CIO Brook Colangelo’s trailblazing journey spanned White House, Waters Corp. – Boston Business Journal

In a career that’s spanned more than 20 years, one connective thread for Brook Colangelo has been his role as a digital transformation expert.

During the first term of the Obama administration, he oversaw an overhaul and modernization of the enterprise IT system at the White House. In a subsequent role at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, he helped the book publishing powerhouse become a digital media platform. And, in his current role as vice president and chief information officer at Waters Corp., he has modernized the IT architecture of a more than 65-year-old publicly held company with a global presence.

“I’m a mission and impact person. So, that’s sort of the scale that I look at when I think about, what do I want to do and why do I want to do it? Or where do I want to be?” Colangelo said in a recent interview with the Business Journal.

It’s with that same sort of purposefulness that Colangelo has navigated his professional journey as an openly gay executive. “I’m a super-transparent person and I’m a super-transparent leader with my team. That is who I have to be. It’s not who I want to be, it’s who I have to be — and I have to be authentic,” he said.

Colangelo recalled coming from “humble roots,” as the son of hard-working parents who owned a restaurant where he began helping out as a dishwasher at a very young age. In college, he studied journalism and political communications, and was simultaneously “immediately attracted to the ability to use machines and technology to have bigger impact and to move at a faster pace.” Hence, his future professional path in technology began to take shape.

After he finally disclosed his sexual orientation to a friend in his 20s, Colangelo recalled grabbing a legal pad and writing a “project plan” to come out. First, he would tell friends and family, then the community, and finally the workplace. His comfort level in doing so evolved over time. “Coming out at work was very iterative (for me). It wasn’t one of those things that I arrived at every job and said I was gay,” he said.

He was out during his tenure as CIO for the Democratic National Convention Committee in 2007 to 2008, and, subsequently as CIO for the Obama White House. In that latter role, he helped transform its technology infrastructure in a way that helped the organization achieve nearly 100% operational stability and minimize chronic outages and downtime for thousands of end government employees across multiple business units.

The intensity and speed required of that work are as memorable to Colangelo as the friendships he forged.

“When you think about having only a time limit of four to eight years to make a sizable impact, that impact on society, the pressure to do that, is really tremendous. And it’s pressure you put on yourself, because you’ve subscribed to take this job and to really have an impact. So, it was a really amazing experience,” he said.

Colangelo’s latest high-impact assignment is his role as CIO for Waters Corp., a public company with an expansive global footprint that includes approximately 8,000 employees. Colangelo himself leads a global IT organization within Waters of approximately 175 employees. Waters’ analytical instruments and software have significant uses in the life, materials, food and environmental sciences. That mandate has resonated with Colangelo: “Waters is a corporation that works to make human health and well-being better. We believe in leaving society better than we are.”

He has also been a major contributor to Waters’ efforts to maintain a diverse and inclusive workforce, in part through his co-founding shortly after he arrived of Waters’ Pride Circle, an employee resource group for LGBTQ colleagues and allies. Among other initiatives, the group advocated for the installation of gender-neutral restrooms in Waters facilities across India, the UK and the U.S. The group’s efforts were also integral to Waters earning a perfect score of 100% on the Human Rights Campaign Corporate Equality Index for two consecutive years. Outside Waters, Colangelo and his husband Keith Whelan have been actively involved with such LGBTQ-focused organizations as the Trevor Project and Greater Boston PFLAG,

Ultimately, balancing the demands of being CIO with co-leading Waters’ Pride Circle group is something that Colangelo said brings him joy. “It goes back to that ‘What makes you happy?’ And making progress, seeing progress is one of those pieces of it (for me),” he said.

BROOK COLANGELO