation, integration, and the practical realities of keeping technology useful.
Service & Process
Decades of IT service-management experience, including ITIL Expert and ITIL 4 Managing Professional credentials—and plenty of experience discovering where frameworks meet actual work.
Security & Governance
Information security, compliance, facility security, policy, risk, and the uncomfortable distance that can develop between control design and operational reality.
Communication & Change
Technical writing, proposals, documentation, stakeholder communication, and translating complex systems into something people can understand and use.
The disciplines changed. The pattern didn’t.
Working Principles
Consulting should create clarity, not dependency.
01
Curiosity before prescription.
Understand what exists, why it exists, and what problem people were trying to solve before deciding what should change.
02
Evidence before assumption.
Policies, processes, dashboards, and documentation describe part of a system. The people operating it describe another.
Both matter.
03
Leave capability, not paperwork.
A consulting engagement should leave an organization better able to understand and manage its own system, not simply leave behind a larger document repository.
Please. No more binders.
Outside the Diagram
I Still like making things.
There is probably a reason I called the company a Foundry.
I’ve always been drawn to making things—systems, writing, ideas, and occasionally things that require considerably more sawdust.
There is something satisfying about taking raw material, understanding what it wants to become, shaping it carefully, and leaving behind something useful.
That instinct informs my consulting work too.
Organizations aren’t machines. They are far more interesting than that. But good work still requires attention to materials, relationships, tolerances, craft—and the humility to notice when reality has other ideas.
That’s the work I built 9th Story Foundry to do.
