From 17 to 57 boards. One Slack rollout. A 75% cost cut.
The hardest part of the job was not the cybersecurity. It was getting 57 publicly funded organizations, each with their own politics, IT teams, and risk tolerance, to operate as one program. Slack became the spine. I built the case for it, rolled it out, and renegotiated the licensing.
The starting picture.
A provincial cyber resilience program for Ontario’s K-12 sector. 17 school boards onboarded when I joined. The mandate was to scale that to all 57. Same team, same budget, more sensitivity per stakeholder, not less.
Email threads were the connective tissue. They worked at 17 boards. They were never going to work at 57. The program needed an actual operating surface.
Why I picked Slack, and why that was a product decision.
The choice looked like a tooling decision. It was a product decision. The program needed:
- A shared channel structure where every board had a private space and a few cross-program rooms
- Searchable history so a new IT lead could read three months of context in one afternoon
- A workflow surface where I could pin progress trackers, alerts, and intake forms next to the conversation
- Light enough to feel modern in 2024, structured enough to satisfy procurement
I built the case, ran the pilot, then rolled it across all 57. Adoption was a function of structure, not chat. Channels were named consistently. Every board had a clear “what to do here”. The platform stopped being a tool and started being how the program ran.
How I cut 75% off the platform cost.
Once Slack was the operating surface, licensing became the next problem. Every board onboarded meant more seats. The default contract was going to scale linearly with adoption.
I audited usage by role, mapped active users to actual workflows, and proposed a tiered seat model. Light users got a guest tier. Active operators got full seats. Procurement got a budget story they could defend. Slack got a long-term commitment across the program.
The result: a 75% reduction in Slack license cost across the program, while we tripled the number of organizations on it. Same product. Better contract.
What else shipped under this program.
- Workplans, progress trackers, and collaboration systems that made scaling from 17 to 57 boards possible at all
- A provincial-level cyber posture dashboard. I defined the metrics and the data storytelling spine. Used by Ministry executives
- Cross-functional planning around SIEM, XDR, and Vulnerability Management, with GPT-powered alert triage in the mix
- Cybersecurity workshops for 50 to 100 participants, translating technical material for school superintendents and trustees
What it says about how I work.
- I treat tooling decisions as product decisions. The platform you pick is the operating surface for the work
- I move at institutional speed without losing momentum. 17 to 57 is a long arc. The program never stalled
- I bring receipts to procurement. A 75% cut is what happens when usage data and a defensible model meet a willing vendor
- I run trust as a system. School board leads, IT, Ministry executives, vendors. Every audience got the version they could act on