Ken Lockwood is chief information officer at Caplugs, where he oversees technology strategy across its parent company Protective Industries’ subsidiaries. His career spans software development, infrastructure, cybersecurity and business relationship management, with prior leadership at Rich Products. He earned degrees in Computer Information Systems and Industrial Technology from Buffalo State University and is currently pursuing a Doctorate of Business Administration, specializing in Information Systems.

Technology Leadership Grounded in Business Outcomes

Many enterprise technology efforts today involve AI and predictive analytics. But the focus needs to remain on how these technologies support the business.

A common tendency in the industry is to pursue emerging technologies before clearly defining the business problem. You see AI and these new technologies emerging, and the instinct is to immediately figure out how to apply them. My focus has always been on three outcomes: business growth, cost efficiency and risk mitigation before bringing IT on board. Every platform decision and every dollar of investment has to connect directly to one of those three things.

That discipline was built over more than two decades, beginning with writing business software for a regional retail company in the Northeast, and refined through every role I have held since.

A Career Built in Code and Strategy

I completed my bachelor's in computer information systems at Buffalo State University and later did my master's in industrial technology. Right out of college, I started where most technologists do, heads down in development. I spent a decade writing software, gathering requirements directly from the business and learning how systems behave inside a company. It gave me an instinct for where operational problems live before they surface as technology requests.

My move to Rich Products changed the scale of everything. It is a six-billion-dollar global food manufacturer, and moving from a regional retail organization tail organization into that environment required a different perspective. I worked across infrastructure, application management, disaster recovery and business continuity before moving, around 2015, into business relationship management.

That shift changed how I approached the CIO function. My business partners were senior leaders in supply chain, sales, marketing and procurement. My role was to work alongside them during planning cycles and bring IT into the conversation early enough to shape strategy. Translating business ambition into technology capability became the foundation for everything I do today.

That ongoing academic work continues to sharpen how I think about enterprise systems, organizational behavior, and the way better information leads to better decisions.

Learning Before Building

When I stepped into the CIO role at Protective Industries, the parent company of Caplugs, Mokon and Tristar, my priority was to understand the business. How we generated revenue, where growth opportunities existed and what the technology environment would need to support those ambitions.

I saw an opportunity to accelerate the organization’s next stage of digital maturity. Data analytics, ERP, e-commerce infrastructure, and the broader Microsoft platform stack presented meaningful opportunities for modernization and better integration. Business analysis capabilities existed across the company, but there was an opportunity to connect them more effectively, improve reporting agility, and evolve development models to better support business responsiveness. These opportunities were not only technical; they were tied to how the business could move faster, make better decisions, and scale more effectively. Rather than approach these opportunities as separate initiatives, I developed a multi-year technology strategy aligned directly with the company’s business objectives. Executing that strategy required translating technology priorities into clear business outcomes so senior leadership could understand how each investment supported growth, efficiency, and scalability. In my experience, that ability to connect technology direction to business value is central to effective CIO leadership.

Building the Data Foundation for Decision Making

One of the most consequential structural changes I made was the creation of Enterprise Insight and Analytics, a strategic enterprise data program designed to unify analytics capabilities, strengthen decision-making, and create a scalable foundation for innovation across the organization. Analytics capabilities existed across the business, and we saw an opportunity to unify them under a shared operating model. Bringing them together under a shared enterprise program created a common operating model for how data is governed, analyzed, prioritized, and delivered across the enterprise. The modernization is anchored by an integrated enterprise data and analytics foundation, but the more significant shift is behavioral.

We moved from static outputs to a self-service environment where power users can access live dashboards and consume analytics directly. Over time, tools like Copilot will allow teams to interact with data rather than rely on IT to interpret it.

The impact is not just speed. It enables the organization to move from diagnostic reporting toward predictive thinking— modeling outcomes, anticipating business needs, and making more informed decisions before committing resources. Just as importantly, it creates the foundation to take advantage of artificial intelligence and machine learning as part of our future enterprise platform.

Accelerating Digital Capability

The e-commerce transformation followed the same logic. When I looked at how the team was operating, the problem was not talent. It was structure. There was an opportunity to evolve the development model to better support responsiveness and customer needs. We moved to an agile way of working and brought in a nearshore development partner to expand capacity. At the same time, we shifted internal roles toward architecture and closer collaboration with the business to understand customer needs and define the experience we wanted to deliver.

While the full revenue impact is still developing, we are already seeing meaningful improvements in development velocity and platform performance. The broader objective was to enable a more digital operating model—one that gives greater ownership to the marketing team, improves prioritization, and allows the organization to pivot more quickly in response to changing business and market conditions. The ability to respond faster than competitors is an operational advantage, even before it shows up in financial results.

  ​Do fewer projects. Execute them extremely well. Build credibility from a smaller number of successful initiatives and expand from there. 

Governance, Accountability and the Future

Governance is where strategy either becomes real or stays on paper. I built a CIO scorecard around the most important areas IT needs to deliver, each tied to measurable business outcomes. Cybersecurity, ERP, infrastructure, e-commerce and data and analytics are all measured, scored and reviewed by business leadership. The scorecard exists to create accountability and make the connection between technology investment and business outcomes visible.

Looking ahead, much of the work remains foundational. We are eliminating technical debt, moving toward low-code and no-code platforms and implementing cloud-based ERP through Microsoft Business Central. Data governance is also a major focus, including removing outdated data and managing legacy datasets more effectively.

None of this is particularly visible work, but it is the infrastructure that everything else depends on.

The Leadership Principle I Keep Coming Back To

My advice to other CIOs is simple. It is just as important what you do not do as what you do. The temptation is to launch initiatives on every front and try to do everything at once. That approach often spreads effort too thin. You end up doing many things poorly instead of a few things well.

Do fewer projects. Execute them extremely well. Build credibility from a smaller number of successful initiatives and expand from there.

Technology leadership is ultimately about people. I was fortunate to have strong mentors throughout my career, and I invest time in developing the people I work with. If I am not helping prepare the next generation of technology leaders, then I am not building something that lasts.