IT Leadership Award Honoree Jeremy Shubert

Editor's Note: The IT Leadership Awards, presented by Pride Technologies, celebrate local IT professionals who help local, regional, national and global businesses run better through engaged leadership and a commitment to innovation. For the next 3 weeks, check back each Tuesday and Thursday as we highlight one of the 20 honorees of this year's award.

When it comes to hiring for his tech team, Jeremy Shubert, chief information officer for Triplefin, a leading pharmaceutical brand support company, doesn’t just focus on technology skills. "There are certainly some skills a person must possess," he says, "but once past that, I’m looking for intangibles in a person. I would take a person with the right communication, accountability, collaboration and excitement with good technical skills over a person with outstanding technical skills but not quite the right fit. Building a team of people with those skills seems to elevate everyone."

He says with a team like that, "there is nothing they can’t accomplish together."

And judging by what Triplefin is accomplishing in its tech area, this University of Notre Dame executive MBA holder knows a thing or two about building a team.

"What this team has done over 18 months would typically take an organization several years to accomplish," says Shubert, who readily shares the credit with his staff. "We upgraded, changed and added new technology. It starts with the fundamentals. We are not in the business of managing data centers, so we moved all our infrastructure to a co-location facility where we get best-in-class services. And we are now in the midst of moving again to a full cloud infrastructure."

They also changed carriers and upgraded their network to MPLS, along with almost all their network infrastructure. "Then, because call center is core to how we support our clients, we invested and implemented the Cisco Enterprise Unified Communication Platform."

Next up? The team is nearly halfway through "re-architecting and building our own proprietary service platform operating as a SaaS product model. This product is live today and generates revenue and profit for our organization, but we have a complete roadmap that we continue to evolve and build."

When he’s not at work, Shubert loves to spend time with his wife, Tanja, and their three boys, ages two to 10. Like at work, "we always have something going on."

Previous honorees featured: Michael Braine, Senior Vice President and Chief Information Officer of Retail and Vision Care Services for Luxottica Retail; Jay Brown, Senior Vice President and Chief Information Officer for UC Health; Steve Brunker, Chief Information Officer for LSI Industries; Dave Hofmeister, Chief Information Officer with Enerfab; John Kellington, CIO and Senior VP, The Cincinnati Insurance Companies; Vinit Kohli, Vice President of Management Information Systems for Sibcy Cline; Annette Marksberry, Associate Provost and CIO for Information Technologies at Xavier University; Anup Nair, Chief Information Officer of Vantiv; Jim Umphrey, Director of IT Operations for AdvancePierre Foods; Ralph Watkins, Vice President of Technology for Pure Romance