Robert Cain isn’t a regular CIO. He’s a cool CIO.
At one point in his life, Cain considered the Delta Sky Club Lounge his home because of how frequently he traveled for his career in the US Army. Now, he gives Florida the honor as he celebrates his two-year anniversary as CIO for Schneider Electric’s North American region, a title he told IT Brew that those in his close circle would never imagine him having.
“It’s like betting on the long shot in the Kentucky Derby if they would ever guess that I would become the CIO, considering where I’ve come from,” Cain said.
Those looking at Cain’s background won’t find traditional IT roles, such as a security operations center analyst, or security engineer. After receiving a Reserve Officers’ Training Corps scholarship in college, Cain jump-started his professional career in the Army, eventually climbing the ranks to serve as a lieutenant colonel.
“I was able to actually complete 20 years of service,” Cain said. “Twenty years, seven months, three days, and 14 hours, but who’s counting?”
Five years into serving as a commissioned active duty officer, Cain flipped the switch and joined the General Electric Company (GE), initially serving as a black belt quality leader before later transitioning into the company’s sales organization.
“I literally started at the bottom of the rung there of the sales ladder…[and] progressed my career up to channel leadership, large projects, district leadership, [and] sales leadership,” he said.
After roughly 10 years at GE and a four-year stint at Rittal Corporation, an industrial and IT manufacturer where he had his first opportunity at profit and loss leadership, Cain landed at Schneider as VP of sales in 2014. In that role, he led Schneider’s largest US sales region.
Four years later, Cain took on the role of VP of business transformation, where he worked to decommission the energy management and automation company’s over 30-year-old enterprise resource planning system. This experience, combined with Cain’s budding “digital acumen,” primed him to take on the CIO hat in 2022.
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As expected, Cain told IT Brew that he had an “appropriate level” of anxiety stepping into the new role because of his lack of a “traditional technologist” background. However, those worries quickly subsided.
“What I quickly found is that I wasn’t a unicorn in the fact that there were a number of organizations that were moving towards bringing business leaders into those digital roles because of the convergence of business and technology,” he said.
Overlap. Today, Cain spends his time working to provide the digital enablement of Schneider’s sales growth. To do so, he told IT Brew that he often borrows a page from his military playbook and takes a people-first, mission-always approach.
And that’s not the only thing that is transferable from his previous positions. Cain told IT Brew that all three career paths favor those who are agile.
“It’s something that in either of those environments—the military environment, the commercial environment, [and] the digital environment—it’s key to winning,” Cain said.
Cain takes pride in his unorthodox background, as well as the fact that his career story has created more opportunities for others within his organization. He estimates that half of his team doesn’t have a “hardcore technology background.”
Now, with two years of skin as CIO, Cain told IT Brew that he has very “defined” goals for his next year at Schneider.
“We will be able to trace more value to the [profit and loss] by delivering on those big rocks than we have before,” he said.