Louise Brandy has been the Chief Information Officer at QuidelOrtho since 2022. She oversees the company’s information technology strategy and assists the teams to drive efficiency in the company to meet business goals. She has close to thirty years of experience in this field and a diverse portfolio of expertise in fields including business transformation, enterprise architecture, system consolidations and program management. She holds a bachelor’s degree in Business Administration from the University of Phoenix.

What are your current roles and responsibilities as the Chief Information Officer and Senior Vice President at your organization?

I have been working in IT for the past 25 years, and before that I was in accounting and finance for 15 years. Throughout this experience, I have gained insights into the benefits of technology that gauge organizational success. The transition from finance to IT has helped me understand both domains effectively and bridge the gap between technology and business needs.

After finishing my degree, I developed a better understanding of system design, program coding and how systems are created, in order to use technology to make people's lives easier. So, during my IT career, I had opportunities to take a step away from simply implementing software solutions to strategically developing my expertise with new technologies, data management tools, cybersecurity protection, and overall infrastructure platforms. This helped align all of technology with the business goals, meet every user need, and drive success.

Once I joined the leadership team, I implemented a business-centric approach, emphasizing the need to help solve business problems and align with stakeholders' needs. IT doesn’t impose automation just to automate. Technology solutions have to have clear business value. Also, I coined the term “enabling our business partners”, which prioritizes the importance of collaboration and service-oriented IT. Technology is meant to be perceived as business success and not something to deal with individually. This is how I advocated for partnership and innovation in IT to drive organizational growth and success.

“We partner very closely with our business operations teams by enabling them to achieve their business goals through technology solutions. We empower our business to adapt to the evolving changes and assist them by creating multi-year roadmaps and run implementation projects. Our strong collaboration mindset helps us to overcome any technology challenge together and leverage recent technologies that align with their business goals.”

What are the challenges or concerns that the CIOs are facing the most in the industry?

One of the most challenging yet beneficial aspects that we, as CIOs, face is the rapid advancement of technology. So, it is about a dichotomy for every CIO in the industry: the desire to be on the leading edge of technologies while simultaneously not endangering the organization’s resources, budget, time and people in uncertain circumstances, is the challenge. For instance, there was a rising trend of transforming all systems into the cloud, and everyone followed the herd but eventually found it too expensive. So, it is very important to first understand the technology and its advantages before implementing it. AI has taken the world by storm, but we should be well aware of its use to align with the distinct needs of every business. Ensure the data that is being used is accurate, as well as the security of the information. For instance, our CISO and the security teams are trained to know about the system's risk before implementing any technology.

Another significant challenge lies in protecting our environment from the latest technology threats, which are growing every day. We coined the slogan ‘Enable and Protect”. This shows we need to delicately balance the ability of our business teams to do their jobs, while ensuring we have the right level of security to protect, but non inhibit, our work force.

And lastly, implementing new technology also brings high costs, which poses a significant barrier for businesses. To have a proper financial plan, partnering with the CFO has been highly effective. I have always been concerned about managing both, the capital and operational expenses, understanding the difference and ensure accurate forecasting. Making sure we learn early if there are major shifts in the spend so we have time to course correct if needed. Therefore, having a financial background also strengthens the relationship with our CFO, aligning both of our goals.

What are some of the trends that CIOs are following in 2024 or would follow in the future?

Of course the most popular trend is to embrace GenAI and Automation. It’s inevitable that we will need to harness the power of these tools to help better analyze data and free up our workforce to perform more value added tasks. Another trend is to be faster at Cybersecurity measures. The evolving changes in the geopolitical space creates many constraints for our businesses. And the bad actors are becoming very crafty every day. Participating in joint consortiums to protect our environments will be the best way to thwart these threats. It’s not a competitive advantage to protect one organization. When we do this together, and share the knowledge and solutions, we all have a better chance to stay safe.

More importantly, fostering strong relationships with business leaders leads to effective leadership. While engaging with our business leaders, we first address the most challenging business problems, and deliver quickly so as to gain reliability and establish credibility. This is how we serve our business as trusted advisors and problem solvers, facilitating collaboration and effective decision-making among every stakeholder.

How do you see the role of the CIO in the next couple of years?

The current role of the CIO has marked a sudden shift from traditional IT roles like data center management, support tickets and business analysts into business ownership of products and services. The role is more of a strategic business partner involved in executing organizational strategies. Fostering initiatives like Organizational Change Management in order to adopt new technologies, and institute a continuous improvement culture in order to reap the benefits of upgraded systems will be an important part of the CIO leadership. Being a strategic partner at the table will improve productivity for IT and the company. Stretching outside of the technology desk and understand how you can influence business decisions will give your company more of a competitive advantage and improve productivity.

What would be your piece of advice for your fellow peers and aspiring professionals on how to be successful at their organization?

My only piece of advice for my fellow peers is to build a strong relationship with business partners, listen carefully and seek consensus in fulfilling business goals comprehensively. This will help the business to overcome many pain points and pave the way to success. If the business is successful, then we in IT are successful.