Curt Carver

When you’re in a war, you’re focused only on the fight in front of you. Once that fight is over, you clean your weapons and patch your tents. Then you take care of your soldiers. You send them to college and get them training so they’re ready for whatever is next. That’s how we’ve operated over the past 15+ months at the University of Alabama at Birmingham.

One of the most rewarding roles CIOs play is nurturing the next generation of IT leadership. It’s an opportunity to pass along the wisdom and, importantly, lessons learned from a career navigating the complexities and constantly evolving priorities of IT. We caught up with CIOs who recently won the 2021 Alabama CIO of the Year ORBIE Awards to learn more about what it takes to be a strong IT leader today.

CIOs who successfully led their organizations through the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic were rewarded with an honor many have been seeking for quite some time – we’ve been recognized as agents of innovation. That’s no small feat. For years, even the best CIOs have been trying to step out of the long shadows of IT’s history. Even when we reached new milestones, it could be hard to shake the legacy perception that IT is a cost efficiency center or a transactional “process improvement” center.