You've Been Heard

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 c...

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...

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...

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...

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 create...

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...

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...

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 stro...

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 usin...

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...

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, reputat...

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 leaders...

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...

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 ba...

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 navi...

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...

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 softw...

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/Organizatio...

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."