Recently, The Enterprisers Project had the opportunity to sit down with Larry Bonfante, CIO of the United States Tennis Association, and ask him a few questions about what it means to be an enterprising CIO.
Watch the video or read the transcript below.
TEP: Do you consider yourself an Enterpriser?
Bonfante: I do consider myself to be an Enterpriser. Everything we do, we do through a lens of what matters. So, if I woke your CEO up at one o'clock in the morning, and asked that individual what are the five things that are driving your organization this year, what would that individual say to you?
My team is focused on what are those five things. What are the things we are doing in the marketplace to drive the fan experience at the US Open, to drive the player experience in our leagues and our tournaments?
So we are totally focused on what we do in terms of the consumers we touch, and the programs we touch and everything we do is wrapped around that.
We don't upgrade software for the sake of upgrading software, we drive technology that creates outcomes for our players, for our fans, for our patrons, for our sponsors.
TEP: Describe one of your enterprising moments.
Bonfante: So one of the people on my team was a developer at the time. We were just hearing the early things about the private cloud, the public cloud. And we put him in charge of really researching what is out there. And he came back with a suggestion to move all our back end systems to the cloud. And he drove that process and drove that outcome for us, saving us about 30 percent in terms of operational cost and Cap Ex cost.
We were one of the first people into the public cloud because we saw the opportunity economically and from a time-to-market perspective to drive outcomes for our clients by going to the cloud.
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Larry Bonfante is the CIO of the United States Tennis Association and an executive coach at CIO Bench Coach. As an award-winning CIO, Bonfante's mission is to help develop world-class technology leaders and teams who enable their organizations to deliver outstanding business results. Bonfante has been recognized as a leader within the industry having been nominated for the CIO Hall of Fame in 2013, receiving the 2011 CIO 100 Award and the 2009 Premier 100 IT Leaders Award.
