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Expertise and Resources:

Talent Acquisition, Development, Management and Retention of professionals. Lonnie Emard was instrumental in the formation the Consortium for Enterprise Systems Management and was named the executive director in January 2009. He is responsible for the strategic planning and tactical operations of the Consortium, including financial management and facility planning. He has been passionately working to bring academic, business, economic development and public relations entities together to address the need for more workers in the IT talent pipeline. Emard joined BlueCross BlueShield of South Carolina in 2002 as the director of staff resource management for the information systems division. Under his direction, the BlueCross BlueShield information systems organization grew from 1,200 employees and contractors to more than 2,300 in seven years. His management techniques helped the IS division maintain a 93 percent retention rate at a time when other information technology companies were struggling to keep their best people. Emard also was responsible for the Managing People Program, which includes best practices in talent acquisition, development, management and retention. He introduced the organizational, structure design (OSD) model as a valuable framework for the Institute for the Management of Information Technology offered by the Rushing Center at Furman University. Before he joined BlueCross BlueShield, Emard spent 18 years as an information technology professional working for Amoco Corp. He followed the model IT career path, holding seven different types of IT positions before becoming an IT executive manager. Emard also worked on several major organizational redesign efforts and began integrating organization development theory into IT. His efforts during this time also included roles as executive lead recruiter for Georgia Tech and the Atlanta University Center, where he began developing innovative techniques for academic and industry collaboration. Emard serves on several boards, including the Columbia Chamber of Commerce Information Technology Council, Midlands Education and Business Alliance, New Carolina's Insurance Technology and Services cluster and the Innovation in Insurance organization. He graduated from Northwest Missouri State University with a bachelor's of science in computer science in 1981.