About

Thirty years of doing this — most of it as the one in the room making the call.

I'm Grey Lawson — over 30 years in IT — 10 of them as an IT Director running complex, multi-site enterprise environments. For most of my career I was also hands-on in the trenches: switches, servers, datacenters, the actual work. I direct the work because I've done the work.

From 2005 to 2015 I also ran my own practice, AbilitySBCC — ten years of hands-on IT support for more than 25 different clients. I advised every one of them the same way I do today: vendor-neutral, nothing to sell them, just the right call for their business.

The independent-assessor role goes back to the start. In the early 2000s I led a four-person team on a full cybersecurity assessment of the Oklahoma City-County Health Department — a top-to-bottom review of a government agency's security posture, reported straight to leadership. Verifying whether the security you're paying for actually holds up isn't a new service for me; it's most of what I've done.

I started OKC CIO Partners because I kept seeing the same gap in the Oklahoma City market: businesses where technology had quietly become critical to how they operate, but nobody at the leadership table actually owned it. That leaves an owner choosing between guessing and taking a vendor's word for it — and both of those get expensive.

You get a person who knows your systems — not a ticket queue and a different tech every visit. That's how I ran it for a decade at AbilitySBCC, and it's how I run it now.