Features Region: Midwest

Craig McBeath earned a promotion to director of information technology for the City of Bloomington, Illinois, just as the COVID-19 pandemic hit. And his first task was keeping the city’s services up and running as the whole country was shutting down. Located in central Illinois, roughly two hours southwest of Chicago, Bloomington is home to […]

Onward it goes, the migration of on-premise case management systems to the more secure yet still accessible cloud. Time was when it might have been met with dissent by the people who administer Michigan’s Macomb County, but as Chief Information Officer Jako van Blerk assures, the process proceeds according to plan and with the support […]

Ashtabula County, Ohio, sits on the shores of Lake Erie, all 720 square miles of it dotted with quaint towns and picturesque greenery. It’s known for its wine country, covered bridges and—if you ask Rockford Benson—the down-to-earth friendliness of its 97,000 people. Benson is a native son who came home to serve his neighbors. He’s […]

As tech leaders, Alex Magdics and Scott Bauer are both Men of Steel and a Dynamic Duo in their roles at Majestic Steel. Superman and Batman comics aside, they have teamed up to provide technology innovations and solutions for Majestic Steel for more than a decade. Bauer, who was the first full-time IT employee when […]

How it helps to know the nuances of a profession before transitioning to a supportive role. So says Sarah Slipetz who spent the early years of her career as a registered nurse, getting a clogs-on-the-floor look at how inefficiencies were built into almost any healthcare system. Her colleagues and patients deserved better, she says. “I’ll […]

One chilly morning in January 2020, Tony Neumann got the call every IT director dreads. Some strange splash screens—also known as boot or welcome screens—were popping up on devices given to employees of the City of Oshkosh, Wisconsin, where Neumann has worked since 1999. Before long, staffers couldn’t use their devices. Neumann tried to remote […]

Having spent over a decade in cybersecurity, Nicholas Schopperth has pretty much seen it all. But when one hacker went after the direct deposit information of his colleague at Dayton Children’s Hospital, the mild-mannered Air Force veteran got mad. “I don’t like when people bully my people,” Schopperth says. “So, I called the bank, because […]

Ransomware attacks on hospitals can be devastating, and despite healthcare organizations’ escalating spending on security, cyberattacks targeting patients’ information are becoming more common. In fact, a recent study from the University of California, San Diego, concluded that healthcare cyberattacks should be treated as regional disasters. Because healthcare organizations are facing such rising security costs and […]

It may not be true to say that Battle Motors’ work manufacturing electric vehicles has been more than 75 years in the making. However, Kelleigh Ash says it took acquiring Crane Carrier Co., founded in 1946, to enable Battle Motors to make the heavy truck chassis to incorporate the electric vehicle batteries the company has […]

Brett Thelen has seen the best and the worst that technology can do. He’s used his IT expertise behind the scenes to help public school officials secure their systems so educators can focus on teaching kids. He’s also helped lead an internal task force and a partnership with Michigan educational technology leaders to protect schools […]