Merritt has more than 25 years of experience designing, delivering, and operating technology and business process solutions in the higher education sector. He has specific expertise in information technology (IT) service management, information security and IT organizational strategic planning.

About Merritt

Merritt has nearly three decades of experience developing, delivering, and operating technology and business process solutions in the higher education sector. He has specific expertise in IT service management, information security and IT organizational strategic planning.

Throughout his career, Merritt has:

• Developed IT skills and activity surveys, an IT service portfolio, and maturity diagnostics for over 500 IT staff members for an IT organizational review of a large public institution.
• Led a benchmarking analysis for a Big Ten centralized IT department against IT service management (ITSM) best practices, resulting in an ITSM maturity model and maturity scale, a road map of process and technology improvement initiatives, and extensive metrics on the current-state IT delivery landscape.
• Led an IT policy/electronic protected health information (ePHI) readiness assessment for a research organization where he reviewed over 80 IT policies related to document and information management, including continuity/disaster recovery, risk analysis and management, access controls, and encryption, and conducted an extensive benchmarking study against the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) Security Rule as well as the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Special Publication 800 (SP 800) series.
• Served as the global service lead responsible for the planning, transition and steady-state operations of a 50-person offshore data center project to migrate 2,300 systems from over 300 physical locations in 60 countries into three geographically distributed data centers.

Merritt is a member of numerous professional associations, including ISACA, the IT Service Management Forum USA (itSMF USA) and the American College of Healthcare Executives (ACHE). He is also a United States Navy veteran.

Prior to joining Huron, Merritt served as a senior manager for Grant Thornton LLP and a senior consultant for Deloitte Consulting. In addition, Merritt has held operational roles such as vice president of strategy and consulting, chief information officer, chief technology officer, and director of security and infrastructure.

Merritt holds a Bachelor of Arts in communications from the University of Pittsburgh.