Brian Kelley
Name: Brian Kelley
Current Job: Chief Technology Officer at Ohio Turnpike and Infrastructure Commission
Favorite restaurant in town? Don’s Pomeroy House, Strongsville
Favorite thing about Cleveland? The Arts – Cleveland Museum of Art, Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, Cleveland Orchestra, Playhouse Square, and live entertainment
Q: Brian, being the CTO of the Ohio Turnpike was your dream job. Can you tell the readers how you finally landed the role? I applied for my position at the Ohio Turnpike in 1992 and was turned down. I went on to complete over 27 years as CIO at Portage County. In 2017 I was in Columbus at the Rhoades State Office Tower and encountered a friend and colleague, Randy Cole, who was Executive Director at the Ohio Turnpike. He shared that he had been planning to call me to sit down and have coffee and chat. He said that his Chief Technology Officer recently retired and he wanted to pick my brain to see whom I would recommend he reach out to. I recommend the best person I knew qualified for the position which was myself. He encouraged me to apply for the job when it posted and I so I did! The rest is history.
Q: What are your roles and responsibilities for the position? My current focus as Chief Technology Officer at the Ohio Turnpike and Infrastructure is focused on our current and future innovation endeavors. These include the following:
Electric vehicle charging stations
DSRC/C-2VX connected vehicle technology
Exploration of solar energy development
Our toll modernization project to implement open road tolling
Inductive in-road charging for electric vehicles
An electrified integrated interchange for a smart logistics yard with electric autonomous vehicles moving freight
Tire safety workstations
Connected and autonomous vehicle testing with automotive company partnerships and our state and regional collaboration endeavors
Q: How does the Ohio Turnpike Commission approach innovation? The Ohio Turnpike has a rich history for innovation as a major transportation corridor across Northern Ohio to east/west destinations since 1955. We have 241 miles of fiber connectivity along our road connecting our 55 facilities. The installation of the majority of this fiber was installed in 1984 under a telco right-of-way-agreement. In the 21st century, Digital Age our fiber connectivity is critical to future technology coming down the pike with IoT, edge computing, connected, autonomous and electric vehicles, and the continuous modernization of our toll collection system to enhance safety and improve the customer experience for 56 million-plus vehicles traveling across the Ohio Turnpike every year. We leverage strategic objectives and operational metrics to monitor, analyze, and chart where we are going. This is critical in excelling us forward to leverage innovation to be more efficient and effective as a toll road operator. We have internal, external, and people task teams focused on implementing new technology and programs to improve our organization and our operations. We leverage partnerships and collaboration to explore new technology to prepare for the road of the future just over the horizon.
Q: How has the shift been to remote work? The Ohio Turnpike and Infrastructure Commission had unknowingly prepped itself quite well a year in advance of COVID-19. We successfully completed a major device refresh between 2018 and 2020 and many of our desktop users migrated to tablets and notebooks. We ironically began implementation of new collaboration and document workflow and electronic signature software in early 2020. We thus found ourselves well-prepared to shift unexpectedly to remote work with our administrative staff when the COVID-19 quarantine sent us home in mid-March. Being well-prepared for remote work, we have been able to keep the pace without skipping a beat under the stellar leadership of our Executive Director, Ferzan Ahmed, and our exemplary management team, as we work on our strategic objectives and major project initiatives planned for 2020 and beyond.
Q: You are a car fanatic. Can you share the story of your daughter riding in the corvette for the first time? A year ago I decided to purchase a vintage Corvette from the last century. My thirteen-year-old daughter riding in the Corvette for the first time was fascinated with a button on the console. I instructed her to push it in, wait a while, and pull it out. When she pulled the button out she saw what she knows as a 12-volt outlet. She found the end of the button to be red and very hot. I then had to explain that is was 20th-century vehicle technology, a cigarette lighter!