With the pace of digital advancements increasing, today’s CIO simply can’t be complacent. Isaac Sacolick has never been content with the status quo—and he didn’t come up through traditional IT roles.
While his peers were climbing the corporate ladder, Sacolick was busy creating tech startups like TripConnect (a web 2.0 social travel hub), a network of software-as-a-service (SaaS) solutions for newspaper companies, and analysis solutions for genetic researchers. The work has given him insight into how a CIO can leverage many roles to rethink business models and capabilities. The experience enabled Sacolick to be a transformational CIO at two McGraw Hill businesses:BusinessWeek (now owned and published by Bloomberg) and McGraw Hill Construction. An entrepreneur, social networking guru, media specialist, business intelligence architect, blogger, and speaker, Sacolick is the portrait of the new CIO.
Sacolick’s trajectory goes back to his childhood. When he was twelve years old, he asked his father for an Atari 2600, but Sacolick’s father refused. One day, however, Sacolick came home to find a new computer. “My dad said that just buying video games was a waste of time,” Sacolick says. “If I wanted to play games, I’d have to program them myself.” And that’s just what Sacolick did. Soon, he was learning how to program from the back of computer magazines and even running his own bulletin board.