Mary Solak

Director of Program Management

Mary Solak is the Director of Program Management for Systems Made Simple. Ms. Solak joined Systems Made Simple in 2010 as Program Manager for the Virtual Lifetime Electronic Record (VLER) Initiative, where she supervised five diverse, multifaceted programs involving 240 employees, and a budget of some $61 million. She has been instrumental in developing and implementing a Community of Practice-style governance structure across the initiative to establish consistency and continuity in best practices, plus provide a network of experts for mentoring and problem resolution.

With a portfolio demonstrating extensive multiple industry experience, including the banking, academic, scientific, pharmaceutical, special events (Olympic Games), health services, and mining industries, Mrs. Solak brings some two decades of information technology (IT) leadership and management experience to her new position. Prior to joining Systems Made Simple, she served in two positions with global responsibilities for Rio Tinto, Inc., the multinational mining giant. Ms. Solak first served as manager of the America's Regional Project Management Office, where she built and managed a team of eight project managers to deliver a portfolio of over 125 IT projects for business units, Rio Tinto and IS&T. Tasks included working with the customer and IS&T management to define the portfolio requirements, building the portfolio, developing the governance, optimization and improving customer relationships through seamless, transparent customer service emphasizing consistency and continuity, and elimination of redundancy. Later, as practice leader of the company's Global Project Management Office, she was responsible for the global portfolio focusing on program assessment to remove duplication, , ROI, resource and load balancing, scheduling and tracking, risk management and improvements in project implementation through process development and reengineering to IS&T customers throughout the world.

A certified network engineer, Ms. Solak was also heavily involved with the 2002 Olympic Winter Games in Salt Lake City through SchlumbergerSema, Inc., first as project manager-operations documentation, and later as program manager-information services training. She developed and produced written documentation of all operations policies, procedures, hand-offs, communication flows and staffing requirements for all technologies required to host the Olympic Games.

During the 2002 Olympic Games themselves, she served as a member of the Technology Team for the Main Operations Center (MOC), tasked with fast response resolution of multi-department issues. During the 2002 Paralympics, she was Director of the Technology Command Center (TOC).

Ms. Solak is a former technical trainer at Salt Lake Community College. She has attended Sierra College (Rocklin, CA), Henry Ford Community college (Dearborn, MI) and Fresno City College (Fresno, CA), and will receive a BA degree in business administration from Westminster College (Salt Lake City) later this year.

« Back to About Us