After finishing a Penn State Computer Science degree in 1987, Karl Herleman moved to Florida as a software engineer. He stayed awake most nights tweaking code for companies like L3Harris and Seagate while also studying at UCF in Orlando. As his responsibilities increased and the systems he worked on grew larger, he turned his focus toward managing processes and people.

After 15 years, Herleman moved into enterprise architecture at Gartner and five years later he was the CIO for Miami Dade College. After finishing an MBA, he returned home to Pittsburgh in 2012 to work with manufacturing data and analytics at Management Science. Now, he’s helping to drive digital transformation at American Textile Company, a leading provider of performance bedding products.