Features March 2018

Nick Pitre knows what it’s like to juggle an info-tech livelihood with the pursuit of higher education. To begin with, an IT boss can be like a first responder, being summoned to the scene of a web malfunction that respects no hour of the day. Then, almost being forgotten about until the onset of the […]

Several years ago, spurred by growing student demand, the faculty and students of Wisconsin Indianhead Technical College (WITC) were invited to The Next Generation of Learning Town Hall to give feedback on how to bolster the school’s technology capabilities. One by one, attendees wrote their wish lists and concerns on pieces of paper, sticking each […]

The idea sounds simple enough: leveraging cutting-edge software to simplify and optimize your company’s operations. For Western Reserve Group (WRG), an Ohio-based insurance provider servicing more than 170,000 customers in the personal, commercial and farm sectors, it’s meant a near-total overhaul of the firm’s internal processes—from claims to customer service. Using software provided by Guidewire, […]

In “Inception”, the 2010 sci-fi thriller starring Leonardo DiCaprio, the protagonist is forced to navigate a series of dreams, each more involved than the last. While that might seem like a strange analogy for an IT initiative, Drew Lane insists his school district shares something in common with the special effects blockbuster. “What we’re doing […]

Ten years ago, the two most important tools in recording a patient’s vital signs were a pencil and a piece of paper. Once logged, the resulting numbers were manually typed by the patient’s nurse into a computer, often located in another room. Only then, after the computer had generated a composite score, were doctors able […]

Back in 2002, the year Jim Boyer became the newly minted chief information officer for Rush Memorial Hospital (RMH), you almost had to go out of your way to contract a computer virus—i.e. visit an extreme website or open an infected floppy disk (remember those?). Even then, the resulting damage was typically mitigatable, and seldom, […]

Shopping for car insurance can often feel like a shell game, where even an impeccable driving record—no accidents, no speeding tickets—doesn’t guarantee competitive rates. Even worse, one minor accident could peg you with a sky-high rate for years, subsequent sterling record be damned. Now imagine getting a lower bill for parking your car eight hours […]

Back in 1984, finding someone with Nick Szymanski’s title—chief information officer—was about as common as owning a laptop. The fact that Szymanski wasn’t even born yet, underscores how enormously the IT world has changed. To be sure, it’s a transformation the 32-year-old CIO of Richmond University Medical Center (RUMC) knows he must embrace. But it’s […]

When you think of a typical college classroom, a very particular image comes to mind: the professor standing at the front, with rows of students sitting attentively. For all the ways in which technology has transformed learning, this dynamic remains the default setting at most universities. As chief information officer of Denver’s Regis University, Jagan […]

Joey Johnson knew he might never again fetch a job offer like this: High-profile, superb benefits, a challenging but rewarding workload. Family and friends implored him to take it, said he’d be a fool to let an opportunity like this pass him by. And yet, something about it didn’t feel right. Johnson and his wife […]