Media Coverage
CIO Spotlight: Gregg McNulty, ElectrifAi
by: IDG Connect
August 24, 2020
Name: Gregg McNulty
Company: ElectrifAi
Job title: CIO
Date started current role: November 2019
Location: Jersey City, New Jersey
Gregg McNulty is the CIO of ElectrifAi with more than 30 years of proven leadership experience from work at CVS Health, Avaya, eBay Enterprise, Merck, Medco Health Solutions, Pfizer and Johnson & Johnson. McNulty has deep experience running the world's highest performing transaction workloads on IBM, Oracle, AT&T and Cisco systems
What was your first job? My first job was a desktop support technician at Medco Health Solutions in Northern NJ.
Did you always want to work in IT? Yes, because I found learning new technology was interesting and rewarding.
What was your education? Do you hold any certifications? What are they? I attended the University of Pittsburgh and Fairleigh Dickenson University.
Explain your career path. Did you take any detours? If so, discuss. My career path progressed from desktop support to CTO and CIO positions.
What business or technology initiatives will be most significant in driving IT investments in your organisation in the coming year? Leveraging Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence technologies.
What are the CEO's top priorities for you in the coming year? How do you plan to support the business with IT? Priorities are continuing to support the business teams and new technology as they emerge, additionally leveraging cloud providers to allow our business to expand rapidly and securely.
Does the conventional CIO role include responsibilities it should not hold? Should the role have additional responsibilities it does not currently include? It varies from company to company, in some companies the Information Security function reports into the CIO and in some it does not. It depends on the needs of the business and IT.
Are you leading a digital transformation? If so, does it emphasise customer experience and revenue growth or operational efficiency? If both, how do you balance the two? No, that does not apply to our business model.
Describe the maturity of your digital business. For example, do you have KPIs to quantify the value of IT? That does not apply to our business model.
What does good culture fit look like in your organisation? How do you cultivate it? In our organisation it is all about a small highly performing team that works together seamlessly.
What roles or skills are you finding (or anticipate to be) the most difficult to fill? At this point DevOps Engineers, Cloud and Information Security roles are in high demand and it can be problematic to find seasoned professionals due to that demand.
What's the best career advice you ever received? Failure is not the opposite of success, it is part of success, you must learn to fail fast, learn from it and recover.
Do you have a succession plan? If so, discuss the importance of and challenges with training up high-performing staff. Yes, the challenge is transferring and training my successor on everything I have experienced in the last 35 years being in IT.
What advice would you give to aspiring IT leaders? Pick a great place to work, a great brand, with great people and do not settle for just getting an IT job, what matters is who you work for and who you work with!
What has been your greatest career achievement? Hiring people into my team, mentoring them and seeing them grow into senior IT positions.
Looking back with 20:20 hindsight, what would you have done differently? Nothing, I have enjoyed my career at every company I have been, learned and grown from all my experiences.
