Ken Venner, Chief Information Officer of SpaceX

Episode Overview

Among other topics, Ken discusses the following issues with Metis Strategy:

• His multi-staged people assessment and project selection strategies to align business strategy and IT infrastructure in the first few days in his new job
• KPIs and the need for business units and IT departments to communicate with and understand each other
• The strategies he undertook to build a resilient IT workflow structure needed in a lean organization with many single point of failure possibilities
• The unique challenge of blue-printing and institutionalizing a CIO office at a large but extremely dynamic and entrepreneurial organization
• Working with Elon Musk and deriving value and insights from other companies in his portfolio
• Eye on the trends: Because of security regulations for aerospace companies, SpaceX aims to achieve efficiency and scale by vertically integrating all processes and maintaining full ownership of any solutions developed

Ken Venner’s Biography

Since January 2012, Ken has been the CIO of Space Exploration Technologies Corporation, better known as SpaceX, a company that designs, manufactures and launches advanced rockets and spacecraft.

Prior to his time at SpaceX, Ken was the Executive Vice President, Corporate Services and Chief Information Officer of Broadcom Corporation, a role he held for over a decade. In that role, his purview included Real Estate, Construction, Facilities, Security, Travel, Administrative Services, and all business systems, computing and telecommunications infrastructure.

Prior to his time at Broadcom, Ken served as Vice President of Product Management and Chief Information Officer of Rockwell Electronic Commerce. Prior to that, Ken held a number of information sciences and information technology management positions for over 11 years at Lucent Technologies and AT&T Bell Laboratories.

Ken received a B.E. from the Stevens Institute of Technology, an M.E. from Carnegie Mellon University and an M.B.A. from New Hampshire College.

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