Dr. Lance B. Eliot, MBA, serves as Vice President of Information Technology at Interactions, a global leader in retail solutions and experiential marketing. Dr. Eliot has over 20 years of industry experience, especially in the retail and CPG marketplace, and has served as a Chief Information Officer (CIO), along with having founded, ran, and sold several high-tech related businesses.
Acknowledged as an outstanding innovator in the retail/CPG realm, Dr. Eliot was instrumental in Twentieth Century Fox Consumer Products receiving the prestigious Innovation in Information Technology award from UCLA for the proprietary state-of-the-art merchandising system that he designed and fielded with Fox, and that also earned Fox a vaunted Wal-Mart Supplier-of-the-Year award. These systems ultimately enabled Fox to boost merchandising revenues by 100 percent in only two years. He was also crucial in the design of the Taco Bell self-serve kiosks, one of the first to provide such a capability for fast-food stores and which led to technological breakthroughs that other kiosk systems subsequently now rely upon.
Known for his thought leadership in many leading areas of business technology, including mobile technology and also Business Intelligence (BI), he previously hosted the popular radio show Technotrends that was also available on American Airlines flights via their in-flight audio program.
Author of three books and over 200 articles, he has made appearances on CNN, and has been a frequent speaker at industry conferences. A former professor at the University of Southern California (USC) and the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA), he founded and led an innovative research lab on Artificial Intelligence in Business. He was elected to the Board of the Southern California of the Academy of the Sciences (SCAS), and has served on the International Board of the Society for Information Management (SIM), a prestigious association of over 3,000 CIO’s/CTO’s worldwide.
He has performed extensive community service, including serving as Senior Science Adviser to the Vice Chair of the Congressional Committee on Science and Technology. He has served on the Board of the Orange County Science and Engineering Fair (OCSEF), where he is also has been a Grand Sweepstakes judge, and likewise served as a judge for the Intel International SEF. He served as the Vice Chair of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Orange County Chapter, a prestigious association of computer scientists. And, he has been an advisor to start-ups via the USC Stevens Center for Innovation and also the LaunchPad incubator and accelerator.
Dr. Eliot holds a PhD from USC, MBA, and Bachelor’s in Computer Science, and earned the CDP, CCP, CSP, CDE, and CISA certifications. Born and raised in Southern California, and having traveled and lived internationally, he enjoys scuba diving, surfing, and sailing.
