How an Enterprise Architect Shows Up for the People Who Need Him
It’s a Saturday afternoon just outside of Mandan, and Mike Benz is covered in dust and sweat at the base of an elderly family member’s driveway. Huffing and puffing, he works diligently to install a new garage door opener.
“Easy does it,” Benz mutters to himself as he threads the new track into place. Once it’s set, he plops down on the garage floor, rests against the wall, and catches his breath with a water bottle in hand.
Nearby, the homeowner beams, appreciative beyond measure for Benz, who has bent over backwards—sometimes literally—time and again to help them move furniture, organize storage, and tackle whatever project happened to be sitting on the to-do list that week.
Benz extends that kindness to pretty much everyone in his life.
A few miles away, for example, his neighbor is getting ready to install a new fence. You can bet your bottom dollar that Benz will be there with knee pads and a nail gun. And halfway around the world, in a quiet province in the Philippines, there’s a wobbly ceiling fan in his father-in-law’s living room that needs attention.
Near or far, when someone needs an assist, Benz shows up.
A Heart to Help
As an Enterprise Architect at NDIT, Benz brings that same ethic of customer service to his day-to-day, and it’s quietly defined his entire career.
Benz’s story starts in Killdeer, a small town in western North Dakota just north of Dickinson, where he landed his first job at 14, bagging groceries and stocking shelves at the local corner store. It was there, he says, that he developed an allergy to a phrase he still can’t stand today: “That's not my job.”
“I've never liked that attitude,” Benz says. “Sometimes you just have to roll up your sleeves and figure something out, whether it’s for an individual or an agency.”
That mindset followed him to Dickinson State University and into IT. In the late 1990s, he took a support desk role—his first real foothold in the technology world, and the place where his customer service instincts were forged for good. “From the very beginning, I enjoyed being the first line of support that people called,” he says.
From there, Benz’s career grew steadily: a decade at a Dickinson software company building solutions for hotels and motels, a move to Bismarck when he met his wife, and a new role as IT Coordinator with North Dakota Health and Human Services (NDHHS), supporting the agency’s surveillance systems and data.
Then the COVID-19 pandemic hit.
Benz naturally volunteered every way he could to help with the situation, on top of already working long hours to help fully automate North Dakota's health data reporting infrastructure—a crucial piece of the puzzle in battling the pandemic and other major health events.
The work put him in regular contact with the Governor’s Office and the National Guard, and he quickly became an invaluable member of the state’s technology team. It also set him on a path toward NDIT as North Dakota strategically centralized its IT operations. He eventually joined the Enterprise Architecture team, where he has been since November 2021—marking nearly 20 years in state government and almost three decades in IT overall.
A Blessing in Disguise
If you want to see Benz’s customer service instinct in action, look no further than a recent interaction with the North Dakota Department of Transportation (NDDOT).
What began as a simple permissions issue with the state’s media library storage service quickly grew into something much more complicated—entangled in single sign-on, Active Directory mappings, and user roles. When someone with an urgent need required admin access, Benz and a handful of NDIT colleagues, most notably Darrell Slag and Tina Radenz, dug in to understand not just how to fix the problem, but why it had happened in the first place.
“It was simply a matter of coming together as a team and figuring out how everything was joined together,” Benz says humbly. The result: a fix that left everyone better off than when they started, and real partnerships with NDDOT staff along the way.
The fix didn’t just resolve a technical headache—it left an impression. As one NDDOT staffer put it: “What I thought would be a simple fix seems to have opened a can of worms we weren’t expecting. Thank you for your time and patience, Mike—you’ve been a blessing.”
More Than a Job Title
In plain terms, Enterprise Architects (EAs) like Benz design the technical roadmap that helps state agencies solve big, complex problems—connecting systems, untangling data, and building solutions that hold up over time. In state government, where resources are often limited and the stakes of getting it wrong are high, that kind of planning isn’t a luxury; it's what keeps agencies from learning the same hard lessons twice.
Benz doesn't do that work alone, either. Enterprise Architects work hand in hand with Technology Business Partners (TBPs) and Information Security Officers (ISOs) to serve agency customers as a unified team—the kind of collaboration that turns an isolated fix into a genuinely great customer experience.
Speaking the Language
Ask Benz what he loves most about the job, and he doesn't hesitate: “My favorite part is imagining a solution, then seeing it come to life. It’s the greatest feeling.”
Years of working inside an agency before coming to NDIT gave him something that’s hard to teach: a firsthand understanding of what agencies actually need. “It's not always about the tech,” he says. “It’s more about the business need. Once we understand that, the rest becomes much easier.”
That perspective has taught him something else—that no matter how different two agencies’ missions look on paper, the technical solutions underneath are often remarkably similar. He points to his years working with infectious disease data at NDHHS: “It's no different than NDDOT,” he says. “It’s just different data elements. You’re essentially dealing with the same need, just manifested differently.”
It’s a philosophy that echoes across NDIT—the same one that inspired an Enterprise Portfolio Manager to help build the state’s Portfolio Steering Committee, giving agencies visibility into one another's work instead of operating in silos. Benz’s version plays out one integration at a time, proof that the fastest way to help agencies is often to notice how much they already have in common.
There’s a fitting parallel in his personal life.
For several years, he’s been quietly teaching himself Tagalog, the national language of the Philippines, using Rosetta Stone in 10- and 15-minute stretches whenever he can find them. His wife, who moved to the U.S. from the Philippines at age 6, grew up speaking her family’s local dialect rather than the national language—so Benz has spent years learning to meet her family halfway, one phrase at a time.
It’s not so different from how he approaches his job: learning the language an agency speaks well enough to genuinely help, rather than simply handing them a solution and walking away.
A Home Away From Home
Last year, Benz and his wife made their first trip together to the Philippines, bringing their daughter and son along for the first time. His wife hadn’t been back since 1997. They spent two weeks in her family’s hometown, far from any big city, with no hot running water and plenty of firsthand lessons for the kids.
True to form, Benz didn’t spend the trip sitting still—he and his father-in-law spent part of it installing that new ceiling fan, one of several house projects he was happy to assist with.
The two-week trip was itself something new: his first vacation of that length in his entire career. Making it happen meant leaning on the flexibility and trust NDIT extends to its people. When Benz called his supervisor on a Sunday to float the idea, the answer came back without hesitation: book it.
The same heart for helping others that defines Benz’s work also shapes the example he sets for his loved ones.
A Place Worth the Leap
It’s no coincidence that NDIT has been named one of the Top 10 Young Professional Workplaces by the Bismarck-Mandan Young Professionals Network two years running. For Benz, that tracks with everything he’s experienced firsthand—a workplace that hands out real trust, real flexibility, and real room to grow.
Ask him why someone should take a chance on NDIT, and Benz points to his team, the deep well of experience across the Enterprise Architecture group, and NDIT’s investment in continued learning. “I think that’s really good for people like me who never want to stop learning,” he says.
More than anything, though, Benz comes back to purpose.
“I think people want to do something meaningful and get satisfaction out of their job,” he says. “You want to feel like you accomplished something. That you were a help.”
In Benz’s case, not just a help—a blessing.