7/16/2018

By Peter High. Published on Forbes.

Jason Lish was recently promoted to Chief Information Officer of $2.3 billion Alight Solutions. As CIO, he is responsible for Alight’s overall digital, technology, enterprise risk and security strategy, and execution. Lish also leads the team charged with designing and developing Alight’s latest human-centric designs and advancements at the Alight Innovation Lab.

Lish’s career path is an unusual one, as he has spent most of his career in security, most recently as Chief Security Officer of Alight Solutions, a role he took on in July of 2017. In that role, he directed physical and cyber security initiatives including developing and enforcing security policies and strategies, establishing security standards and programs across the company, and focusing on increasing protections around digital and physical assets. Lish also oversaw client investigations and was responsible for monitoring information security risks overall. There are a number of reasons why CSOs (sometimes referred to as CISOs – chief information security officers) are not regularly called upon to take on CIO responsibilities, but chief among them is that CSOs, understandably, develop a risk mitigation and risk management orientation to such a strong degree, that they are believed to be ill-suited to the CIO role, which often has an innovation mandate, as is the case in Lish’s current role. By definition, innovation requires risk-taking. Alight Solutions’ assessment that he can successfully make the leap from CSO to CIO suggests that he is equipped to balance risk-taking and risk management appropriately.

One factor that has helped Lish’s growth in developing a broader perspective than the average CSO has been involved in advising other technology firms. He is an advisory board of member of Tigera, Inc., a provider of secure application connectivity for the cloud-native world; SecureCircle, which provides unstructured data security for cloud-first enterprises; and Privora, a mobile protection company. Though all three are in the security space, his role in each case is as an advisor to help each company grow and innovate.

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