Guest

I'm currently IT exec in health care. I started work in the mid early 90s and we started off pulling cable. Found out that I had an aptitude for it, I found out I could do it and really found it interesting. The second thing I will say that kind of spurred me and pushed me, there weren't a lot of blacks in that profession. I wanted to do it just because, right? I wanted to be in that room, I wanted to understand that. And that was something internal. Me being in the room may not mean the same thing to everybody. But one thing you two will know is that I am there. Now, my motivation is to see how I can affect change in the industry. I wanna be instrumental in exposing kids who were like me, who weren't the best in school. I was a special education student, not because I couldn't do the work, because I was labeled as a little discipline problem, he talks a lot. And I wanna be able to let folks like that, other kids, what they say is not who you are. And that's a big drive for me, pulling people into the profession. 

I was raised by a single mother and we struggled financially as I was growing up. My mother always said, "Where you are is not who you are." Living on food stamps was where we were but not who we were.

A lot of my work is about bringing solutions to the table with problem-solving. I work to streamline operations, improve doctor-patient visits, and make it easier for patients to connect with physicians through telehealth and apps. I make sure server backups are done and the load balancer is allowing particular application servers to have equal access and throughput. I work to decrease our footprint in the data center while making sure we're providing enough compute for the rest of the company.

Vice President of Information Technology

You can't do that. Your skills aren't good enough and you don't have enough discipline.

Al Gardner

About Al

Al Gardner

About Al

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