Features Region: Midwest

It’s a simple enough goal Michael Loggins espouses in his role as info-tech director at SMC Corp. of America, the U.S. division of the Japanese heavyweight for pneumatic control engineering in support of industrial automation. “Our job is to make people awesome,” the personable Loggins tells Toggle in February, several months after commencing a project […]

Jill Maple compares entering HOMEBANK to walking into an Apple store or another high-touch customer service environment. Customers don’t just step in, stand in line and file one-by-one to the teller. Instead, banking representatives welcome each customer up to their “pods” where the two can stand side by side. There’s no physical barrier separating them, […]

There is always a seat available at Troy Hardeman’s technology table. In his mind, it’s the best place to have people sit down and talk it out, because face-to-face interaction is the fastest way to get even the most complicated projects done. Regulations. Legacy systems. Data migration to the clouds. Hardeman, an IT veteran with […]

It’s time for that most loathed of citizen rituals: spending an entire afternoon watching that digital red counter as you wait to renew your driver’s license: 17, 18, 19, at a rate of roughly one tick every three minutes. By the way, you’re number 72. If you happen to live in the State of Kansas, […]

When Roger Brunelle arrived at Naperville Community Unit School District 203 (NCUSD) in 2010, after a successful run in the private sector, many in the district weren’t sure what to expect. For some, the assumption was that the new CIO would test the waters of change cautiously, one toe at a time. Instead, Brunelle went […]

A technologist by profession and education, Moe Alkhafaji has a passion for technology and problem-solving. But he acknowledges that, in his younger days, his goal was to “start a company to build something cool and make money.” That inclination led him to design and develop an intelligent decision-support engine using contextual patient data—medCPU Advisor—that, when […]

The American Academy of Family Physicians, whose 135,000 members make up the first line of defense against most any health problem, has been a bedrock of advocacy for family medicine for seven-plus decades, “A family doctor is well-positioned to be the one who first diagnoses a patient’s illness or injury,” Michael Smith tells Toggle in […]

And you thought you had a busy summer. Every summer for the last four years, Tim Klan has led the technology component, as Livonia Public Schools has undertaken not one school building renovation project, but five to six buildings for a total of 23 so far. From a tech perspective, that’s meant installing new everything—servers, […]

What does it mean to be a patient-centric hospital? For Pam Banchy, registered nurse and chief information officer at Western Reserve Hospital in Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio, it means combining her skills and experience on the clinical side with her expertise in deploying technology to better serve patients. Since Banchy first spoke with Toggle in January […]

While our college experiences are in many ways defined by buildings themselves—the gothic brick and modernist concrete, the teeming dorms and chock-full lecture halls—the technological infrastructures can be equally evocative. Without reliable internet, those memories can be colored quite differently. And not in sunny hues, either. Looking at the modern, arched opening of Ozarks Technical […]