The Internet Advisor
Gary Baker
Gary Baker is the SVP and CIO of Gale | Cengage Learning (www.gale.cengage.com), a world leader in e-research and educational publishing for libraries, schools, and businesses. It has over 100 online databases that support the company's 200+ digital and Internet products and an innovative leading edge platform for the 20+ web portal products. Started decades ago as Gale Research Co., it also highly customizes and licenses its proprietary content for integration with Web-based information services for nearly 100 organizations. Best known for its accurate and authoritative reference content as well as its intelligent organization of full-text magazine and newspaper articles, Gale enhanced its reputation in 2008 by purchasing HighBeam Research which aggregates content from over 3,500 publications and owns www.encyclopedia.com.Gale is one of three business units of Cengage Learning ($2B+ in revenue) which is a leading global print and electronic publisher of textbooks, reference materials and other educational resources for the higher education, professional training and library reference markets. This global private company, recently spun out of a public company (Thompson Reuters), is a private equity financed, profitable entity that has all of its businesses ranked either #1 or #2 in each of their respective markets. Gary serves on Gale’s Executive Committee and Cengage Learning’s Technology Council.
Previously, Gary was the VP of IT Delivery Services at Borders Group, Inc., a retailer of books and music, with 1,100 stores and over 30,000 employees worldwide. As the Chief Information Security Officer of this publicly-traded company, he was responsible for SOX and customer’s payment card security with additional responsibility for the program management office, IT planning and control, application production support, quality assurance, support operations, telecom and vendor management.
Prior to joining Borders, he was a Director in IT Transformation Services for AlixPartners, LLP, an internationally-recognized firm of corporate turnaround, performance improvement, IT and financial advisory professionals. He specializes in helping large global companies with IT governance and operations, vendor management, outsourcing/insourcing, strategic planning, IT organizational change management, business process alignment, application development and Internet-related technologies and Web services.
Before that, Gary was the Process Executive and Managing Director for EDS on the General Motors account simultaneously leading both Global Purchasing & Supply Chain and Global Business Services, two of GM’s five global process areas. His groups provided IT operations and application development for the large legacy environments, deployed commercial off-the-shelf software and utilized emerging technologies for custom development. They also provided the operations management for all of GM’s customer web sites globally.
As a Partner in the Advanced Technology Group in Business Consulting for Arthur Andersen, he led numerous client engagements in IT strategic planning as well as application development. He also created and led the first fully-functioning Application Development Center with new processes for onsite and offsite development.
In early 1994, Gary was co-founder, Chairman and CEO of Online Technologies Corporation (www.onlinetech.com), one of the oldest ISPs/ASPs in Michigan providing hosting, comprehensive Internet solutions and Web services for businesses. He sold the company in 1999, however OnlineTech continues to be a market leader in its market segment on a regional basis.
He has lectured locally and nationally on IT-related topics in general and specifically on new processes and technologies. He has written articles and co-authored white papers on a number of subjects dealing with innovative information technologies. He also wrote articles and appeared weekly as the Internet Advisor on WXYZ-TV Channel 7 Action News on Thursday mornings from 2000 through 2002.
Gary currently serves on the Board of Directors of University Bancorp Inc., a bank holding company and at one time served on the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago’s Advisory Council on Small Business. He has also served as a director or in a leadership position for various business organizations such as the Chairman of the IT Business Roundtable for the State of Michigan, Director of the Economic Alliance of Michigan, Director of Michigan Technology Council, Growth Fund Trustee for the Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan and others. He is an MBA graduate of the University of Michigan.
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