I have been in IT for over 30 years. Not a neat career path. I came up through operations. That means I have fixed the copier, written warehouse logic in Excel because nobody else would, led support operations globally for IFS, implemented SAP in Sweden, Dubai, and Serbia, run gap analyses across continents, built a global master data team, and designed factory processes from the floor up.
I know what work looks like when the systems are wrong and the people have already built undocumented workarounds to keep reality moving. I have sat in manufacturing plants in South Africa, the Middle East, and Eastern Europe. The difference between a clean architecture diagram and an actual production environment at 2am is not theoretical to me.
For the last decade I have been running IT security. I designed the key controls. I hold a Master’s in engineering and an ISMS certification. The business scope I am responsible for reaches roughly 1.5 billion euros. The Finnish legal entity is small enough that at events someone may look at the badge and assume I arrived from a minor side office. That is fine.
For a while I let another kind of doubt get in. A friend, brilliant in his own field, has more than once introduced me as someone who drifted into this role by accident, with no formal background, someone who would rather be making art. I think he meant it affectionately. It still landed where those remarks always land.
The profile is messy. That is the profile. I understand “risk-based” as something lived, not something presented. Budget is real. Threat is real. Legacy OT is real. Undocumented dependencies are real. That is the work.
I also make films. I make art. I have been to IFFR three times, once as a director, twice as an actor. My film Sleep is currently being exhibited at the Anozero Coimbra Biennale. Back in 2015, Edwyn Carrels called me out of nowhere to show the work after months of silence. Sometimes the work finds its own way.
For years I kept the two sides separate. Different websites, different names. I understood the logic. In art circles a “real job” can flatten the mystery. In professional circles visible art makes people wonder if you are fully serious. So I split the versions of myself.
The problem is that I am one person.
The separation was quiet and corrosive. It made me look more legible but less true.
This spring the timing became hard to ignore. Sleep was selected to Coimbra. At nearly the same moment I was invited to speak on a major cyber podcast. Different worlds, same mind.
So I stopped hiding it. Not loudly. Just by admitting what was already true. The breadth that makes some people uncomfortable in professional settings is the same breadth that lets me make films and build security models for ugly real environments. These are not contradictions.
I am shy. I spent 14 years abroad and came back to Finland without much of a natural network, not in art, not in security. I do not effortlessly work a room. But the combination of ERP architecture, global operations, OT security, and active creative practice is unusual in a way that cannot be faked.
If I need a new position one day, I will not resemble a standard candidate. I no longer think that is a disadvantage. A standard candidate competes with other standard candidates. I do not really have a direct comparison group.
That is part of why juhalilja.com exists now as it does. Two doors. One person.
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