DoGood Member Spotlight Ammar Ammar
"Why would I look at other higher eds when they're all struggling?"
Ammar Ammar
AVC & Chief Technology and Information Security Officer · University of Tennessee Health Science Center
When Ammar Ammar needed a better model for security operations at a state-funded university, he didn't look at other academic medical centers. "Why would I look at other higher eds when they're all struggling?" he says. "Why don't I look at the Fortune 250 and see how they're handling it, and scaling it down?" So he stepped outside his own industry entirely. Ammar looked at what large-scale enterprises were doing, then rebuilt a scaled-down version for UTHSC.
"I don't have the most money in the world, but let me see what they're doing and how I make it happen. Am I going to have the budget on their level? Absolutely not. However, can we have performance on their scale? Yes. We just have to do it within our bounds."
Ammar Ammar, UT Health Science CenterThat's the same instinct behind the role he holds now. Ammar is both the CTO and the CISO at the University of Tennessee Health Science Center, two roles that usually belong to two different people who argue with each other over every decision. He doesn't have that argument. It happens inside one person.
"Everyone has to have a security first mindset," he says. "We do security first, and then we design things to fail in a secure way, but we provide availability in a secure way."
He didn't plan to climb into that position. Ammar was working in data center operations for a large IT shop located in Memphis when he decided he wanted a change, took a pay cut, and moved into cybersecurity operations at UTHSC instead. He didn't intend to climb the ladder from there, either. "I kept moving up and kept performing and kept doing more things," he says. "And then next thing I know, it's like, here I am." More than a decade later, he's held nearly every title in the building: analyst, manager, deputy CISO, interim CISO, CTO, CISO, and now AVC holding both hats at once.
The climb wasn't free. The hardest part wasn't technical. It was leading people who used to be his peers, and giving up the part of the job where his own hands were on the keyboard. "Now you move into the operational, into the strategic, which is a very different transition," he says. Most people think they'd do better in charge. "If you had to be your boss," he says, "would you still like you?"
Sometimes the job meant losing people he respected, and not always for the same reason. A budget cut could force it. Other times, someone just wasn't right for the role anymore. Either way, it never got easier. "You work with them for years, and you have to let them go," he says. He got through it with help: two mentors, both former CIOs, who stayed friends long after.
The hardest shift took the longest to make. Early in his career, Ammar took every complaint personally: an unhappy employee, a criticism of his leadership, a bad review. "I took a lot of things personally coming up," he says. Now, criticism doesn't land the way it used to. He's learned that a harsh review usually says more about the person giving it than about him, and after climbing every rung in that same building, he's earned the standing to let it go.
"I take absolutely nothing personal anymore."
Ammar Ammar, UT Health Science CenterHis advice to anyone moving into a senior role: don't take your team's wins or losses personally, and don't let someone else's insecurity become your problem to manage. "You're going to run across 300 different personality types in one day," he says. "You need to be an executive leader."
This has been a DoGood Member Spotlight.
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