Guest Blogger: Jan Marshall, Vice President and Chief Information Officer of Cubic Corporation
Jan Marshall, vice president and chief information officer (CIO) of Cubic Corporation, was recently named among the top 100 CIO/CTO Leaders in STEM by STEMconnector®, the one-stop resource for “who is doing what” in Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM) education and careers. Honored by the selection, Jan shares her insights on business and innovation from a technology and information perspective.
Cubic is helping solve global challenges such as national security, aging infrastructure and congestion through our cutting-edge products and services. Innovation is not only important to our company – it’s the backbone of Cubic. If we don’t innovate, we won’t survive.
The competitive edge of our innovation is our people. Cubic employees are the ones who help identify problems and work to solve those problems in new and creative ways. Through them, we’re able to achieve our vision - ‘be the global market leader by winning the customer to accelerate our growth.’ We use a “homegrown” product called IdeaSpark to harness the power of our collective minds and advance our products and services.
How are we innovating in the transportation sector? Through our NextCity vision, we hope to create a unique predictive analytics model for helping transportation operators gain insights into and use their existing data to produce efficiencies in operations and provide more actionable information to their customers.
On the defense side of our business, we have NeuroBridge, a neuroscience-based software solution used with Cubic’s Live, Virtual and Constructive training systems to optimize how the trainee’s brain functions in real-time to improve situational awareness and assessment. The data captured by these systems allows dynamic adaptation of the training event through analysis action and inaction, both physically and cognitively, to customize exercises specifically to the trainee.
These are just two examples of how we’re living and breathing innovation at Cubic. And because our focus is to meet our customers’ needs through innovation, we’re also investing strategically in our internal infrastructure, to better position us for growth.
As the company’s first CIO, I am responsible for leading our company’s information technology (IT) transformation, including implementation of a new ERP system. We, in IT, along with our senior leaders, are leading change in the company – improved tools, new technologies and new ways of delivering service and value to the business. What we are delivering and how we are delivering it are fueling our One Cubic vision. One Cubic is about harnessing the operating synergies across business units at our locations around the globe. I believe that we will offer a higher quality of service with better value through IT strategy, innovation and leadership, which all influence the success of a company.
Providing technical, process and change leadership expands well beyond a department transformation. We are enabling a new way to work and more productive ways for our employees to continue winning our customers. This is the future of the CIO role in our industry. By removing technical barriers and improving the tools available to employees, technology can, does and should directly lead to innovation. I’m proud to be mentioned among the group of executives leading the way in STEM education and careers. I’m even prouder to work for a company that not only leads in the design, development and integration of defense and transportation systems, but is also committed to the growth and strength of our youth in the sciences, to help inspire our future innovators.