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Ronald G. Maillette
"The ‘impossible’ becomes possible when the team believes in itself and believes in its leader."
RONALD G. MAILLETTE
EVP, CIO, CSO
Education Corporation of America
Since early 2007, Ron has served as Executive VP and CIO at Education Corporation of America. In that role, Ron was instrumental in enabling the growth from 7 locations to close to 35 locations throughout the country. Prior, he joined the Coca-Cola Company and ultimately became the CIO for the company’s largest stand-alone operating unit, the Food service and Hospi tality Division. Also, he served in the U.S. Air Force as an airborne linguist responsible for monitoring Mid East Air Force capabilities during the late 1960s.
Challenges in technology to meet enterprise needs in 2013 and expectations.
There are a number of challenges but in many cases they are really not new. IT has always had the tendency to put out ‘solutions’ and marketing hype around them significantly in advance of their really being ready for prime time. I believe this is as much because the actual integration into the fabric of business solution was not all that well thought out. A good example is ‘the cloud’. The concept was put out there, the marketers picked it up, it became part of the daily lexicon and yet what it really meant, how it could be used, and integrated into an overall solution was not clarified.
The biggest challenge for me is picking out the real enablers to my strategic technology vision and strategy and laying the ground work for their use, in some cases, several years down the road. That is the real job of the CIO.
The areas in business environment where solutions do not yet exist or not up to the mark, and which if existed, would've made job easier.
Overall, like most CIOs, my greatest trepidation is in and around security breaches, both internal and external. In some respects, internal are more troubling, overall. Externally, we have to deal with those folks in the world who seem to derive pleasure from exploiting the honest labor and hard work of law abiding businesses people. The more one needs to open the environment to the general populace, the easier we make it to be attacked from simple phishing through denial of service or worse.
Technology Trends Impacting Enterprise Business Environment
BYOD for the most part as it puts additional strain on properly managing access, security while all the while making it easier to do business.
My roles and responsibilities as a CIO
My role has not changed, appreciably, over the past couple years. My main role was continually looking over the horizon to see what IT enablers were going to be coming and pick those that would best fit with the business plan. My biggest challenge is finding resources that could operate it day-to-day and helping the business transition to this, for them, seemingly somewhat alien world.
Lessons I learned as a CIO that can help you
I have been a CIO for about 15 years in four different companies in rather disparate verticals. My efforts always were conducted in a consultative manner with both words and action demonstrating my interest in what I was hearing and value in the opinions being expressed. Perhaps more important than anything, I needed to portray my role as one of a skilled General Manager who happened to have a toolset in IT.
I think the other thing I have found over the years is to do everything you can to attract the best talent that your business will afford. The ‘impossible’ becomes possible when the team believes in itself and believes in its leader. Couple of guidelines that I follow- One is to staff as lean as possible which makes IT less of a target during lean times. Two, outsource as much as you can of noncore capabilities. Three, is by keeping lean and outsource on-core, your team gets to work on ‘cool stuff’.
