Kensmoe excited about co-op opportunities
Capital Electric - May 1, 2011
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Kent Kensmoe heads up Capital's IT department. |
Growing up on a farm west of McClusky, Kent Kensmoe understood what it meant to be a cooperative member. The family farm was on Verendrye Electric's lines and relied on the co-op to keep the farming operation going all year long. Kensmoe is the new information technology (IT) specialist at Capital Electric, and he brings with him the rural work ethic that is prevalent among North Dakotans.
Kensmoe joined the co-op this past November, after working for National Information Solutions Cooperative (NISC) in Mandan for 12 years. After college, Kensmoe had plans to take his agriculture degree from North Dakota State University, Fargo, and head back to the farm that his great-grandfather had homesteaded. Instead, the computer science portion of the agriculture program ended up steering him to a job in technology. He found a niche working for NISC and enjoyed the many challenges that came along with the job as the company grew.
"It was very hard to leave NISC; they had become like a family to me. This opportunity at Capital Electric just seemed like a great opportunity for me to serve the rural folks that I grew up with," says Kensmoe.
He joined Capital Electric at a time when technology will change the way we serve our members. According to Kensmoe, "There are definitely a lot of cool things going on here. Our system will become more automated, improving our efficiency and making everyone's job easier."
One of Kensmoe's major goals will be to assist with the process of gathering vital co-op data from the system and making it usable. He adds, "The system we have is very complex. You have to be able to mine the data and present it so it makes sense to the average person."
Kensmoe's co-op duties will also include making sure the co-op's IT infrastructure is current and safe. Keeping our members' data secure is a high priority in this age of identity theft. Kensmoe says, "Our members trust us with personal information and we have to make sure it is safe, which means we
have to keep our security up to date at all times."
Kensmoe and his wife Jo Lynn have 4-year-old twin daughters, McKenna and Kennedy, to keep them busy at home. Jo Lynn, a nurse at St. Alexius, puts up with Kent's hobbies, which include mud racing in four-wheel-drive pickups, hunting and athletics. "Mud racing gets in your blood. Once you get muddy, you don't ever want to get clean," he jokes.
Family life is still where it's at for Kent, just as it was in rural McClusky with his mom, dad and the grandparents all living on the same place.