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Paul Brassil (MSIT ‘01) first got into tech in the early 1990s.

He studied business as an undergraduate but didn’t know what he wanted to do for a career afterward. Looking through job postings at the time, he saw that most were looking for programming and tech professionals. He thought: “I’ve got to learn this - this is where the future’s going.”

So Brassil took a risk and accepted an entry-level job at a help desk for a software company in Cambridge.

Eventually, he became a C++ Programmer by moving up the ranks at his company. Though he enjoyed coding, he still found himself interested in business. He decided that, in order to propel his career forward, he needed to find the right combination of IT and business.

Choosing Bentley University

Brassil came to Bentley University in 1999 to take his career to the next level.

He saw that programming was becoming highly commoditized, and decided to move into IT Leadership to stay ahead of the trend. “I wanted a Master’s degree that was very focused on the business of IT, not just the tech side of it,” he explains.

The Masters of Science in Information Technology (MSIT) program was designed to be flexible for the diverse group of students who enroll. In Brassil’s case, this meant he was able to begin working at EMC Corporation while at Bentley in 1999, where he ran one of their enterprise data centers and launched their first extranet website.

“Really, Bentley was the only choice at the time - and continues to be the only choice in Massachusetts - for the right combination of IT and business.”

Working at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston

In 2013, Brassil transitioned from the corporate world to the nonprofit one by becoming the vice president of information technology at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston. The Federal Reserve – the central bank for the United States – is made up of 12 regional banks and the Board of Governors in Washington, D.C., which oversees Reserve Bank operations and makes monetary policy decisions.

At the Boston Fed, Brassil directs all local IT activity for the nearly 1,100 employees at the Bank, which covers desktop support, mobile device management, application development support, cyber security, information security, project management, IT innovation, and more.

Although the 12 Reserve Banks operate independently, Brassil points out the Banks do support one another when possible. His office provides enterprise platform services to the 22,000-person Federal Reserve System, including a national PPM platform, business intelligence offerings, and web services.

Though the Federal Reserve might be a long way from his first programming job, Brassil still sees it as tech-first.

“People think of the Federal Reserve as a financial organization or regulatory body, but it is important to remember how much technology drives what the Fed does,” he says. “The Federal Reserve  deals with major advances in technology – such as digital currency, blockchain, mobile payments, and integrated financial global systems – to determine how such advances affect the U.S. and global economy.”

The Fusion of IT and Business

Technology can no longer be an afterthought or side project in business. “IT has to be at the table to help companies and organizations disrupt - and not be disrupted by - the rapid change of technology.”

In Brassil’s mind, IT and business go hand-in-hand. The business needs to understand technology and looks to IT as its trusted partner and advisor when making technology decisions. But IT leaders also need to understand business. Transferring data to the cloud, for instance, can have a big impact on customers and budgets. IT leaders need to be fully versed on business strategies and roadmaps before beginning the journey to the cloud. By clearly understanding where each side is coming from, business and IT can work together and strengthen one another.

Brassil remembers learning this idea of a combined approach in his Systems Analysis and Design class at Bentley. His professor stressed that IT was about more than just writing code - it’s about building a product. IT professionals have to understand the project requirements, get customer buy-in, determine the cost, and more - they’re not just writing code in a vacuum.

He implemented this concept of running IT as a business at the Federal Reserve, where he and his team developed a mature demand management process for IT. When customers need services, staff write a value statement of what the customer wants, price it out, and create a timeline with clear milestones and deliverables. This systemized process shows the customer that there is a solid plan of action in place, and helps set expectations on both sides before work begins.

A Growing Trend

Brassil decided to focus on IT Leadership in 1999, getting involved ahead of the trend.

Today, IT has a strong future. According to a recent study by Gartner, by 2020:

  • 100 million consumers will shop using AR
  • 30% of web browsing will be done without a screen (such as your car or Amazon Echo)
  • 40% of employees will be able to cut healthcare costs by using fitness trackers

Technology is endlessly changing, which is what keeps Brassil interested.

According to Brassil, tech needs to partner with business and listen to the customer. At the Boston Fed, they’ve done this by creating a Business Relationship Manager role. This person is a consultant who sits down with the business to look at their roadmap, budget, and needs, making sure they’re on the same page as IT.

Pursuing a Career in Information Technology

Despite its rapid growth, there are still challenges to working in IT.

At times, says Brassil, the business takes IT for granted. He compares it to your phone - when it works right, you don’t think about it, but when it breaks, you’re upset. His job is very similar.

“But when our customers go aha - that’s how the cloud can change my business - an amazing amount of self-satisfaction comes from that,” he adds.

A second challenge is with communication. In technology, you can never communicate too much. Since so much of it happens behind the scenes, it’s important to always let the customer know what’s going on, why there’s a delay, and what they can expect going forward.

This kind of proactive communication is something Brassil learned during his undergraduate days, when he waited tables to help pay for school. He learned that the people sitting at the table don’t realize that your kitchen is overwhelmed - all they know is that their food is late. But if he went over to them to explain the situation and see if he could offer them anything, they were often times understanding of the situation.

Today, Brassil is a member of the Boston Private Industry Council’s CIO Leadership group, an organization of IT leaders in Boston “helping to promote IT literacy in the Boston School System and summer intern opportunities for students from low and moderate incomes.”

It’s in this role where he is actively combating the third challenge he sees in the future of IT: how do you excite a young woman and people of color to consider careers in IT?

Brassil is starting at home - his two daughters are both pursuing careers in STEM.

But beyond that, he wants to encourage young people to get involved in technology even if they don’t particularly like math or numbers. Nowadays, technology is about much more than that - it requires people with strong analytical and creative skills.

Between Project Managers, UX/UI Designers, BRMs, programmers, and more, every skill set is needed in IT.

Brassil got his first taste of this combined approach during the MSIT program, where he participated in many group projects with extremely diverse teams.

“In the future, all companies are IT companies - without exception,” he explains. “You need to be educated in technology to be effective in whatever field you pursue.”