War***ard

Business Relationship Management, Strategic Thinking, Digital Transformation, Strategic Partnerships

State CIO | Agency Head Indiana Office of Technology at Indiana Office of Technology

• Location: Indianapolis, Indiana, United States
• Duration: 2025-03 to Present
• Description: Indiana State Chief Information Officer (CIO) overseeing the state's IT strategy, ensuring efficient and cost-effective technology services for state agencies, covering key focus areas that include: • IT Strategy and Leadership • IT Governance • Resource Management • Cybersecurity • IT Modernization • Collaboration • Cost-Effectiveness

Chief Information Officer / Chief Technology Officer and Leadership Coach at The Lenard Group, LLC

• Location: Carmel, Indiana, United States
• Duration: 2024-10 to Present
• Description: Experienced IT leader providing services to help organizations bridge gaps by driving strategic planning and enhancing operational capabilities and effectiveness. Coaching and mentoring services for high potentials to ensure they are ready for succession is a critical piece to these services that allow organizations to stay on course while directionally aligning to a promote from within culture. Interim CIO / CTO: Organizations oftentimes find themselves in a position where leadership roles are vacated posing potential disruption to strategic initiatives, operational stability and team morale. Promoting from within is always a desired option, but can be disastrous if succession planning has not been defined or executed well. Interim CIO/CTO services can bridge that gap by introducing experienced leadership into the organization and coaching high potentials to ensure they are ready for succession at the same time. Fractional CIO/CTO: Part-time technology leadership services are a cost-effective solution for many organizations that provide significant value around strategic direction and leadership for business technology initiatives. Startups, and small and medium-size organizations that need high-level IT leadership but don't have the budget or workload to justify a full-time executive can still benefit from senior leadership services either on a project basis or through a retainer agreement. Leadership Coaching and Mentoring: In today’s competitive business landscape, companies across the world are looking for creative ways to attract and retain top-level talent. Effective executive coaching can enhance leadership and overall employee performance within the organization. When combined with fitness and nutritional coaching overall job satisfaction, engagement and performance are significantly enhanced, which better positions a business for growth and success.

Chief Operations and Information Officer at Byrider

• Location: Carmel, Indiana
• Duration: 2018-12 to 2024-10
• Description: Executive officer and leader responsible for the overall leadership of Byrider’s Operations and information Technology group tasked with elevating and maturing a struggling Byrider IT organization and elevating the organization to operational excellence. Responsible for all technology solutions driving company growth, optimizing execution and increasing effectiveness. Responsible for the partnership with business leaders and franchisees in an effort to enhance customer experience and drive the Byrider mission of customer advancement. - Restaffed and restructured the IT organization to better align with industry standard roles and optimize strategic execution. - Created a more collaborative group culture built on partnerships that enhanced product development and advancement. - Defined and implemented a repeatable set of standard processes and procedures enabling the organization to execute more predictably and consistently to better meet the needs of business partners and franchisees. - Rebuilt the franchisee relationship through strategic partnerships and collaboration on key technology products and operational procedures that differentiated and positioned Byrider as an industry leader in the Buy Here Pay Here market. - Led the stabilization of Byrider’s Discover platform eliminating downtime and increasing efficiency across all dealership processes. - Implemented a new data warehouse and business intelligence platform thereby modernizing reporting and consumption of data enabling better analysis of customer portfolio and increased dealership performance. - Led the development of a new mobile app, MyByrider, enabling better customer engagement through a more modernized experience that has eased the collections burden around payments across the entire franchise system. - Led the cloud migration of Byrider’s entire technology infrastructure thereby increasing systems scalability, resilience, performance and security.

VP, Technology and Operations Solutions at Finish Line

• Location: Indianapolis, Indiana Area
• Duration: 2014-06 to 2018-12
• Description: Senior IT leader providing organizational, technical and operational leadership in a newly created role to meet the challenges of an ever-changing organization amidst the competitive landscape of premium sports apparel. Responsible for partnering with senior leaders across the Finish Line organization to create cohesion among geographically dispersed and cross-functional teams through building trust, knowledge, and mutual respect and understanding. - Restructured and transformed the Finish Line Technology and Operations organization driving infrastructure stability, better systems performance and overall better support to the organization. - Implemented a set of formal change management processes and procedures establishing a healthy culture and rapport with business partners through engagement and empowerment. - Lead a work culture transformation through the migration to Google’s Workspace platform and the implementation of a company portal that dramatically increased operational effectiveness, product awareness and better organizational engagement. - Senior member of a company-wide supply chain initiative that transformed and enhanced Finish Line’s order and warehouse management platforms elevating Finish Line’s capabilities to meet the demands of a rapidly growing business. - Led the upgrade of Finish Line’s eCommerce environment that reduced system down time and website performance issues eliminating sales losses and customer frustration. - Interim CIO for an 8-month period leading all aspects of the IT organization during a period of significant change that required purposeful mentoring and coaching in order to sustain and elevate morale while optimizing productivity and operational excellence. - Led the transition during the JD Sports acquisition of Finish Line in conjunction with the senior leadership from JD Sports and successfully overcoming the challenges of a large scale acquisition.

VP, IT Enterprise Systems at The Children's Place

• Location: Secaucus, NJ
• Duration: 2012-04 to 2013-12
• Description: Senior Information Technology executive responsible for all IT infrastructure and related support services. Areas of responsibility included network, systems and storage infrastructure, data center operations, data security, database administration, SAP Basis services and employee client technical services.