You've Been Heard

Jeremy Mayfield, Director of IT at National Sugar Marketing Cooperative, took the company from a legacy on-premise ERP to a fully SaaS platform in under 12 months, against a 14-month board approval, after a year of defining requirements and a vendor hit list that ended with "now you have to show us." He explains why an organization that can't tell you its requirements isn't ready for change, and w...

Veteran CIO and US Air Force veteran Brian Ledbetter on why IT leaders who earn a seat at the table can still be seen as the person who fixed the printer. He walks through the six pillars of his LEAD IT framework and explains why developers who hammered out code all day will end up managing AI agents. At a small law firm, one of the heads of the firm called Brian Ledbetter his CIO. Another called...

Everyone's using ChatGPT on their own to save 30 minutes a day, and nobody will wait six weeks for a review, so Brandon Muncy, Director of Information Technology at PepperPointe Partnerships, wants to make the approved path fast enough that a shortcut isn't tempting. After building the dental service organization's in-house IT team from a fully outsourced start, he explains why onboarding broke ev...

John Errington, Director IT/IS at Pengate Handling Systems, tells his teams something they hate to hear: turning the light off every day is the thing to automate, and their time belongs on why the light keeps going off. With more than 27 years in IT, he also explains how he learns a new business from the people with their boots on the ground, and how AI took three to four days of pulling major-inc...

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...

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 techno...

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 li...

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...

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 suc...

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...

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 servic...

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...

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.

Gabriel Chappell, Chief Information Officer at Fabricut, Inc., came in to help a wholesale distributor in the interior design space finish its move off an AS/400 ERP, and he had to take on AI governance before phase one was done. He explains why one of his first moves was to put a business analyst in place and shadow everybody, and why AI ideas need a path to a business case and a governance counc...

Rajvir Madan, SVP and Chief Digital and Information Technology Officer at Arcutis Biotherapeutics, explains why experienced leaders must test old patterns against a new context. He connects self-awareness to culture, operating principles, business outcomes, and the discipline to stop work that no longer serves the organization.

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 suc...

Bret Henning started college as a music major and entered technology through a trade school and a computer operator job. He handled backups, printers, support, and disk drives before moving into programming and application work. Building systems for accounting, payroll, inventory, and manufacturing gave him an education in how a business runs. Bret traces the shift from computers as an after-the-f...

Brian Laird's career has taken him through tech support, networking, security, software development, enterprise architecture, consulting, and the CIO seat. In this conversation with Doug Camin, he looks back on the week his former company sent thousands of employees home during COVID. Some customer service agents had no internet at home, so staff lined up at Verizon stores to buy hotspots three or...

Demetrios Xarhoulakos began his career producing CAD drawings and became the person colleagues called when technology stopped cooperating. That curiosity eventually led him into application support, global team management, cloud migration, and technology leadership for an international engineering business. In this conversation with host Mike Kelley, Demetrios explains why solving every problem pe...

Farhan Zakir's path into technology started far from a server room. After leaving medical school in Pakistan, he returned to Orlando, worked across hospitality roles, moved into accounting, and found his opening through ERP implementation for the club industry. In this conversation with Phil Howard, Farhan explains how that operating background became an advantage in IT leadership. He shares pract...

In Episode 441 of You've Been Heard, Michael Moore speaks with Matt Thomas, Director of IT and Marketing at Crabapple Roofing, about the communication skills that turn technical expertise into business leadership. Matt traces a career spanning small MSPs, music, recording, photography, video production, and internal IT leadership. He explains why technology becomes easier to support when leaders t...

In Episode 439 of You've Been Heard, Phil Howard speaks with James Dunlap about turning technology and security work into language executives understand. James draws on leadership experience across healthcare, banking, fintech, and legal services to explain why projects, ticket counts, and technical jargon rarely tell the full story at the board level. He shows how to lead with risk reduced, value...

Bill Garcia explains why IT leaders lose credibility when they speak technology but cannot translate it into business outcomes. Drawing on a career in process redesign, ERP transformation, COO roles, and global leadership, he shows how governance can increase speed, why AI needs clean and trusted knowledge, and why communication remains the skill that separates strategic leaders from service provi...

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...