You've Been Heard

Technology leaders can contribute to business decisions when they understand what the company is trying to accomplish. Teresa Duran, chief information officer at Tree Top, joins Phil Howard to discuss the questions she asks in her first 90 days, her preference for five current priorities over a rolling five-year project list, and why technology strategy should follow company strategy.

She explains how scattered company information limits decisions, how to decide what outside suppliers should build and what internal staff must maintain, and why a quickly built tool using artificial intelligence still needs a support plan.

Teresa also recounts a biotech transformation during COVID: as plans changed from a first public stock sale to selling part of the business, her team built software and kept time-sensitive corneal tissue moving. They close on career learning, mentoring future technology leaders, and making technical presentations lead to decisions.

George Hicker, Vice President of Information Technology (IT) and Business Transformation at Ronnoco Beverage Solutions, joins Mike Kelley to explain what happens when AI lets employees build useful tools in hours. Fast results can hide weak security, missing instructions, unclear ownership, and problems that appear when more people use the tool. George offers a practical response: bring the technology team in early, write down the plan, have experienced developers check the code, test with safe data, limit access, keep backups, and make people responsible for the result. He also explains why skilled software designers and developers become more valuable as AI creates work faster.

Jeff Hobbs, Director of IT at SV Labs Corporation, joins Mike Kelley to discuss the leadership skills that matter beyond technical expertise. Jeff explains how he uses Copilot to tailor communication for different stakeholders, examine unfamiliar security questions, troubleshoot Intune issues, and help a small team close knowledge gaps. He also discusses the limits: AI output needs review, paid licenses need measures, and easy access to public tools creates data-protection risk. The conversation returns to one idea throughout: technical ability can get a leader noticed, but influence, relationships, and business judgment move the work forward.

Scott Holleran, CIO of Altus Fire & Life Safety, joins Phil Howard to discuss what gives technology leaders real influence inside the business. Scott shares lessons from the Army and three private equity-backed technology roles, including why leaders should walk the floor, ride with frontline teams, and map the full process before choosing a system. He explains how to frame difficult requests through cost, time, return, and tradeoffs; why business-specific data expertise belongs close to operations; how clear behavioral scorecards help teams perform; and why AI will strengthen specialists rather than erase the value of expertise.

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.

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.