S3 Ep6: A Conversation with the CIOs of Marriott, IRS, FDA and JPL Part 1 Artwork

Bridging Business & IT

Meet your hosts, Dave and Dan, a father and son team interviewing experts from around the IT ecosystem. Dave’s a serial entrepreneur, CIO, board member, author, speaker and advisor with a lifetime of frontline tech industry experience. He wants things to work—perfectly! His son and cohost Dan, is Head of Sales for PlanetScale (a Silicon Valley software company). He wants to get things done—now! While they certainly have their differences, they’re both driven to understand what business customers need so they can deliver the best possible solution. That’s why these two have joined forces (along with a lot of industry heavyweights) to help resolve the biggest challenge in business technology: How to successfully bridge the gap between what a business needs and how its IT department and vendors address that need. This podcast is for those in the trenches, for professionals with hands-on experience who are striving to overcome the multitude of challenges standing between them and the successful deployment of technology to advance business objectives. Each episode is filled not only with humor and sarcasm, but with tricks of the trade and lessons learned. Connect with their stories, experiences, shortcomings, failures, and successes. Let them be your guide on this unvarnished, irreverent and entertaining look at business and IT. Subscribe, listen, and laugh while getting a true appreciation for the fact that in your day to day tech challenges, you’re not alone and solutions are out there.

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Bridging Business & IT

S3 Ep6: A Conversation with the CIOs of Marriott, IRS, FDA and JPL Part 1

March 16, 2023 • Dave Burrill & Dan Burrill • Season 3 • Episode 6

But we're talking to just one man. Today is the first part of our conversation with a uniquely accomplished IT professional, Jim Rinaldi. Over Jim's long career he's been the Vice President of IT for Marriott Hotels, the United States Internal Revenue Service (IRS), the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), and most recently, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) which is managed for NASA by Caltech (the California Institute of Technology). Needless to say, he's seen his fair share of what he refers to as "business projects that just happen to be enabled by technology" (aka, IT projects).

We spend a lot of time talking about why IT projects tend not to be successful and what needs to be done to change that. Perhaps more importantly, we talk about the role of a leader in IT organizations and what a successful leader must do to understand and serve the needs of his team and organization. We throughly enjoyed this conversation. We hope you do too.

These podcasts are dedicated to bridging the gap between business & IT. Each episode looks at different aspects of this relationship as we explore ways to help the two groups better communicate. We're passionate about this topic because it's a failure to communicate that causes 75% of all IT project failures and costs the US $1.8 Trillion every year—8% of US GDP!

If you don't want to become one of these statistics and want to learn about an easy way to avoid it, please visit our website and schedule a free consultation.

Alternatively, if there's some topic you'd like to hear more about, or you have an idea about how we might better serve our listeners, please shoot us an email at dave@bridgingbusinessit.com. We'd love to hear from you.

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Dan Burrill

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Dave Burrill

Host