Advisory Board

Ray DeLuke

Chairman of the Advisory Board

Ray has distinguished himself as a transformational IT leader during his previous tenures as Chief Information Officer (CIO) in three Fortune 500 organizations. Most recently he served on the L3 Executive Steering Committee for the merger of L3 Technologies, Inc. (L3) and Harris Corporation that resulted in the creation of L3 Harris Technologies (NYSE: LHX), a top tier Aerospace and Defense (A&D) company with a market cap of over $40B and over 45,000 employees worldwide.

Prior to the merger, his team executed a “digital transformation” of L3 Technologies - a Fortune 300 global A&D company with approximately 31,000 employees. Most notable in that transformation was a consolidation of over 50 electronic messaging environments into a single cloud-based messaging and collaboration platform and implementation of an enterprise analytics platform providing key performance metrics of over 60 individual businesses with roll-ups at each organizational level to a full view of the corporation for the CEO. This enterprise analytics system was recognized by SAP as its innovation award winner for North America in 2018. That same year L3 was granted a patent for a novel approach to information security for its corporate network which, according to a “Big 4” independent evaluation, established new benchmarks in the industry for external network resilience and protection against data exfiltration. L3’s data center transformation initiative with a leading cloud provider was also an industry first lowering data center costs for assets in this environment by over 70% and providing greater business enablement and agility.

Ray began his career as a computer programmer with the Eastman Kodak Company. After leaving Kodak in the early 1980’s he was promoted into program and P&L management at Kaman Sciences Corporation which was later acquired by ITT. Until his retirement in July 2019, he was SVP and CIO at L3, a direct report to the CEO, a corporate officer, and a member of company’s Executive Leadership Team (ELT).

Ray has led the IT functional work streams for several multi-billion-dollar M&A activities including the formation of Exelis (a Fortune 500 spin-off of ITT in 2012) and the IT integration of Exelis into Harris Corporation when Harris acquired Exelis in 2015. Ray was VP of Shared Business Services and CIO at Exelis Inc. from 2012 until 2015 and CIO of ITT’s $6B Defense and Information Solutions business from 2009-2012. As VP of Shared Business Services at Exelis, Ray had responsibility for transactional processing and service delivery for IT, Finance (AP and Payroll), HR (HRIS and Benefits Service Desk), Travel, eProcurement, and Corporate Real Estate.

Ray is a certified Six Sigma Black Belt and holds an undergraduate degree in Computer and Information Sciences from the State University of New York at Potsdam and an Executive MBA from Syracuse University.