Matthew Ridge

Nearly thirty years in IT support, from the desk itself through to running the organizations that staff it — most of it in contract team-lead and manager roles for pharmaceutical, medical-device, financial-services, and manufacturing clients around Boston.

That has included support operations at genuine scale: a 15-person team across four continents running 24/7/365 coverage for multiple client companies, as liaison to their CTOs and IT directors. It has also included the unglamorous version of the same skill — taking an East Coast queue from a peak of 146 tickets to under 20 in three months with no on-site support, and cutting a 30% breached-SLA rate to under 1%.

The earlier years were spent closer to the metal: Apple-certified desktop, portable and help-desk work out of Cupertino, building macOS deployment images for Boston College, Mount Wachusett Community College, the Massachusetts Medical Society and Harvard University, and running networks back through the AppleTalk era to gigabit.

Contract work in regulated industries is a particular education on top of that. You arrive at an environment somebody else designed, under rules that do not bend, with users who need to work now and an audit trail that has to hold up later. You learn very quickly which problems are technical and which ones only look technical.

That work is the reason the software side exists. The tooling built here comes from watching support teams do the same thing by hand for years because no vendor would build the small, specific thing that would have fixed it — and from being close enough to the problem to know exactly what that thing needed to do.

Black Sheep Systems is the two halves working together: fix how the desk runs, then build the tooling it was missing.