Dave McKenna

Chief Information Officer & Chief Information Security Officer IDC

Last Reviewed: September 18, 2026

Executive Summary

Dave McKenna is Chief Information Officer and Chief Information Security Officer at IDC, the technology market-research and advisory firm, appointed to the combined role in June 2026. The dual title is the point: IDC’s pivot toward an AI-native intelligence platform means the firm’s analytical output is increasingly consumed as a system rather than read as a report, and McKenna’s framing of the job is that when that happens the security posture stops being an operational concern and becomes part of what customers are buying. His own summary of it, given on appointment, was that as the platform becomes part of how enterprises operate, trust becomes the product. He arrived with an unusually varied security background for a market-research firm - property insurance, a newly created state regulatory agency, and a consumer internet business - and a doctorate whose research subject was the security of connected devices.

Career Highlights

• Appointed Chief Information Officer and Chief Information Security Officer of IDC in June 2026, with responsibility for IT operations, cybersecurity and the firm’s enterprise AI automation and modernization programme.
• Previously VP of Platform Engineering and Chief Information Security Officer at Monster.
• As Chief Technology Officer of the Massachusetts Cannabis Control Commission, built a government technology infrastructure from nothing in under six months, satisfying HIPAA, CJIS and employee-data compliance requirements, and left the agency able to operate remotely when COVID-19 arrived.
• VP of Information Technology and CISO at Upland Capital Group; earlier, VP of Information Technology and Data Management at Narragansett Bay Insurance Company.
• Ph.D. in Information Technologies with doctoral research on Internet of Things device security.
• Holds CISM, CDPSE and PMP certifications.

Professional Journey

McKenna’s career runs through the regulated end of the technology function, where the constraint is rarely what the systems can do and usually what the law and the auditors will permit. He spent the mid-2010s at Narragansett Bay Insurance Company as VP of Information Technology and Data Management, a property insurer whose data problems - exposure modelling, claims, personally identifiable information - sit squarely at the intersection of engineering and regulation.

In 2018 he became Chief Technology Officer of the Massachusetts Cannabis Control Commission, an assignment with a genuinely unusual brief: the agency was new, the industry it regulated was newly legal, and the technology had to exist before either could function. He has described building the infrastructure from scratch in under six months while satisfying three overlapping compliance regimes at once - HIPAA for medical data, CJIS for criminal-justice information, and ordinary employee-data protection. The system’s design turned out to be fortunate in a way nobody planned for: it was already capable of supporting fully remote operation when the pandemic closed offices in 2020.

He moved to Upland Capital Group as VP of Information Technology and Chief Information Security Officer, returning to specialty insurance, and then to Monster as VP of Platform Engineering and Chief Information Security Officer. The Monster role combined the two halves of his experience for the first time, pairing responsibility for the engineering platform itself with responsibility for securing it - the pattern he now carries at IDC.

IDC named him Chief Information Officer and Chief Information Security Officer on 10 June 2026, in an announcement that also brought in Nick Mercurio as Chief Revenue Officer and Joe Bradley as Chief Technology Officer. The company had appointed Lorenzo Larini as chief executive earlier in the year, effective February. McKenna’s remit covers IT operations and cybersecurity together with the enterprise AI automation and modernization programme, positioned against IDC Quanta, the firm’s AI-native intelligence platform.

Education

Capella University

Ph.D., Information Technologies

Brandeis University

M.S., IT Management