You've Been Heard

Mason Herbel describes the shift from an AI startup to Parallel Systems, where the first questions were about governance and company data. Some employees already used AI. Others had barely started. His advice for IT leaders: give people a clear route to approved tools, then make that route easy enough to use at work.He suggests company enterprise plans, agreements about data handling, and a trial period for tools employees request. After the trial, check actual usage and whether another paid app already does the job. Blocking a website has limits when someone can reach for a personal phone. Mason puts it plainly: “So you may as well make it easy for people to use in a secured manner.” This is his proposed approach, rather than a report of a completed company-wide AI rollout.We also get into choosing infrastructure one workload at a time. Mason recounts moving an engineering firm away from aging local servers after checking its remaining applications and Microsoft licenses. At an AI company, he argued for examining owned GPUs as API bills grew. He describes that proposal and the conversations around it; he does not claim verified savings from a completed GPU deployment.For IT leaders trying to get a useful idea heard, Mason explains how he kept discussing the GPU proposal with a principal engineer. He also recalls asking to join a server installation early in his first job and learning by doing when the lead technician had to leave. The practical thread: ask how the work gets done, bring colleagues into the decision, and keep everyday IT needs covered while taking on new projects.

Jim Harden began his IT career in the Marine Corps, building tactical data networks from commodity gear before moving into corporate technology and leadership. Now CIO at Singleton Schreiber, Jim joins Phil Howard to explain how IT can move from break-fix support to business strategy. He shares why his team is giving lawyers one governed entry point for AI workflows, how infrastructure as a service cut new-office deployments from days to hours, and why growth requires two- and three-year technology plans. Jim also explains what he wants from specialist vendors, including a project that consumed about $40,000 before being scrapped, and why a strong project manager can be worth every penny. The conversation closes with lessons from bad leaders, useful feedback, humility, and the questions Jim asks at the end of every one-on-one.

Peter Vardaro started in biomedical equipment service, where unreliable connectivity and slow documentation often consumed more time than the repair itself. That frustration pulled him into low-code experiments, enterprise applications, medical-equipment logistics, and team leadership. In this conversation with Mike Kelley, Peter explains why applications must be designed for the business that may exist tomorrow, how repeated support tickets can point to features that help hundreds of people, and why leaders should measure and celebrate the time their teams return to the business. Peter also discusses vendor accountability, protected health information, AI governance, vibe-coded prototypes, and his belief that AI will make human judgment and relationships more valuable.

Mikkel Finsen, Chief Technology Officer and CISO at Open Door Family Medical Center, explains why healthcare AI needs guardrails, human validation, and a clear patient-care purpose. He also shares hard lessons from ransomware recovery, an overcomplicated network, nonprofit budgeting, and building IT into a trusted business partner.

Rajvir Madan, SVP and Chief Digital and Information Technology Officer at Arcutis Biotherapeutics, explains why experienced leaders must test old patterns against a new context. He connects self-awareness to culture, operating principles, business outcomes, and the discipline to stop work that no longer serves the organization.

Dr. Michael Barr has worked across military communications, infantry leadership, university teaching, research operations, and healthcare IT. In this conversation with Doug Camin, he explains how that range changed the way he leads. They discuss connecting technology to operations, preparing people for work beyond their current role, making decisions with incomplete information, and building a succession pipeline before a key absence exposes the gap. Michael closes with a direct challenge for emerging leaders: study the parts of the business that sit outside your technical comfort zone.

Bret Henning started college as a music major and entered technology through a trade school and a computer operator job. He handled backups, printers, support, and disk drives before moving into programming and application work. Building systems for accounting, payroll, inventory, and manufacturing gave him an education in how a business runs.Bret traces the shift from computers as an after-the-fact record to computers as the place where work happens. He recalls how Y2K made technology’s place in the business harder to ignore and describes an early web sales interface that turned month-end reports into current information people could act on during the month.The conversation then turns to shadow AI. Bret explains why an immediate no can drive employees around IT instead of changing their behavior. His approach starts with questions, listening, and a clear explanation of risk. IT still has to offer an option that meets the employee’s need. He also shares why he hires teachable people with customer service experience, how empathy affects vendor and employee relationships, and why trust starts before a difficult business conversation.

Brian Laird's career has taken him through tech support, networking, security, software development, enterprise architecture, consulting, and the CIO seat. In this conversation with Doug Camin, he looks back on the week his former company sent thousands of employees home during COVID. Some customer service agents had no internet at home, so staff lined up at Verizon stores to buy hotspots three or five at a time. Early planning gave the company something to work from when the situation changed fast.Today, Brian is CIO at Bahler Group, a group of construction companies with manufacturing, supply chain, and field operations. His team is replacing a twenty-year-old Excel sales tool, connecting data across operating companies, and building systems that can support more revenue without adding staff at the old rate. He explains how family ownership changes the pace of decisions, why leaders need to understand the rhythm of the business, and how clear decision criteria help teams act with confidence.Brian also walks through Bahler Group's AI strategy. AI-assisted development helps the team build faster. Department copilots make operational data easier to query. Purpose-built copilots check estimates, contracts, and material takeoffs for details that may have been missed. Brian keeps people in the decision loop while the team learns where the AI can be trusted. He closes with four rules for team decisions and a direct challenge to rising IT leaders: learn how the business works and prove the value your work creates.

Demetrios Xarhoulakos began his career producing CAD drawings and became the person colleagues called when technology stopped cooperating. That curiosity eventually led him into application support, global team management, cloud migration, and technology leadership for an international engineering business.In this conversation with host Mike Kelley, Demetrios explains why solving every problem personally limits a leader's reach. He shares how he trained support teams to handle specialized tickets, connected technical groups that had been operating in silos, and aligned IT priorities with organic growth and acquisitions.The discussion also covers follow-the-sun licensing, vendor scorecards, unused contract value, role fit on lean teams, and the difficult decisions that come with people leadership. Demetrios closes with a practical look at governed AI adoption, the support burden behind employee-built applications, and a future where IT spends less time reacting to tickets and more time enabling the business.

Farhan Zakir's path into technology started far from a server room. After leaving medical school in Pakistan, he returned to Orlando, worked across hospitality roles, moved into accounting, and found his opening through ERP implementation for the club industry. In this conversation with Phil Howard, Farhan explains how that operating background became an advantage in IT leadership. He shares practical ways to translate technology into business language, make support interactions feel safe, teach cybersecurity through personal relevance, protect historical data during software migrations, and communicate value to executives. Farhan also explores the service cost of automation, the responsibility to keep learning as AI evolves, and the three-part framework he gives emerging IT professionals: listen, understand, execute.

In Episode 441 of You've Been Heard, Michael Moore speaks with Matt Thomas, Director of IT and Marketing at Crabapple Roofing, about the communication skills that turn technical expertise into business leadership. Matt traces a career spanning small MSPs, music, recording, photography, video production, and internal IT leadership. He explains why technology becomes easier to support when leaders tell clear stories, respect the people asking for help, and connect cost to time saved and business outcomes. The conversation also covers practical AI adoption, documentation and SOP libraries, the danger of leadership losing touch with frontline work, the value of solving problems every day, and the governance needed to keep AI automations useful, secure, and maintainable.

In Episode 439 of You've Been Heard, Phil Howard speaks with James Dunlap about turning technology and security work into language executives understand. James draws on leadership experience across healthcare, banking, fintech, and legal services to explain why projects, ticket counts, and technical jargon rarely tell the full story at the board level. He shows how to lead with risk reduced, value created, revenue impact, competitive advantage, and reputational consequences. The conversation follows his path from fine art photography and medical imaging into CIO leadership, including his decision to step down from a healthcare CIO role to learn directly under a banking CISO. James also recounts leading a seven-location medical practice from paper charts to electronic records, examines the security challenge of legacy healthcare equipment, and warns that governance and accountability for AI agents are not keeping pace with capability. He closes by reframing imposter syndrome as part of growth and explaining why credibility comes from quiet, consistent follow-through.

Bill Garcia explains why IT leaders lose credibility when they speak technology but cannot translate it into business outcomes. Drawing on a career in process redesign, ERP transformation, COO roles, and global leadership, he shows how governance can increase speed, why AI needs clean and trusted knowledge, and why communication remains the skill that separates strategic leaders from service providers.

In Episode 435 of You've Been Heard, Doug Camin speaks with Stephen Hightower about a career that spans aerospace and defense, information security, quality engineering, private equity consulting, YETI Coolers, and technology leadership at Harmar. Stephen explains why cycle time, service quality, and unit cost are the three metrics he uses to understand whether a business process is working. The conversation moves through private equity speed, order-to-cash thinking, Lean Six Sigma, master data, ERP and CRM discipline, AI decision quality, proactive monitoring, and the need for IT leaders to earn trust through transparency. Stephen's through line is clear: technology should not be treated as a cost center when it can remove waste, improve customer experience, and help the business make better decisions.

In Episode 434 of You've Been Heard, Phil Howard speaks with Tim McCrosson about a career that moved from dot-com era web development into federal IT leadership, policy, cybersecurity, and large-scale operations. Tim explains how an early leadership correction changed him from a command-and-control project manager into a more sustainable coach and collaborator, while also showing why leaders still need the right style for the moment. The conversation moves through CIO authority in the federal government, laptop refresh policy, the use-or-lose budget problem, enterprise depot operations, pandemic-era network consolidation, SASE risk reduction, AI in acquisition, and the danger of chasing AI without a clear business case. Tim's through line is simple: technology can be powerful, but it works best when leaders manage up, manage down, build trust, and keep people at the center.

In Episode 433 of You've Been Heard, Mike Kelley speaks with Alex Vasilescu about the path from service desk work to global IT service delivery leadership. Alex shares lessons from major incident management, ITIL-driven operations, ServiceNow optimization, and the current pressure organizations feel around AI adoption. The conversation centers on a practical point: AI can create value, but not by rushing. Companies need clear use cases, organized data, governance, security, and a realistic implementation pace before technology can truly improve service delivery and customer experience.

Mike Kelley speaks with Jesse Crane, Vice President Information Technology at Argon Medical Devices. Jesse traces a career that started in finance and accounting, moved through Y2K, Oracle ERP, Silicon Valley startups, Stanford, Stryker, master data, business partnering, cybersecurity, and ultimately the VP seat. The conversation focuses on how IT earns trust inside the business, why being in the room is different from being accepted as a peer, and why AI should not be used to make broken processes faster. Jesse brings the perspective of a leader who understands budgets, operations, security, data, and the human side of change.

Kevin Neureuter, Jr. brings a supply-chain, public-sector, managed-services, and business-ownership perspective to IT leadership. In this episode, he talks with Michael Moore about moving from reactive support to proactive leadership, translating IT decisions into owner-level options, using frameworks like ITIL and ISO 20000 without getting buried in process, and building AI governance that creates guardrails instead of denial. Kevin also explains why the next 18 months will be messy for IT leaders, and why awareness, backups, disaster recovery, and the ability to pivot matter more than fear.

Kevin Neureuter, Jr., Director of IT at DiMarco Group, joins Michael Moore to explain why modern IT should be understood as revenue protection, not overhead.Kevin brings a supply-chain, public-sector, managed-services, and business-ownership perspective to IT leadership. The conversation covers moving from reactive support to proactive leadership, translating IT decisions into owner-level options, using frameworks like ITIL and ISO 20000 without getting buried in process, and building AI governance that creates guardrails instead of denial.Kevin also explains why the next 18 months will be messy for IT leaders, and why awareness, backups, disaster recovery, and the ability to pivot matter more than fear.

Michael Baillargeon brings a telecom and contact-center lens to the AI strategy conversation. He argues that companies should stop treating AI like a SKU and start treating it like an operating practice. The episode covers practical quick wins in call recordings and quality management, the risk of public GPT use, the role of LLM aggregators, why data cleanup matters, and the five-part sequence IT leaders can use to move from AI pressure to measurable business outcomes: stakeholders, outcomes, data, guardrails, and ROI.

Jose Young, CTO at Beyond Air and founder of BrightPeak AI Solutions, and Luis Oliveira, Director at T4 Guidance Measurement, compare what carries across industries and what has to be learned from the ground up. They talk through early programming days, hurricanes, cloud recovery, COVID-era healthcare technology, stakeholder buy-in, SAP and manufacturing realities, and the rush toward AI. The strongest lesson is blunt: IT earns trust when it solves business pain, learns the operation, and avoids becoming the hammer looking for a nail.

Cody Aldinger is VP of IT at KLJ, managing technology for 30 offices across the US. He's learned that a huge part of his job isn't technology—it's sales. Convincing business leaders that IT is worth listening to.His AI philosophy cuts through the hype: "The word hallucination is a fancy word for flat out wrong." He's focused on practical governance, teaching context over button-clicking, and using AI as a thought partner.We get into the gap between AI expectations and reality, why throwing AI at bad processes just makes them faster, and the pricing disaster nobody's talking about. Cody shares how he's rolling out Microsoft Copilot to 650 employees while keeping guardrails in place.The biggest takeaway? People don't care how much you know until they know how much you care. In the AI world, that means listening first, understanding the real problem, then figuring out if AI is even the right tool for the job.

Eric Brosius, Vice President of IT at Sun River Health, joins Mike Kelley to talk about the real pressure behind healthcare technology leadership. He shares how his team supports multiple entities with different risk profiles, what COVID demanded from healthcare IT, why AI governance now has to account for PHI and vendor behavior, and how leaders build teams that answer the 4AM database call. The conversation is a grounded look at AI, compliance, process discipline, and the invisible work that keeps care moving.

Edward Marchewka, CIO at Illinois Bone and Joint Institute, joins You've Been Heard for a practical conversation about board communication, cybersecurity leadership, and the gap between technical expertise and business trust. He explains the information asymmetry gap, why fear-based security messaging often backfires, and how IT leaders can connect risk to confidentiality, finance, people, reputation, availability, and data integrity. The episode also covers adult learning, remediation ownership, third-party validation, operationalized security, incident response discipline, and the career lesson Edward gives every emerging IT leader: do not sit behind your desk.

Dario Sarmiento started as a help desk fixer at one of the world's largest law firms during the dot-com boom. He thought his job was solving tech problems. Turns out, his real job was understanding how every department actually works.Now CIO at Wilshire Law Firm, Dario brings a unique perspective shaped by 25 years in legal tech and a master's in theological studies. His approach? Servant leadership that puts people first and treats IT as the connective tissue of the organization.We get into workflow intimacy (why IT touches every department differently than HR or Finance), the upside-down leadership triangle, and why AI governance is about teaching people to use the right hammer for the right job. Plus the story of an employee who almost quit to become a bus driver—and how Dario's intervention changed his entire trajectory.The biggest takeaway? IT's strategic advantage isn't technical expertise. It's proximity to how the whole business actually operates.

Steve Goudreau has been in IT leadership long enough to know the difference between being at the table and being heard. At his current role, he has a seat at the executive round table. At his previous company with five times as many direct reports, he didn't even have director-level access.The difference? Understanding what executives actually need from IT. Not helpdesk metrics or project status updates. Information that helps the company make better decisions about technology, risk, and investment. "You want the information you're presenting to move the company forward," Steve explains.We get into executive communication that works, AI strategy that starts with goals instead of tools, and shadow AI governance that doesn't kill productivity. Steve also breaks down technical debt as future cost made visible, the questions CEOs should ask their IT leaders, and why the strongest leadership skill isn't technical.His biggest insight hits different: "There is a cost to know things." Training costs money. Research costs time. But staying ignorant costs more.

Robert Sheesley explains why AI needs business architecture, capability maturity, intelligence architecture, and organizational change management before it can create durable value.

Drew Ludwick brings military communications pressure, network engineering depth, and modern CIO judgment to a blunt lesson: technology will fail. The work is making sure the mission does not. Drew Ludwick did not plan to become an IT leader. He started as a network engineer who liked hard environments, messy infrastructure, and the pressure of making systems work when the stakes were real. That background shaped his view of so-called zero-fail environments. Drew argues that technology breaks at the worst possible time. The real discipline is building redundancy, preventive maintenance, planning process, and team readiness around the mission that cannot stop. In this conversation, Drew connects lessons from military communications and the White House Communications Agency to business IT leadership today. He explains why leadership intensity has to change by context, why IT needs a seat in business planning before systems are bought, and why data governance now sits at the center of AI risk. The conversation closes on a warning most teams will recognize: vendor management is becoming one of the next big security problems, especially as vendors add AI features inside business systems with limited visibility. Key takeaways: Plan for mission survival, not perfect uptime.; Frame technical risk in business language.; Govern data before scaling AI.

Bart Waress has led IT across healthcare, telecom, banking, oil and gas, mining, data centers, and energy. His lesson is blunt: transformation sticks when IT listens first, speaks the business language, and proves value where work actually happens.

Nick Feczko took the VP IT seat at DuBois Chemicals six months ago after walking away from an environment that ran on ego and politics. He came looking for a place where IT careers get built on common sense instead of theatrics, and he is running the AI rollout the same way.

Thomas Wolf runs IT for DEUTZ Corporation in Atlanta, the Americas hub of the 162-year-old German engine maker. His job is balancing global governance with local execution.

Josh Siddon is rolling out managed Wi-Fi across three hundred multifamily properties at MAA. The infrastructure is the easy part. The hard part is pulling IT out of the back room and into the business, where it now has to live. Josh Siddon is VP of IT Architecture at MAA, one of the largest multifamily operators in the country, and the founder of ResiQ, a consultancy helping smaller operators navigate managed Wi-Fi, cloud migration, and PropTech vendor selection. His team is rolling out managed Wi-Fi across a 300-plus property portfolio, with per-unit VLAN isolation, 10-gig pipes, and contractors cutting cable through occupied brownfield buildings. The engineering is hard. What he argues is harder is the identity shift IT has to make alongside it. Josh says you can't be just a nerd anymore. A resident's Wi-Fi connection isn't a ticket, it's an operations promise, which means IT now lives in the budget meeting, the project planning cycle, and the CEO's goal-setting conversation. He traces his own ability to make that shift back to a mentor who made him work a week in the hotel, food and beverage, finance, HR, and the buffet line before he was allowed to touch IT. We get into how he's rolling the same playbook forward for the AI wave. Josh lived through RPA at a private-equity-backed retail chain, automating eighty percent of Tuesday-through-Thursday workload without cutting a job. He thinks AI is the same wave with fewer lines of code and the same trust-building work. His team at MAA integrates MCP and Copilot Studio into third-party systems to turn Copilot from a desktop tool into an enterprise platform, and he's a self-described Claude fan. Josh's prediction for eighteen months from now: the conversation won't be about the technology. It'll be about former CIOs and CTOs running companies as CEOs. Key takeaways: You can't be just a nerd anymore. People skills and business fluency are the job now.; Managed Wi-Fi turns IT into operations. A resident's connection is a promise, not a ticket.; AI is the RPA wave again. The trust-building work matters more than the tool.

Scott Kutz runs IT at a construction equipment dealership where excavators connect to the internet and OEMs move faster than the infrastructure can follow. His answer isn't to be the hero. It's to make himself unnecessary. Scott Kutz is five months into his role as IT Manager at Brooks Tractor, a construction equipment dealership where service managers remote into customer excavators in real time and OEM vendors push cloud platforms faster than most dealers can upgrade their bandwidth. He came from a larger privately held construction company where he watched IT people hoard knowledge, refuse to explain their work, and position themselves as irreplaceable. He decided early on that wasn't going to be him. Scott's approach comes from his father, a twenty-year Marine veteran in communications who taught him that slow is smooth and smooth is fast. "It's okay to not know, but it's not okay to stop learning and it's not okay to stop teaching. Because knowledge kept to yourself isn't being kind." That line runs through everything Scott does. He lets his team push buttons on decommissioned systems knowing things will break. He asks people what they do for fun so he can explain IT problems using their language. He told one coworker he fixed their computer by changing the spark plug in their engine. We get into how construction equipment dealerships are quietly becoming high-tech environments, why Scott turned a frustrated coworker into an ally who championed a company-wide bandwidth upgrade, and how he earned a seat at the leadership table five months in by learning the dealership's service operations before touching the IT. Scott's test for himself is straightforward. If he wins the Powerball tomorrow or gets hit by a bus, the business should keep running without him. If it can't, he's not indispensable. He's a single point of failure disguised as expertise. Key takeaways: Make yourself unnecessary. The business should run without you.; Let people fail in low-risk environments. They learn faster that way.; Learn the business before you try to change the IT.

Rob Spellman spent 25 years thinking he had to be the smartest person in the room. Then he learned that being a bulldog who gets things done beats being the expert every time.

Antonio Marin spent decades thinking CIOs earn their seat by talking technology. Then he learned business leaders don't care about CPU utilization, they care about business outcomes.

Piotr Mlodecki spent years watching business leaders hide behind software limitations. Then AI removed all the excuses and exposed the real problem: bad process architecture. Piotr Mlodecki is Chief Transformation Officer at SOL-MILLENNIUM Medical Group, where he's learned that AI's biggest threat isn't replacing humans—it's exposing bad business design. For years, companies could blame slow software delivery for operational failures. Not anymore. "The ROI does not come from the question answered. It comes from a task executed, the job done." Piotr argues that most companies are treating AI like a faster layer on top of broken processes instead of rebuilding how the business actually operates. We get into why feasibility is no longer the bottleneck, how to design agents like real employees with KPIs, and why your data architecture determines whether AI transformation succeeds or becomes expensive automation theater. The prediction? In 18 months, we'll be competing on who built the better agentic enterprise, not whether we should use AI at all. Key takeaways: ROI comes from tasks executed, not questions answered; Design agents like employees with job descriptions and KPIs; Data architecture determines AI success more than the models

Stephen Salaka has a PhD in psychology and builds nuclear weapons systems. Then he learned the hardest truth in tech: AI can't fix what humans won't adopt. Stephen Salaka wanted to build nuclear bombs. A lab accident sent him to computer science. A stint in Japan taught him his real superpower: making humans actually use the technology he builds. Now he's a CTO with a PhD in Industrial/Organizational Psychology. That combination makes him dangerous to every AI myth floating around C-suites. "The biggest fundamental misconception is AI is going to be a panacea for everything," he says. "The real trouble most organizations face is the people." We get into why UPS's maintenance system failed for years until Stephen added change management, how vibe coding should stop at the prototype stage, and why the AI bubble collapse is coming faster than anyone thinks. Plus his framework for bringing order to chaos without mandates. The payoff: Stephen's lived at the fault line between brilliant technology and stubborn humans. He knows which one wins. Key takeaways: Change management isn't optional - it's the actual product you're delivering; Vibe coding works for prototypes, then convert to proper backend components; Smooth processes first, then speed follows - not the other way around

Andrew Rosenblatt has been CIO at three PE-backed healthcare companies. Then he learned the hardest truth about IT leadership: "You're perpetually selling and you need to convince them that it's actually not your idea. It's their idea."

Tim Armstrong runs IT for a construction company with a team of four serving 175 staff. His take on the biggest mistake IT makes: gatekeeping support behind ticket systems instead of helping people first. Tim Armstrong is 90 days into his role as Manager of IT at PROCON, a design-build construction company in Hooksett, NH. With a four-person team serving 175 staff, he has had to build trust fast, deploy Kanban sprints from scratch, navigate shadow AI, and figure out what technology means at a company that builds buildings for a living. His philosophy: IT exists to serve, not to gatekeep. Key takeaways: Not everything requires a ticket. Help first, document later.; Deliberately undercommit on your first sprint to calibrate real velocity.; IT leaders need to know enough to have an intelligent conversation, not enough to do everything themselves.

Nathan Kaufman built CMMC compliance from scratch at a defense contractor with SSH open to the internet and no Active Directory. Then he learned the hard way that technical wins mean nothing if you can't communicate your value. Nathan Kaufman walked into a $100 million defense contractor with 80 employees, zero IT infrastructure, and two years to become CMMC Level 2 compliant or lose all DoD contracts. No Active Directory. SSH open to the internet. Engineers buying equipment with personal credit cards. A flat network running on unpatched switches. He built it all from the ground up. Deployed CrowdStrike across 350+ endpoints. Migrated to Azure GCC High. Survived a merger, acquisition, and divestiture simultaneously. Grew the team from one person (him) to five across three locations and 260 employees. Passed the CMMC audit in November 2025. Then he got fired in August. We get into the technical path for CMMC compliance, why "permission to play" became his rallying cry with executives, and the SBI framework for communicating IT value. Nathan shares his biggest lesson: you can have amazing technical skills, but if you don't advocate for yourself, nobody else will. The brutal truth about building compliance infrastructure while life happens around you. Key takeaways: "Permission to play" - compliance isn't optional for DoD contractors; SBI framework: Situation, Behavior, Impact for communicating IT value; Technical wins mean nothing without executive communication skills

Stephen Chen spent seven years learning digital transformation isn't about technology. Then he discovered the business problem you choose to own defines your entire career.

Bill Markut, IT Director at Gränges Americas, built a five-year roadmap to transform manufacturing IT. From the Department of No to the Department of No, But. And why AI won't fix a decade of infrastructure neglect. Bill Markut spent 36 years avoiding management, preferring hands-on technical work. Then he became IT Director at a manufacturing company running 25 years behind the tech curve and discovered something that changed everything: the power of getting IT and OT to actually talk to each other. Key takeaways: Manufacturing IT runs 20-25 years behind the technology curve. That gap is the opportunity.; The event storm exercise gets IT and OT in one room. That is where silos actually break.; Hire for initiative, not just technical skill. Addition by subtraction is real.

Michael Murray manages 120 project candidates but calls them exactly that—candidates, not projects. Then he learned why the Department of No should actually be the Department of Why.

Roy Cherian spent 25 years watching IT leaders pretzel themselves explaining budgets to executives who don't speak tech. Then he learned why 95% of AI deployments fail: everyone's picking tools before finding use cases.

Josh Tanner runs IT and cybersecurity solo at a Goldman Sachs-backed behavioral health company. 350 users. PHI everywhere. His argument: stop checking boxes and start building an actual security program

Thomas J. Sweet runs IT for a PE-backed company with eight acquisitions and three people. His most reliable hiring signal? Home labs beat credentials every time.

Karl Weber spent 30 years in technology sales before becoming CIO at Rolfson Oil. His biggest insight: stop selling to the CIO and start solving the business problem.

Brian Rowe got hired to build security at a 100+ year old manufacturing company. Then he discovered the real problem: you can't bolt security onto IT that's still running like a mom-and-pop shop.

David Williams spent years thinking his CIO title made him a leader. Then he learned the difference between managing and leading: 'The title that you have does not make you a leader. It can make you a manager.'

Bryan Shanafelt manages IT across 8 offices with just 4 people. Then he learned the secret to building teams that solve impossible problems: hire for personality, not just skills.