Features Chief Information Officer

While some people move to Madison County, Alabama, for the temperate weather, others choose it for its largest city—Huntsville, better known as Rocket City. Home to the largest space museum in the world, the U.S. Space and Rocket Center, Huntsville is where the first rockets that went to the moon were built. Many scientists continue […]

At the start of her career, Kasey Ortoski knew she was helping society as a teacher, spending nearly half a decade imparting knowledge to kindergarteners as well as second and fourth graders. Since leaving the classroom in 2019, she’s found a new way to make an impact—as a contract operations manager handling IT at Jacobs. […]

The National Hurricane Center calls it the “cone of uncertainty”—the projected track of a hurricane for five days measured from its current position. New Orleans—and Loyola University—were in the cone of uncertainty eight times in 2020 as three tropical storms and two hurricanes struck Louisiana. That vulnerability to storms, as well as a 45-year-old IBM […]

Christopher Maynard has been leading IT teams and guiding technological transformations for more than 35 years. But it’s where he’s applied those skills—and the causes behind that work—that matter the most to him. “My career has always been in the nonprofit sector,” he says. “That’s been intentional. I want to work for organizations making a […]

Rome wasn’t built in a day, and neither is a gigabit city. Lots of complexities must be satisfied when laying down a fiber-optic network with its nearly unlimited bandwidth and speed-of-light data transmission. All things considered, the four years-plus that it took to wire Lexington, Kentucky, went about as smoothly as could be expected, says […]

Pens, sheaves of papers, the squeak of chalk across a green board that’s never quite clear of dust—all these are relics of the classroom even before the COVID-19 pandemic led to remote learning. Yet Dr. Robert W. Smiley remembers a time when not a single classroom had internet. In fact, as the technology coordinator for […]

Credit him for foresight. It was around a quarter-century ago when Joseph R. Patuto began assembling infrastructure for off-campus learning at Middlesex Community College. The need for it was widely doubted and the faculty were often unreceptive to the ideas of this former systems engineer from Digital Equipment Corp. “To a lot of people there […]

Jean Guezmir’s tech career was going well and she wasn’t planning on making big changes. At Target, for instance, she drove major improvements to the supply chain and partnered to replace the retailer’s enterprise resource planning platform and software, among other tasks. Then, at St. Jude Medical, she reorganized and systematized IT services and established […]

Now the president and CEO of T. Johnson & Associates Consulting Group, Travis Johnson says his experience in technology has led him to this moment—and the many challenges and opportunities to come. “I’ve been leading technology in higher ed since 2005, and I’ve worked my way up,” Johnson says. “My IT vision for higher ed […]

While it’s relatively easy to learn the outcome of a criminal case, everything that precedes the verdict isn’t so transparent—unless you’re in the courtroom. That’s changing in Washington’s Snohomish County, where a progressive-minded IT leader collaborates with the prosecutor’s office to create a public-facing dashboard that will trace cases from arrest to adjudication. Such tools […]