Jon O'Connell

Over the course of the 13 years that Jon has been with Kiessling Transit, he has held many roles and taken on a variety of responsibilities. Essentially, Jon’s path has paralleled the trajectory of the company. As Kiessling Transit has transformed and grown in the past decade into a leader within the transportation industry, so too has Jon developed from an IT professional and office administrator at the company to a key executive of the organization.

Jon is both a longtime friend and employee of the Kiesslings, having joined the company in 2004. At the time of his hiring, Kiessling was entering into a new MBTA RIDE contract that required a fully dedicated IT person to manage all facets of the company’s technical infrastructure, systems and support. The Kiesslings hired Jon for this critical role for many reasons, including his expert problem-solving skills, his ability to effectively streamline business practices, and, most important, his collaborative and easygoing demeanor. During Kiessling’s contract management of the MBTA’s THE RIDE services on the South Shore, Jon was solely responsible for managing the Wide Area Network (WAN) installation connecting Kiessling’s Norfolk location with the MBTA’s 10 Park Plaza offices in downtown Boston. Jon has also successfully led a number of company projects, with a heavy emphasis on software migrations of multiple company on-premise systems ranging from Microsoft Exchange/Office365 to cloud based Payroll/HR solutions, many which trimmed annual company IT costs significantly.

Today, as Vice President of Operations, Jon works in lockstep with the Kiessling owners, Lars and Roger, and, with great attention to detail, he oversees all the day-to-day operations at the company. His responsibilities include investigating, recommending, installing and upgrading all company software and reviewing company backups of all databases. Jon’s quick thinking and response time, as well as his proactive IT planning, mean that equipment downtime and other operational issues are kept to a minimum.