Company:
Meet Shawn Lovett
Owner and Fractional CIO
I have always loved technology and solving problems.
My career started in the US Army, stationed in Germany with a HAWK missile unit. It taught me to always be prepared and to take care of my soldiers, as we were are team with individual roles that together meant success or failure. Failure was not an option.
Following six years of active duty, I started my civilian career as a software engineering for Unisys at one of their Minnesota manufacturing plants.
Through the years I worked for several companies and moved from software engineer to a project manager, followed by IT software development manager, architect, IT director, and finally Chief Information Office (CIO).
During my twelve years as CIO of a manufacturing company, I was able to apply everything I learned during my career.
Take aways from my job as CIO:
Lead - provide the IT leadership so that your IT team performs exceptionally. Stop the time wasters - if a report is not being used cancel it. If a printer runs out of ink or paper teach the business members how to replace ink and add paper. Prioritize projects and complete them in that order. If we commit to a project we are going to do our best to complete it on time. If you develop software test it and make sure it works before releasing it for user testing.
Business/IT Partnerships - if the business units and IT spend all their time pointing fingers and blaming each other, not much will actually get done. It's not a competition on who is smarter or whose error it is. You need to check your ego at the door and work together - collaborate. The best ideas I saw were a combination of ideas from both the business and IT - first shrugged off as "that's stupid" or "we can't do that" to later arriving at a solution nobody initially thought of. It created a level of trust between the business and IT; even if we didn't always agree at least we communicated.
Technology - My former boss would always ask me, "how can we use our IT to provide a competitive edge?". We stopped taking baby steps and starting making giant leaps. We received a lot of pushback: "Our current system works just fine" (no, it did not); "Every company that has tried that size of project has failed" (we were determined it would not also be us); "We should not be using that technology" (guess what - we did and it worked out great). In the end our factory was able to receive orders fully electronically entered by the customers (who loved the system), with much of the end to end manufacturing process automated.
Fast forward to today, In my role as a Fractional CIO I want to leverage my experiences over an exciting career to help businesses achieve the same success I was able to obtain.
I would love to meet you, hear you story as well as your challenges and problems, and then determine how we can help each other.