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On Tim Dickson‘s second day as chief information officer at Generac Power Systems Inc., the company’s website and phone lines went down.
It was August 2020 and not only was the world in the thick of the Covid-19 pandemic, but Hurricane Isaias was also ripping up the East Coast of the United States.
Demand for Generac’s backup power generators was high and as the new executive in charge of technology for the Waukesha-based manufacturer, it was Dickson’s job to fix the outages. He and his new team jumped in and resolved the problems.
“I committed to my boss (Generac CEO Aaron Jagdfeld) later on that afternoon that that would never happen again on my watch,” Dickson said in a 2021 interview on a podcast called “Everybody Pulls the Tarp.”
Whether or not Generac and other major Milwaukee employers are viewed as “technology companies,” they employ thousands of technical workers and rely on their skillsets to help drive business outcomes. Local companies across industries ranging from manufacturing to health care to professional services utilize tech talent.
The U.S. is in the midst of a tight labor market where hiring technologists is particularly competitive. Attracting and retaining tech talent — while challenging — can help companies stay on top of digital transformation, create innovative solutions to pressing business problems and uplift the local economy with higher-paying jobs.
Milwaukee economic development groups, corporations and other organizations have for years emphasized the need for the region to strengthen its technology ecosystem.
For instance, the MKE Tech Hub Coalition was established in 2019 by local companies including Northwestern Mutual and Advocate Aurora Health with the goal of inclusively doubling the area’s tech jobs and talent pool. The group has made strides in that direction with strategies including talent and corporate attraction, education and upskilling, and startup support programs.
The coalition tracks progress using data from the information technology (IT) industry group CompTIA Inc., which publishes tech talent data that counts non-technical employees working for companies in the tech industry and employees working in technology roles for companies across industries.
In this special report, the Milwaukee Business Journal talked with tech executives and leaders at well-known local companies across industries about their technology organizations and how they leverage tech to operate and grow.
Chief information security officer
As the chief information security officer for Children’s Wisconsin in Wauwatosa, Angela Johnson leads a team responsible for ensuring secure connectivity for all of the health system’s technology, from Zoom videoconferencing software to internet-enabled medical devices to the Epic electronic medical records (EMR) system.
She also collaborates with providers to make health care innovations a reality. For instance, she’s exploring how to use genomics for precision medicine, where providers use patients’ individual DNA to inform their treatment decisions. Her team also is actively working on a project to install transportable cameras in rooms for patients that need sitters, allowing human sitters to monitor multiple patients at once.
Johnson’s team has also moved the EMR system into a private cloud, allowing the health organization to upgrade the system more quickly and efficiently.
“I like to tinker with things. When I was younger, I would take things apart just to put them back together again. …I’m always the first one to get the new phone or get the new iPad or get the new something and just to play with it and figure out how it works.”
“Before, people were always looking for people with an IT background, and that’s not necessarily the case (anymore). …I can teach security to anyone but what I can’t teach is patience and problem-solving skills.
“I don’t require a computer science background. I just require that they understand what a computer is … everything else we can teach you. …We have a lot of former nurses who transitioned to Epic analysts and they had no technology background.”
“Just the amount of technology that’s needed to support an operation like Children’s. When you think about Children’s Hospital, you immediately think about the doctors and nurses. You don’t necessarily think about the tools that they use to do the jobs that they have, and most of those are technology-related.
“There was a tool that was developed — it’s a survey, and it’s really around detecting suicidal tendencies in kids. …A kiddo comes into the hospital and they give them an iPad. …They go through this really quick survey and it tells us whether they’re in danger or they feel like they need help … which then allows us to provide them services that maybe we wouldn’t have provided had we not gotten that data from them.”
Chief information officer
Tim Dickson is Generac’s first chief information officer, hired to report directly to the company’s CEO and lead the 63-year-old company’s digital transformation.
When he joined Generac in 2020, the company’s 75-person IT team was primarily focused on its employee resource planning (ERP) software and dealing with on-premise infrastructure, Dickson said. Today, the team has around 110 employees, many of which have been upskilled in the areas like data, user experience, digital architecture and integration.
As the team and the company have grown, Generac has also scaled its IT budget, Dickson said. For instance, the cybersecurity team has more than tripled and the company has transitioned to newer cloud-based software, he said.
Dickson also established an internal digital incubator known as the Digital Center of Excellence focused on rapidly prototyping new solutions. The IT team, which is largely based out of the company’s Waukesha office, regularly has events like hackathons, he said.
“Upskilling (is) a huge passion of mine. I partnered with seven or eight strategic vendor partners in the software space and we kicked off a number of different upskilling initiatives where we would offer free, virtual, self-paced training to team members that they would take on their own time.
“As an example, I saw a person who was an SAP data analyst … become a data scientist. So somewhat in his field, but certainly much more further advanced than what he had been doing before. …I saw a person who was a database administrator become what we call the queen of bots now. She is the RPA, robotics process automation, lead.”
“I’ll be honest and open and transparent in saying that (Wisconsin) is still gapped in certain skill sets. This area still I think has a ways to go in building a larger pool in the areas of artificial intelligence and automation, some areas around data, data management and data integration.
“I have plugged those holes with part-time folks … contractors or contractors-to-hire, while I open up full-time requisitions and have the time to spend to find the right people to bring in from the outside, and sometimes outside of the state, but (the) first priority, obviously, is trying to find somebody here in the state of Wisconsin.”
Vice president of solution delivery
Maribeth Achterberg is part of the IT executive leadership team at Molson Coors Beverage Co. She’s responsible for the “build” portion of the company’s plan, build, run IT operating model, which includes application development, data analytics, and software and hardware infrastructure.
Achterberg joined Molson Coors in 2020 and said she was hired because of her experience with agile, a software development approach that’s designed to help organizations be more responsive to customer feedback.
As she previously did at Johnson Controls, Achterberg is helping Molson Coors take an agile approach to IT, moving the company away from what’s known as the traditional “waterfall” methodology, which takes longer to create value for the company, Achterberg said.
Achterberg leads a team of around 180 internal employees based in Milwaukee and Romania that’s on track to grow to around 215 by the end of this year, she said. She also manages more than 200 external IT professionals, including contractors and consultants, that can flex to up to 400 as needs arise, Achterberg said.
“IT is a business function that enables all other business functions. …Every piece of that brewery is enabled with some sort of tech so we can manage the quality of the product, so we can manage production and make sure we’re meeting timelines and that things are packaged and shipped according to orders.
“I don’t think you’re going to find a company that isn’t tech-enabled and is having any sizable impact from a revenue standpoint.”
“When I think about digital transformation, you can go in different layers of what that means and it really depends on which persona perspective you’re looking from.
“From an IT person’s perspective, digital transformation is moving workloads into the cloud and then applications more into software-as-a-service.
“From a brewery standpoint … digital transformation could be something as simple as predictive maintenance. I have sensors on my machines that are telling me, based on certain kinds of metrics like vibration data, that certain parts are going to fail, and instead of me waiting for it to fail and the machine being down impacting production and revenue … replace it before we have a lot of production downtime.
“In totality, it’s really leveraging technology so that we can be faster, better, cheaper, and be more effective in a way that you’re leveraging tech to make your job better.”
Managing director of Direct Supply Innovation & Technology Center
From inside the Direct Supply Innovation & Technology Center on the Milwaukee School of Engineering campus in downtown Milwaukee, Tom Paprocki and his team build new technology that serves thousands of senior living communities nationwide, and also identify and scale senior care startups from around the world.
Paprocki’s immediate team consists of around nine people, but the group also works with startups and other outside groups that add another couple dozen to the mix, he said.
Around 25% of Direct Supply’s total employees are software engineers, most of which live in the Milwaukee area, Paprocki said. The employee-owned company is in the business of senior living and health care solutions.
“The problem right now in our industry is rooted mostly around staffing. Long-term care … has lost about 300,000 workers over the course of the pandemic. …So as a result, we have to find ways to do more with less.
“Right now across the country, there are people going room to room who will take vitals … and then later on (they) would give it to somebody who would go enter into the computer. It’s super inefficient.
“We created a piece of technology … where it’ll take all the information automatically when you take the vital with a smart piece of technology. …We’ve integrated with (post-acute care electronic medical records companies) so that when you … take the readings for vitals, it just automatically goes in. There’s never a transcription error and it takes about 40% less time, which is time they can spend taking care of residents.”
“We have, over the course of the last decade, scoured the earth (for startups) and at this point. I have personally vetted about 2,800 startups around the world, and we only work with the ones that we think are the most impactful … so it’s less than 1% of the companies that we evaluate.
“We do not function principally as a venture capital arm of the company, although we do find ways to pursue some form of ownership if it’s the right sort of relationship for the company. But our primary goal is to actually co-create solutions for startups, and then help them commercialize and scale.”
Director of global performance analytics
As the director of global performance analytics at the global workforce solutions corporation ManpowerGroup, Dave Mancl works with the company’s business leaders from around the world and across departments to identify key business performance drivers and then use data to improve them. For instance, as it relates to marketing, Mancl and his colleague analyze channel attribution and return on ad spend data.
Mancl also works with the team behind the company’s Experis Career Accelerator, which launched last year and leverages artificial intelligence to understand users’ interests and abilities and prescribe career paths and training accordingly. His background is in industrial-organizational psychology and human resources technology.
At least five Milwaukee-based ManpowerGroup teams — including Mancl’s — focus exclusively on technology, he said.
“Yes, I mean, continuously. More with analytics, especially, because it’s such a rapidly developing area. New developments in artificial intelligence, machine learning, even programming languages — even though in my role, I don’t have to do a lot of hands-on development, I still need to understand coding logic.
“Platforms like Coursera, Udemy, all of the massive open online content that’s available to everybody today … (are) hugely beneficial to anybody in a technical field who really requires a continuous honing of skills and understanding in order to do their job.”
“We can categorize it in different ways. So the categories are operational, incremental and then disruptive. …Operational innovation is like (ManpowerGroup’s personalized career resources program) MyPath. MyPath is really a program or a strategy designed to improve the ability of our recruiters to coach and develop talent in our associates (and) for our clients.
“Incremental innovation is a little bit more where most of our data and analytics falls into place … because what analytics enables you to do is leverage past experience to improve future performance, and that’s done incrementally; it’s not like you can take a look at how you’ve performed in the past and then revolutionize your business based on that.
“And then disruptive innovation, for us, is really about designing platforms that enable us to do our business or leverage our core strategic capabilities related to understanding talent and the world of work in a disintermediated way. So we’re automating more and really bringing people together at a much higher scale. …Really, innovation just relates to change.”
Maribeth Achterberg is responsible for the “build” portion of Molson Coors Beverage Co.’s plan, build, run IT operating model. A previous version of the article misstated the portion of that model she is responsible for.
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