Bio
Kent Carpenter is an accomplished professional in Information Technology. With 30 years industry experience in IT Service Management, Kent’s focus remains dedicated to providing solutions that focus on service operations while emphasizing and promoting the ‘customer experience’. Mr. Carpenter graduated from California State University Northridge with a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science. He received his MBA from Cardinal Stritch University in (list city), Wisconsin. While at Stritch, Kent’s research and thesis addressed a new process for release management in service desk operations that was based on the Capability Maturity Model and Deming, as well as other models. This process preceded the now-current ITIL and ITSM paradigms. Mr. Carpenter has received his PMP certification in Project Management and is ITIL certified. Mr. Carpenter started his career at Prudential Insurance company where his responsibilities ranged from developing insurance applications for laptops, which was then being introduced to the market, to being part of a team responsible for deploying 20,000 laptops to a non-technical group of insurance agents. This deployment also included training. After 19 years at Prudential, Kent accepted a position with Progressive Insurance. In this capacity, he successfully managed three service desk operations, which resulted in operational maturity, and served as the driving force to shift Progressive’s IT operations to a ITIL service model. His transition to higher education began with Pearson Education, Denver, Colorado. While at Pearson, Mr. Carpenter successfully transitioned their Network Operations Center (NOC) into an international, state-of-the-art monitoring team providing round-the-clock support in Denver and Sri Lanka. Beyond the typical escalation service desk responsibilities, the supporting team monitored all aspects of IT Infrastructure and APIs, and also included customer facing SaaS Learning Management Systems, and other Pearson provided products. As the Director of Service Management in the Office of Information Technology at the University of California Merced, Kent is responsible for leading operations that cover the Service Desk, Project Management operations, Software Asset Management, developing and deploying ServiceNow and implementation of ITSM maturity.
