Features November 2022

So, he is asked, is technology what enables The Kraft Heinz Co. to churn out so many processed foods and beverages? Not quite, responds Gary Kraversky, who’d rather credit the people who manage and run the 33 plants in the United States and Canada. But how much more efficiently they oversee production, maintenance and quality […]

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 […]

In March 2020, companies across the globe were racing to adapt to COVID-19’s rapid spread: shuttering offices, setting up first-time Zoom meetings and struggling to move operations to the cloud. At Toronto-based Vision7 International—which was renamed Plus Company in 2021—they did nothing. In the years prior to the pandemic, the IT department at Vision7 had […]

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 […]

In 2017, the leadership at Tualatin Valley Water District decided it was time to have a dedicated information technology department and someone at the helm of that team. To carry out their ambitions, they created a director role. After learning about the position from someone in his network, Tim Boylan applied and became TVWD’s first […]

Often when school bus drivers communicate with each other, they speak in code in case their radio channels are intercepted. Doing so helps protect information about students, such as their names and addresses, from being exploited by people who shouldn’t be listening in. Last year, Drew Taylor began exploring a more secure option. After gathering […]