A CIO's 20-Year Journey Of Success Amid Painful Loss

"What I love about the midmarket is that I can see the benefit of my work a whole lot faster," he said.

Jay Ferro has experienced a lot. Not only has he been an IT leader across midmarket and Fortune 500 companies in various industries, but he's also a widower who lost his beloved wife to cervical cancer.

Ferro, currently the executive vice president and chief information, technology and product officer at Clario, spoke candidly with The Channel Company's vice president of midsize enterprise services, Adam Dennison, on stage at the Midsize Enterprise Summit Fall 2024 event last week in Tampa, Fla.

He has served in several IT leadership positions besides his current role at Philadelphia-based clinical research data management services firm Clario and discussed his career journey.

"I was the CIO of a number of large business units ... it was terrific. I also learned what it's like to be public enemy No. 1," he said.

"I left AIG, really followed my passions. The next big role I had was as global CIO at the American Cancer Society – and the question I probably get asked constantly – how do you go from a Fortune 20 company to a large, global nonprofit?"

"When I went to ACS ... I had lost my wife five years prior to cervical cancer. My boys were 9, 6, and 3. When I got the job ... my first day was the five-year anniversary of her passing – it was a labor of love.

It was an absolute privilege to serve that mission and then I got into some private equity VC work," he shared.

Working In The Midmarket

"Things move faster in the midmarket," Ferro said. "Certainly, you don't have the resources of a multibillion-dollar budget of a Fortune 20 company. But what I love about the midmarket is that I can see the benefit of my work a whole lot faster.

(Jay Ferro, EVP, Chief Information, Technology & Product Officer, Clario)

The First 100 Days

Dennison asked Ferro to talk about the first 100 days in a new role as an IT leader.

"It always starts with listening. You're being brought in for a reason. Usually that reason is your predecessor has been let go – you're replacing somebody. That might be retirement, maybe they found a new job," Ferro said.

"After about two or three weeks of doing a listening tour, working with customers, meeting with frontline staff, meeting with your peers, you begin to develop key themes... and that's the same in any job.

We all know when you take a new role, you discover crap in your first year ... I mean you've got these new systems... there's always surprises.

You're brought in to do a job. It was [at] ACS ... we had a donation processing center in Oklahoma City. Beautiful people, great facility [but] why would we have ever done that ourselves? I don't know why we wouldn't have outsourced payment processing, information processing, but for whatever reason we had this enormous facility.

And the actual check scanning technology was on a really old version of some local software that was dependent on a dongle, a parallel port dongle for its licensing.

I fly to Oklahoma City ... literally on my phone I have a picture of the dongle on an old-ass server, and I started to get close to it and they're like what are you doing...we don't touch it.!

I said, well, do we have a back window? Do we have a virtual dongle? Can we buy one off the grey market, the black market?

Well, we have a beta dongle ... it was proof of concept that we did when we first installed it, but it's throttled, and you can only do one-tenth of the transactions.

I made it one of my life missions to get rid of the dongle which we did in the first six months.

You discover stuff like that.

It's really easy to walk into a new CIO role and throw your predecessors under the bus .... you got to take the high road; you never know their circumstances. "

On CIO 'Plus-One' Roles

Dennison asked, "Are you responsible for other business functions outside of IT? When I spent time at CIO magazine, we called that the 'CIO plus-one role."

Ferro said that the "plus-one" role was asked of him, but "I also volunteered for it."

(Adam Dennison, VP, Midsize Enterprise Services, The Channel Company)

"I was looking for other opportunities," he said. “The first time that happened I was at EarthLink ... I became chief product officer as well as chief information officer. "

He said that his CEO at the time had two roles open: CIO and CPO.

"He and I met, and I turned down the CIO role, I said man that is just not for me," Ferro added.

He said that he and the CEO developed the idea to combine the two roles into a CIPO role.

"It was terrific. It was a great experience," Ferro said.

Current Experience At Clario

"At Clario, I started off as the CIO," he said. The company made its largest acquisition in 2021, and then Ferro said he also became CTO.

"I owned product development, applications development, data analytics, AI, everything else. At the end of 2022, I took on the CPO role."

Ferro said in addition to leading the company's technology strategy, he also is involved with corporate marketing and communications.

"You hit a point in your career where the way you are going to differentiate yourself as a CIO has nothing to do with technology," Ferro said. "If you look at my goals with my CEO, there are certainly things he and I talk about that are technology based, but the conversations that we have are about revenue growth, they're about cost savings, they're about market penetration ... adoption."

Takeaways

Ferro ended his session with several nuggets of wisdom learned from his decades-long career as a midmarket IT leader: