IT Leadership Award Honoree David Shardelow

Editor's Note: The IT Leadership Awards, presented by Pride Technologies, celebrate local IT professionals who help local, regional, national and global businesses run better through engaged leadership and a commitment to innovation. Check back next Tuesday and Thursday as we highlight the remaining 20 honorees of this year's award.

Sometimes those outside the IT field look at IT professionals as non-social people who are more comfortable in front of a keyboard than out in the real world. When it comes to David Shardelow, senior director of Corporate Information Services for Meridian Bioscience, nothing could be further from the truth. 

He still has friends from kindergarten at Glendale Elementary and from his days at Princeton High School, is a lifelong Cincinnati Bengals fan and season ticket holder, is involved in his church and spends a lot of time with his wife, Lana, and their adult children exploring the best Cincinnati has to offer. 

He brings this passion for his life to his work, too. Meridian Bioscience develops, manufactures, sells and distributes clinical diagnostic kits for various infectious diseases.

“Meridian Bioscience’s businesses have demanded and require access to information and systems at any time and from anywhere to satisfy our customers,” says Shardelow. “Organic international growth, along with an acquisition about two years ago, has resulted in our system, and IT employee, needing to support offices, salespersons and customers in over 60 countries around the globe.” 

Shardelow gives credit to and his team of experienced IT personnel as they have worked hard to keep on top of the growth. Among other changes, his IT team has worked on the virtualization of servers; secure, remote-access to core sales, manufacturing, regulatory and financial applications via a user-friendly portal; helping the salesforce utilize tablets to access the portal worldwide; coordinating with other Meridian departments to turn data into actionable information to assist managers to make timely and effective decisions; and, moving some secondary applications to the cloud.

Making some of these changes, Shardelow says, “has permitted our IT resources to work more closely with the business leaders and be devoted to functions more core to satisfying our customers.”

Something that will make sure Meridian Bioscience continues to stay at the forefront of its field for years to come.

Previous honorees featured: Michael Braine, Senior Vice President and Chief Information Officer of Retail and Vision Care Services for Luxottica Retail; Jay Brown, Senior Vice President and Chief Information Officer for UC Health; Steve Brunker, Chief Information Officer for LSI Industries; Rick Hensley, Chief Information Officer and Corporate Vice President for Messer Construction; Dave Hofmeister, Chief Information Officer with Enerfab; John Kellington, CIO and Senior VP, The Cincinnati Insurance Companies; Vinit Kohli, Vice President of Management Information Systems for Sibcy Cline; Annette Marksberry, Associate Provost and CIO for Information Technologies at Xavier University; Anup Nair, Chief Information Officer of Vantiv; Jeremy Shubert, Chief Information Officer of Triplefin; Jim Umphrey, Director of IT Operations for AdvancePierre Foods; Ralph Watkins, Vice President of Technology for Pure Romance