Category: Recognition

 Amber Boyle

 "At VMware, we know that diversity drives innovation, and innovation drives better business outcomes. VMwomen is a strategic business initiative dedicated to harnessing the power of human difference. At its core, VMwomen is a cultural transformation, not a program that focuses on “fixing” women. We are starting with culture change, driven by business leaders. VMwomen is led by a council of business leaders who have clear accountability to deliver improved results. The council members drive action plans aligned to their business’ representation, hiring, promotion and retention metrics, and regularly report their progress to our executives."

 Cecily Joseph

Cecily Joseph is vice president of corporate responsibility and chief diversity officer for Symantec Corporation, a global leader in cybersecurity. As leader of  Symantec’s global corporate responsibility efforts, Cecily drives environmental, social and governance program development, integration and alignment.  As Chief Diversity Officer, Cecily leads Symantec’s efforts to bring in, grow and keep the best diverse talent.

With more than 15 years of experience building corporate responsibility programs in ethics & compliance, strategic philanthropy and environmental sustainability from the ground up, Cecily acts as an internal and external change agent.  She is an ongoing champion for diversity and inclusion and gender equity, working with the company’s Leadership to create a goal to increase the diversity of Symantec’s workforce by 15 percent, empowering female leaders through the Women on Board initiative, and creating a pathway for underrepresented young adults to enter into the cybersecurity field through the Symantec Cyber Career Connection (SC3). She has also spearheaded an increase employee volunteerism by 70 percent through her team’s community investment efforts and the launch of the Symantec Service Corps.

Cecily is often sought to speak on a variety of topics at industry events – including RSA, the world’s largest data security conference, where Cecily has spoken for three consecutive years. She is an active writer on her blog and contributor of opinion editorials for The Huffington Post.

Cecily currently serves on the board of directors for Net Impact and Leadership California. Cecily received the Award for Human Rights from the City of San Francisco Commission on the Status of Women, recognition as one of the Multicultural Leaders of California by the National Diversity Council, and recognition as one of the Most Influential People in Business Ethics by the Ethisphere Institute.

Cecily joined Symantec in 2005 after thirteen years with VERITAS Software, where she led the company’s legal affairs and served as executive director of the VERITAS Foundation. She holds a J.D. from Tulane University Law School.

 Danny Guillory

"I think if the will is there in a focused way around retention and advancement, that is not as challenging as we make it out to be. I've seen organizations that move forward very quickly if there is a true will to make that happen. The larger challenge is how wide ranging diversity and inclusion really is in all parts of the ecosystem."

 Jeffrey Siminoff

"We have a platform where people come together with no barriers to entry, to feel included and to feel a sense of belonging. The platform is designed to form communities. If that’s what’s inherent in the business, it’s imperative for this company to live up to the promise of inclusion in its own workplace, too. When those two things meet and fuse, when your employees are marching lockstep with the mission of the platform itself, you create something rich.”

 Kate Morris

Kate Morris leads Adobe’s diversity and inclusion strategy and operating team, with a focus on building the industry pipeline, increasing workforce diversity, and enhancing the employee experience to foster inclusion for all. Impact in this role has included expanding Adobe’s family leave policy, analyzing and publishing pay equality data, earning the designation as a Best Place to Work for LGBT Equality, and receiving recognition from the SF Department on the Status of Women. Her passion for this work emerged early, and was reinforced through her Human and Organizational Development academic focus at Vanderbilt University. Kate launched her career as a Human Capital Consultant at Deloitte where she guided clients’ large-scale business, process, and organizational transformations through change management and stakeholder engagement. In 2014 she graduated with her MBA from UC Berkeley-Haas School of Business, where she served as the Women in Leadership President.

 Lindsay-Rae McIntyre

“IBM’s long standing commitment to diversity and inclusion affords us the ability to accelerate our innovation as we unleash the immense talent of all IBMers around the world. Creating an environment of inclusion is not a program, it’s corporate value that has to flow through the DNA of an organization — at IBM it is part of who we are as a company.”

 Shari Slate

Cisco Vice President, Chief Inclusion & Collaboration Officer Shari Slate is responsible for building a strategy that enhances Cisco’s vision to be a world class, benchmark company for inclusion and collaboration, driving exponential value across Cisco, its partners and customers. She is promoting thought leadership across Cisco’s people strategy enabling employee engagement and inclusion outcomes to fuel innovation and market leadership. She is also directing the integration of new models of inclusion and collaboration designed to guide future workplace practices to realize the $19 billion opportunity of the Internet of Everything over the next decade.

In her previous role, Slate served as Chief Inclusion and Collaboration Strategist for Cisco’s Sales Organization. She was responsible for making inclusion relevant in the revenue generating arm of the business and incubating new strategies for fostering full spectrum participation to unleash the power and potential of people.

Slate joined Cisco in 2010. Prior to that, she was Chief Diversity Officer and Director of Global Community Affairs at Sun Microsystems.

Slate has been widely recognized for her visionary leadership and her transformational views on the true value of inclusion. The YWCA recently named her a 2014 “Tribute to Women in Industry” honoree. In 2013, she was named one of Diversity Woman Magazine’s “Stars Who Mean Business”. Previously, she was honored by the California Diversity Council as one of the “Most Influential Women in California” and a “Woman Worth Watching” by Diversity Journal Magazine. She received the National Coalition of 100 Black Women 2010 Corporate Leader Award and The Network Journal's "40 Under Forty" Achievement Award. Slate serves on numerous charitable and community organizational initiatives and advisory boards.

 Cal Jackson

Cal Jackson is the Diversity & Inclusion leader at Tech Data Corporation and a certified NTL Diversity Practitioner. Cal is most known in the Diversity and Inclusion community for his design, development and delivery of engaging and thought-provoking cultural competence workshops. Topics include generations, gender, lookism, self-awareness, discrimination, bias, classism and enhancing the cultural competence of managers.

He has received various accolades for his work from Centers for Disease Control, FL Blue, The Florida Diversity Council, the Conference Board, Jacksonville Business Journal, Indo-USA Chamber of Commerce (Jacksonville, FL), and the First Coast Asian American Chamber of Commerce.

Cal Jackson has been an advocate for social justice through his many associations which include the Hispanic Institute for Life & Learning, OneJax’ Project Breakthrough, Blueprint for Prosperity, Jacksonville Diversity Council, Northeast FL Leadership Council, FL Black Expo Advisory Board, Northeast FL United Negro College Fund Advisory Board, and Community Hospice of Northeast FL Board of Directors.

 Cynthia Marshall

Cynthia Marshall, Senior Vice President and Chief Diversity Officer-Human Resources, develops and directs HR programs for AT&T’s 240K employees. Her organization implements and administers HR practices to support AT&T’s business strategy and diversity programs. This includes defining and implementing workforce strategies talent management, employee engagement, employee relations, compensation design and implementation, etc.

Previously, Cynthia served as President, AT&T North Carolina, where she was directly responsible for the company’s regulatory, legislative and community affairs activities in the state. In this role she proudly served as the first African American chair of the North Carolina State Chamber of Commerce.

She has over 30 years of experience in the telecommunications industry, joining Pacific Bell in July 1981. Since then she has held a variety of management positions in operations, human resources, network engineering and planning, and regulatory/external affairs. She was named to her current position in December 2012.

Cynthia is a passionate advocate for education as the key to unlocking future economic and personal opportunities for all students. As President, AT&T North Carolina, she served as a co-chair of the General Assembly’s Committee on Dropout Prevention and was named a “Friend of Education” by the State Board of Education in recognition of her untiring efforts on behalf of North Carolina’s students and schools. She is also a passionate an active board member of CASA, advocating for the well-being of children in need.

 David Julius King III

Airbnb, based in San Francisco, CA sprang to action due to the reports of discrimination and racism, hiring former U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder to help craft an anti-discrimination policy that would reduce the bias especially inherent in lodging services. That policy has now been released in a 32 page report that strengthens Airbnb’s regulations above federal nondiscrimination laws. Among many changes, those who were discriminated against in the previous system will find the obvious barriers being tackled, namely user photos – which will be reduced – and instant bookings – which will be increased.

In a letter to Airbnb users, CEO Brian Chesky laid out, “At the heart of our mission is the idea that people are fundamentally good and every community is a place where you can belong… Discrimination is the opposite of belonging, and its existence on our platform jeopardizes this core mission. Bias and discrimination have no place on Airbnb, and we have zero tolerance for them.”

 Jennifer Kohler

Leading at the intersection of people, workplace culture, and innovation, Jennifer is the Talent & Inclusion lead, part of Google's Global Diversity & Inclusion team. She and her team ground in research to pilot and scale innovative solutions around culture, diversity, and inclusion.

Prior to Google, she was a Director at Catalyst, the leading non-profit focused on advancing women in business. As a member of Catalyst's Advisory Services practice, she consulted with Fortune 500 companies on diversity and inclusion challenges, co-authored critical research on sponsorship, led the Work-Life Issue Specialty team, and was a member of the Catalyst Awards Evaluation Committee.

She spent two years in Human Capital Management at Goldman Sachs, and also served as a case manager for adults with severe and persistent mental illness. Outside of Google, she co-chairs the Committee to Connect Research, Policy, and Practice, part of the Work & Family Researchers Network.

Ms. Kohler received her MA in Social-Organizational Psychology from Columbia University, and her undergraduate degree from Cornell University, graduating summa cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa, and was named a Merrill Presidential Scholar.

 Lafawn Bailey Davis

“We are committed to advancing, cultivating and preserving a culture of inclusion and diversity because it makes us a stronger, more successful company, and because it is the right thing to do. The collective sum of the individual differences, life experiences, knowledge, inventiveness, innovation, self-expression, unique capabilities and talent that our employees invest in their work represents a significant part of our culture and our values.  I am proud of the steps we’re taking to engage both women and men in the conversation."

 Margenett Moore Roberts

At Yahoo, we rely on the diversity of ideas and perspectives to drive innovation, and we strive to turn the workplace into a community where our employees feel welcomed and inspired. We are continuing to formulate our strategy and initiatives but believe diversity is key to our business success in the future. We believe in diversity as a competitive differentiator and are approaching our initiatives holistically. We want to encourage and empower every Yahoo to contribute to cultivating an environment that is professionally- challenging, opportunity-rich and fully inclusive. We are actively looking for opportunities to increase representation across both ethnic and racial groups.

 Tarsha McCormick

Tarsha is one of the longest-tenured members of ThoughtWorks, having joined the company in January of 1999 as a Recruiting Specialist when the company was a small startup with a group of less than 100.

Over the years Tarsha has been instrumental in helping to build, grow, and lead various aspects of ThoughtWorks, including recruiting, benefits, HR operations, and talent management. Since moving into the Head of Diversity and Inclusion role in January 2015, Tarsha is responsible for driving the strategic thinking and work related to making ThoughtWorks more diverse and inclusive, and advocating for change in the technology industry.

After earning a B.A. in Political Science from Illinois State University, Tarsha worked in the social services industry for 4 year before making a transition into human resources, which married her love of people, law, and education. In addition to her 18 years of human resources experience, she holds an MBA with a focus on Human Resources Management.

 Candice Morgan

"We don't want to force people to become engaged. We have so many people that are really passionate about this already. Whether you're a woman or a person of color, that doesn't mean that you have to be actively as engaged in these opportunities. But I do want those people to understand, as well as everyone at the organization, that what we're doing is trying to benefit the entire workplace, and the richness that comes from diversity in conversations and in solving really complex problems is something to be desired."

 Danielle Mastrangel Brown

"Diversity and inclusion are key to Intel’s evolution and driving forces for our continued relevancy and growth. That is why in January 2015, Intel set an ambitious goal to be the first high technology company to reach full representation of women and underrepresented minorities in its U.S. workforce by 2020. Intel invested $300M in the Diversity in Technology Initiative to support this goal and our broader goal of improving diversity in the entire technology industry.

We will expand a new program called GROW—an enterprise-wide movement that promotes a growth mindset and inclusion. All employees around the world were introduced to a set of actionable, neuroscience-based resources, tools, and habits that can have a tremendous impact on how they relate to each other and rally together to drive innovation in our industry. GROW includes supplemental modules for people managers and U.S.-based diverse employees, so that managers are better equipped to support their diverse employees and grow their careers."

 Felicia Mayo

Ms. Mayo is currently serving as the vice president, global talent acquisition and authenticity and inclusion for Juniper Networks in Sunnyvale, CA.  This position gives Mayo the unique opportunity to work with employees, leaders and the marketplace globally, while transforming the approach to talent for Juniper Networks and in the industry. She started her career with PriceWaterhouseCoopers as a benefits research analyst, where she had the opportunity to lean into her leadership capabilities by leading one of the largest outsourced defined contributions accounts. PWC set the foundation for continued career growth in hi –tech Silicon Valley. Mayo also worked with Siebel Systems for over five years, where she embraced technology and even in HR. She crossed boundaries in the development of technology with product marketing and IT, as an HR professional and provided HR support. In 2006, Siebel Systems was acquired by Oracle, where she spent two years successfully supporting Oracle University. Mayo is an active member of Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority Inc. Rho Delta Omega Chapter located in Palo Alto, Ca.  She has served as vice president, committee leader and mentor to undergraduates at Stanford University.  Mayo earned a a B.A. in political science from North Carolina State University. 

 Judith Williams

“If we’re not actively creating structures to undermine unconscious biases, creating a culture where people feel comfortable calling out those biases, reminding ourselves of our triggers for biases and then having strategies to combat them, we will fall into them. It’s not enough to educate ourselves that unconscious bias exists and this is what happens, it’s something we have to be proactive about all the time. I think we need to point out the behaviors when we see it."

 Lesley Slaton Brown

"At HP, diversity and inclusion helps drive new business, fuel innovation, and attract and attain the best employees.  From HP’s earliest days, the company recognized that the more points of view it can draw on, the better its products and company as a whole will be. Every HP innovation comes from a team of individuals, each contributing their unique perspective, knowledge and experience, to advance the way the world works and lives. 

HP is re-inventing the standard for diversity in Silicon Valley and global tech.  HP has the most diverse Board of Directors of any technology company in the US and plans to continue to grow its diverse representation at all levels of the company.  We’re also in the process of appointing business and site-based diversity leads across the company to provide guidance and sponsorship.  Diversity is embedded into everything we do; everyone at every level is accountable for our diverse and inclusive culture."

 Maxine Williams

"Diversity is central to Facebook’s mission of creating a more open and connected world: it’s good for our products and for our business. Cognitive diversity, or diversity of thought, matters because we are building a platform that currently serves 1.4 billion people around the world. It’s vital for us to have a broad range of perspectives, including people of different genders, races, ages, sexual orientations, characteristics and points of view. Having a diverse workforce is not only the right thing to do – it’s the smart thing to do for our business.

Our work is producing some positive but modest change and our new hire numbers are trending up. In addition to best practice programs we have been running in recruitment and retention, we are always trying creative approaches that tailor solutions to the challenge of increasing the diversity of our population."

 Thela Thatch

Thelá is currently the Vice President of Diversity for Live Nation Entertainment (LNE) where she is responsible for the creation and implementation of diversity and HR strategy implementation designed to serve a global population of 10,000 plus employees. In addition, Thelá serves as chair of the Diversity Taskforce which she was instrumental establishing within LNE. Thelá is also founder and owner of Management Resource Solutions dba MRS HR, LLC which she created in 2010. She has worked with various Fortune 500 organizations such as UPS, Devro, ADC, Paychex, Cablevision, Cosby Productions, and Fox Television. Her role has consisted of auditing business practices, developing policy and procedures and managing benefits while advising and coaching owners and executives.

Thelá R. Thatch, MBA, PHR has over 20 years of business experience. Currently residing in Southern California, Thelá is originally from East Orange, New Jersey. She attended undergraduate school at Kean University in New Jersey and received a BA in Communications with an emphasis in Journalism where she graduating magna cum laude, Who's Who in American Colleges and Universities, and was inducted as a member of the Epsilon Epsilon Omega honor society. She received her PHR (Professional in Human Resources) certification and her New Jersey Life, Accident and Health license in 2005. She completed her MBA with a concentration in Human Resources at North Greenville University in 2011.

Andrew Wilson

"The role of CIO has never been more critical, given how deeply technology is now embedded into the fabric of the enterprise.  Technology impact is exponentially greater now than in any previous era. Today’s CIOs are orchestrators and integrators in the ecosystem of platforms. They are leveraging an ever expanding set of digital capabilities and a more liquid workforce. We are embracing innovation and disruption. Successful brands seize the opportunity and create a an agile digital posture for their marketplace, consumers and employees.  Leading CIOs are at the heart of this digital revolution and a power house for successful change in their enterprises."

Ben Fried

“IT sits in middle of some hard realities. On the one hand, people are creatures of habit. On the other hand, computing is arguably the fastest moving discipline in the history of the enterprise. Realizing the advantages that come from computing’s rate of innovation means we have to force people out of their technology habits. Plan on making changes every year, and on building an end-to-end technology team that flourishes in change. For example, if you think of the help desk as being about reading FAQs and recipes, that’s a cognitive dissonance — you’re acting as if change is bad.”

Diana McKenzie

"The digital transformation that is happening across all industries today not only represents a great opportunity for growth, but it also presents new challenges that IT leaders must address. For one, it puts CIOs at the forefront of this change and places much of the responsibility on them to determine how to successfully leverage the influx of new technologies to help their companies more effectively engage their workforce, run more efficiently, and gain a competitive advantage. It’s also impacting talent as CIOs have to rethink the skills and capabilities required within their teams in order to keep pace with this change and successfully pivot as needed. And through all of this, CIOs must find the delicate balance that still enables them to drive forward on the day-to-day IT operations that are so critical to maintaining a company’s customer and revenue base."

Georgette Kiser

Ms. Kiser is responsible for leading the firm’s Global Technology and Solutions (GTS) organizaiton, developing and driving the IT strategy across the global enterprise, which includes the firm’s application development, data, digital, infrastructure, and program management and outsourcing activities. Prior she was a Vice President of T. Rowe Price Associates, Inc. where she headed the Enterprise Solutions and Capabilities within the Services and Technology Organization. Georgette lead and managed teams that provided creative solutions and technological leverage for Investment Front Office, Trading, and Back office operations. Prior to T. Rowe Price Georgette worked for General Electric within their Aerospace Unit. She earned a B.S. in Mathematics / minor Computer Science from the University of Maryland, College Park, an M.S. in Mathematics from Villanova University, and an M.B.A from the University of Baltimore. Georgette has served on various non-profit boards including The Boys’ Latin School of Maryland, the T. Rowe Price Foundation Board, Maryland Business Roundtable STEMnet Advisory Board, University of Baltimore Foundation, and the Kennesaw State University Brian Jordan Center for Excellence and Professional Development at Lakepoint.

Jim Dubois

"Historically, IT did what the business wanted to do. But with analytics tools, and especially with big data, IT now sees end-to-end across the company more cleanly than most departments, so we are able to say, 'I understand that you want to make this technology investment to make a process better, but this investment actually won't help because of bottlenecks that are happening elsewhere in the company.'

Because IT can see so much, it is our responsibility to influence investment priorities, not just execute on priorities set by our internal business partners. We used to reward IT employees based on whether they delivered a project on time and whether the business was happy with what IT did. But we found that making business partners happy did not always mean that we were doing the right thing at the company level. "

Jonathan Chow

Jonathan has been deliberate in determining how various technologies will benefit Live Nation Entertainment and currently leads his team in improving existing business processes, and integrating systems that help realize significant benefits and improvements. Mr. Chow has continuously displayed his devotion to uplifting others by his active involvement in Live Nation’s Employee Resource Group called AZN Nation. Not only is Jonathan passionately involved in AZN Nation, he makes time to attend other ERG events as well in order to show his support to other diverse groups within our organization. In addition to his contributions within Live Nation, he is also involved in ASCEND, a non-profit professional association that enables its members, corporate partners and the community to realize the leadership potential of Pan-Asians in global corporations.

Kimberly Anstett

"We live in a world of big data - diverse data sets that are growing exponentially. Within Nielsen, our strategy has centered on digital transformation.  As part of this transformation, my CIO organization is: 1. Transforming our global Infrastructure footprint to support cloud-based platforms that deliver scalable, real-time solutions for our clients.   2. Driving automation in our business processes to enable large scale, global growth to serve our clients in over 100 markets. 3. Continuing to mature our cybersecurity posture. 4. Recruiting and focused on retaining top technology talent that is both ethnically and gender diverse."

Mark Sunday

Mark Sunday is responsible for providing the global communications, computing, and security infrastructure that enable Oracle's internal business operations. Sunday is also responsible for a variety of hosting and education services for Oracle customers. Additionally, he and his team strive to be the first adopter, biggest influencer, and best promoter of relevant Oracle technologies. Sunday routinely shares his insights in optimizing business results through the use of technology, developing world-class global teams, fueling innovation, and enabling IT operational excellence.

Prior to joining Oracle in 2006, Sunday was senior vice president and chief information officer of Siebel Systems. With more than 30 years in the high tech industry, he has also served in various IT leadership positions at Motorola, ST Microelectronics, and Texas Instruments. Sunday holds a BSE from the University of Michigan and an MBA from Southern Methodist University.

Sunday supports the innovation, technology, and science community, and serves as vice chair of the Utah Technology Council and as a board member of The Leonardo, a museum dedicated to the intersection of art, science, and technology.

Mike Benson

Mike is responsible for creating and maintaining information technology solutions for DIRECTV’s business operations nationwide and oversees reporting, analysis and infrastructure requirements, customer billing and payment systems, as well as customer care systems and financial, marketing, sales and decision support.

Before joining DIRECTV, Benson held a variety of executive level positions at AT&T Wireless where he had crossenterprise responsibility for the company’s information technology and national real-estate organizations. Most recently, as executive vice president and CIO, he directed a worldwide reengineering of AT&T Wireless’ internal service-based IT organization from 2000 to 2003. In 2000, as vice president of IT Infrastructure and Operations, Benson established technical direction for the company’s IT infrastructure team to support business growth through major acquisitions by initiating service quality programs and crisis management frameworks.

Benson worked for McCaw Cellular Communications from 1987 until 1995 when the company was acquired by AT&T Wireless. As vice president of Information Services, he led the development of the region’s information systems organization supporting significant business. During his service as director of development for McCaw’s cellular division, Benson translated customer and organizational objectives into technology strategies and reduced billing expenses by 50% division-wide.

Naresh Shanker

Shanker started his career at Hewlett-Packard in the Medical Products Group. From there, he moved to Agilent Technologies, where he held various leadership positions. Shanker then served as CIO at Palm Inc. When Palm was acquired by Hewlett-Packard in 2012, he returned to the company as CIO of Printing and Personal Systems.

Throughout the separation, Shanker worked alongside Scott Spradley, now CIO of Hewlett Packard Enterprise, and other IT executives to untangle decades’ worth of legacy architecture, applications, and other IT assets in preparation for the split. The pair, with their teams, codified the “24/48 rule” to escalate any material issues with the project within 24 hours of discovery, and then resolve those issues within 48 hours of escalation. As the teams worked intensely through ultrafast sprints, issues were resolved rapidly, which kept the project on time and on budget.

Roger Gurnani

Mr. Gurnani is responsible for developing and guiding Verizon’s technology strategy and investments. His role includes network and technology planning, development of architecture and roadmaps, continued evolution of digital platforms and oversight and direction for the CIO and CTO teams across Verizon. Before being named to his current position in January 2015, Gurnani was executive vice president and chief information officer for Verizon Communications.

Prior to 2010, Gurnani was senior vice president of new product development for Verizon Wireless and was responsible for the innovation, development and commercialization of consumer and business products.  Gurnani also served as the president of the West area for Verizon Wireless, responsible for the company's operations throughout the western United States.

Gurnani was one of the founding officers of Verizon Wireless. Until 2005, he served as vice president and chief information officer, helping to oversee the integration of the domestic wireless operations of Bell Atlantic, Vodafone AirTouch and GTE at the company's inception in 2000. He had previously served as vice president and chief information officer at Bell Atlantic Mobile.

Sigal Zarmi

Ms. Zarmi is responsible for developing and implementing PwC's IT transformation strategy; leading the delivery of IT services to the PwC network; and creating the technology roadmap for PwC's global portfolio of IT projects, initiatives and enterprise-wide systems.

Prior to joining PwC, Sigal was CIO for GE Capital, Americas, where she led technology efforts to drive business growth and enhance the customer experience for a $105B portfolio of commercial loans and leases. While in this role, she guided the business in effectively leveraging information technology in originations, risk management and operations, with a focus on simplification, productivity and compliance. She also spearheaded targeted analytics and mobile technology initiatives.

Sigal held numerous leadership roles with GE including CIO and Chief Quality Officer for GE Corporate Financial Services, Managing Director and Chief Operating Officer of GE Energy Financial Services, CIO for GE's Financial Guarantee Insurance Company and CIO of GE Corporate Treasury. Prior to GE, she held leadership positions at two financial services firms and began her career as a programmer at Motorola.

Sondra L. Barbour

Under Sondra Barbour's leadership, Lockheed Martin’s Information Systems & Global Solutions (IS&GS) business area employs 26,000 experienced professionals, who provide advanced information systems, security and services supporting the critical, complex missions of customers worldwide. One of five business areas within Lockheed Martin, IS&GS is headquartered in Gaithersburg, Md., and operates in all 50 U.S. states and 20 countries around the world. It generated $8.4 billion in sales in 2013.

Ms. Barbour spent more than 20 years working at a predecessor of IS&GS, including serving as Chief Information Officer and Vice President of Operations for Lockheed Martin Integrated Systems & Solutions. In this role, she was responsible for the Information Technology, Facilities, Supply Chain, Technical Publications, and Environment, Health & Safety operations.  Her career includes extensive leadership and technology experience, notably in the design and development of large-scale information systems.

She currently serves on the Board of Directors for 3M and was selected by Fortune magazine as one of the “50 Most Powerful Women in Business” in 2014.  

Andy Crowder

Crowder has nearly 30 years of IT experience.

In addition to his previous work at MaineHealth, a not-for-profit integrated healthcare delivery network with 11 hospitals and 17,000 employees, Crowder served as CIO for Florida Hospital and Adventist Health System. He has deep implementation experience, including leading the successful Epic implementation at MaineHealth.

Scripps is working with Epic now on system design of its integrated enterprise electronic health record system, with implementation planned to begin in mid-2017. The new system will replace Scripps' existing ambulatory and inpatient EHRs and revenue cycle management system.

Cheryl Thomas

Serving Valero and its predecessor since 1984, Ms. Thomas has responsibility over the information services network and related technology at Valero. She has previously served as Senior Vice President of Information Services at Valero, managing the Information Systems Development, Support & Infrastructure teams and as Vice President of Retail Operations Support and Vice President of Retail Information Systems at Valero. She has played a key role in restructuring Valero’s Information Services Department and integrating all acquired assets into Valero’s complex systems. Ms. Thomas earned a business administration degree in Quantitative Analysis from California State University-Fresno in 1983, graduating Magna Cum Laude.

Dick Daniels

Daniels has been a technology professional for many years, and has held key technology leadership roles in the financial services industry. After accepting his first role with Kaiser Permanente in 2008, Daniels successfully managed various teams leading to increased consistency and lower costs for the organizations. In this role, he was accountable for strategy development and ensuring the delivery of innovative, leading-edge capabilities that drive Kaiser Permanente’s technology agenda. Daniels continues to prove his leadership capabilities in his current role as Executive Vice President and Chief Information Officer. With more than 30 years of experience, he is responsible for 6,000 IT employees and the vision, strategy and execution of Kaiser Permanente’s information technology.

Guillermo Diaz

Guillermo Diaz, Jr., is responsible for Cisco’s global Information Technology organization and services. The focus is on transforming the overall IT experience by strengthening foundational business capabilities; enabling new business models such as service, software, and SaaS; and accelerating innovative business outcomes for Cisco customers, partners, and employees.

Since joining the company in 2000, Guillermo has been a major driver of the development of Cisco’s world-class IT organization by leading initiatives to build and manage significant business foundations. These include the Cisco IT infrastructure, network and management systems, enterprise resource planning (ERP), large-scale platforms, and Cisco’s Internet and intranet network foundations: Cisco.com and Cisco Employee Connection. Additionally, he has led primary business IT application areas such as Cisco’s $45B+ electronic commerce, technical services, professional services, service sales and marketing, customer service, Cisco Capital, and cloud/SaaS platforms.

Guillermo is a primary leader of the Cisco Diversity Council and the executive sponsor of Conexión, Cisco’s Hispanic/Latino employee resource network. Guillermo is the recipient of the 2015 Hispanic IT Executive Council (HITEC) “Estrella of the Year” award for outstanding individual leadership in the information technology field. 

Jim Fowler

"Our strategy around the digital and industrial is this recognition that machines are going to be more connected than ever. Those machines are generating data at exponentially greater rates than humans are, in human cloud environments. Companies that can figure out a way to combine all that data and information off of that hardware with how they run their companies are going to be more profitable. Bringing that back inside GE, how I think about that inside the company, as the IT leader, is that I need to make GE the best example of a digital industrial company in the world. How can I take information that is coming off of equipment in our four hundred manufacturing facilities around the world and use that to make those plants more productive?"

Karenann Terrell

"The thing I underestimated was the speed at which customers are changing in the retail business, the expectation of the customer to simplify the shopping experience, and especially the speeding up of the mobile experience. A primary motivator for us is the need for us to win, compete, and serve at the intersection of the digital and physical. Consumers want a frictionless experience.” Karenann joined Walmart in 2010. Previously, she was chief information officer of Baxter International, Inc. and chief information officer of the Chrysler Group and Mercedes-Benz North America. She began her career at General Motors where her responsibilities included automotive manufacturing and engineering as well as brand development at Cadillac. In 2013, Karenann was named CIO of the Year by the National Association of Software & Services Companies. She has been recognized as one of the 100 Most Influential Women in the Automotive Business by Automotive News.

Linda Clement-Holmes

“We are moving pretty aggressively towards the cloud. I think the cloud gives us a lot of capability and avenues that we have not yet been able to take advantage of at scale. We have shared services and this is scale at the next level. It has been the case that you can do a lot of things quickly that, before, would take us a long time to do.” Ms. Clement-Holmes is a 27-year P&G veteran, and maintains global business services responsibilities. Ms. Clement-Holmes joined P&G as a systems analyst and has since moved up the ladder in its information technology and business services units.  She has been an Independent Director of Cincinnati Financial Corp. since February 1, 2010.

Martin Chavez

Every 20 years in the software business, we get a paradigm shift. Cloud is the dominant paradigm of our time. Coming with that shift, we have another powerful thing that is happening at almost exactly the same time. The amount of money you had to invest to create a enterprise software company has plummeted, from $50 million to something like $5 million. Along with the proliferation of great, free open source software, all this has allowed the amount you have to invest to take a business software company and bring it to profitability to become a tiny fraction of what is used to be. The biggest question we ask ourselves is what these trends mean for us and, more importantly, what does it mean for our clients. We're in the early days."

Mike Crowe

Norm Fjeldheim

Fjeldheim oversees all aspects of Qualcomm’s information technology for all of the Company’s diverse business units. In addition to his IT responsibilities, Fjeldheim is also responsible for Corporate Procurement, and the Technical Publications and Configuration Management organizations. 

Since joining Qualcomm in 1987, he has served as manager, director and vice president of information technology. He has been instrumental in the creation and implementation of systems to support Qualcomm’s growing and diverse corporate needs. In addition, his tenure has seen the development and support of many of Qualcomm’s growing domestic and international business systems. Fjeldheim and the IT department have guided the selection and implementation of technology to link Qualcomm’s corporate sites across six continents.  
Under his leadership, Qualcomm IT has received a variety of honors. The department has been honored by Computerworld Magazine as one of the 100 Best Places to Work in IT for the last 8 years.   

Ross Meyercord

Ross is responsible for all internal applications, infrastructure and associated services at Salesforce.com. Salesforce IT continues to push the envelope on extending enterprise applications to the cloud, leveraging its own Force.com platform as well as third-party providers. Mr. Meyercord is focused on building the architecture, processes and organization to support a $10 billion startup. Prior to Salesforce, he spent 22 years at Accenture in a variety of IT delivery and leadership roles for high technology clients. While at Accenture, he was the Accenture partner at Cisco responsible for a large portfolio of IT programs and application support and led major multi-year transformation programs at EMC Corporation and Sun Microsystems. Mr. Meyercord holds a bachelor’s degree in engineering from Harvey Mudd College in Claremont, California. He started his career as an intern at NASA Ames Research Center in Mountain View while in high school.

Sheila Jordan

Sheila is responsible for driving the company's information technology strategy and operations with a focus on building and supporting the global information technology effort.

Prior to joining Symantec, Jordan spent nine years at Cisco, where she served as senior vice president of IT, communication and collaboration. She was responsible for delivering and integrating key IT services for Cisco's global workforce, including the development of the company’s WebEx Social Collaboration platform, as well as the deployment of all emerging technologies. She also led mobility services and desktop strategy, in addition to launching an eStore for mobile that provides transactional applications.

Previously, Jordan held leadership roles at Grand Circle Corporation, as chief information officer and executive vice president, where she was responsible for developing the company’s technical strategy, and at The Walt Disney Company, where she was a senior vice president for Destination Disney and vice president of marketing and sales finance. She was also a senior financial analyst at Martin Marietta, a construction supplies aggregate company.

Outside of work, she is a frequent speaker on topics addressing collaboration, mobility, Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) issues, and women's leadership. She also serves as a director for NextSpace, a provider of innovative physical and virtual infrastructure for entrepreneurs, and sits on the CIO Advisory Board for SnapLogic.

Susan O'Day

Susan leads Disney Technology Solutions and Services, delivering technology capabilities that enable business segment strategies while achieving enterprise efficiency and promoting cross-company collaborative innovation.

Susan joined Disney in 2008 from the global biopharmaceutical company Bristol-Myers Squibb, where she served as Chief Information Officer and Vice President of Global Shared Services. In that role, she oversaw the company’s information management, global technology strategy, which included enterprise programs that significantly improved and streamlined operations and processes.

Susan began her career at Florida-based transportation company CSX Corporation where she spent 11 years, ultimately becoming Assistant Vice President of Telecommunications. At CSX Corporation, she led the railroad division in telecommunications and computer operations, research and application development.

Susan holds a Master’s degree in Business Administration from The College of William and Mary and a Bachelor of Science degree in Mathematics from St. Lawrence University.  She is also a proud graduate and serves as President of the Board of Trustees for Miss Hall’s School in Pittsfield, MA.

Tony Scott

Mr. Scott is the third Chief Information Officer of the United States, appointed by President Obama on February 5th, 2015. Prior to his position in the White House, Mr. Scott led the global information technology group at VMware Inc., a position he had held since 2013. Prior to joining VMware Inc., Mr. Scott served as Chief Information Officer (CIO) at Microsoft from 2008 to 2013. Previously, he was the CIO at The Walt Disney Company from 2005 to 2008. From 1999 to 2005, Mr. Scott served as the Chief Technology Officer of Information Systems & Services at General Motors Corporation. He received a B.A. from the University of San Francisco and a J.D. from Santa Clara University.

Bask Iyer

I have often remarked that CIOs should be like surfers who are constantly inspired and interested in riding the waves of technology in front of them effectively every day.  We are firmly in the midst of two giant waves: Cloud and Mobile.  Enterprises have to take advantage of this and put some distance between their competition and themselves. CIOs’ leadership skills have to continue to scale and evolve as well. They must be universal enablers to all functions within the company and highly collaborative. Talent is the biggest differentiator for IT and the leader must be able to inspire the best to come and work his/her team including the millennials. The next waves are already forming: The Internet of All Things, machines building machines, and automation of every form of work including knowledge work. These are very much on the horizon.  Be excited not afraid….

Dan Morales

"Security is top of mind and will continue to challenge businesses and end users.  Technology will and is being leveraged in the form of Network Segmentation, encryption, multi-factor authentication and the use of advanced analytics to secure companies and end-users.  All this creates friction for end-users so leveraging technology to simplify the way employees are authenticated in a frictionless method will be key to maintaining a productive work force."

Ellen Barker

Ellen Barker leads TI’s Information Technology Services organization where she is responsible for IT strategies and operational management of IT applications and infrastructure worldwide that enable TI’s changing business needs. For the past three years, Ellen led the successful integration of TI’s acquisition of National Semiconductor and was also the Controller of TI’s Silicon Valley Analog business where her responsibilities included the operational and financial success of this $1B organization.

A 30-year TI veteran, Ellen joined TI as a new college hire. She has held a number of management positions within the company’s Analog, Embedded Processing, manufacturing and former defense divisions, including vice president over High Performance Analog Finance and Operations. She held leadership roles on  the integration teams for TI’s acquisitions of Burr Brown and Chipcon, contributing to TI’s growing Analog presence, and has also contributed her operational, financial and management expertise to diverse operations and functions across TI. Ellen believes in giving back and helping inspire the next generation of technology professionals. She is a stanch supporter of mentoring and during her tenure at TI, she has served as a recruiter for the University of Texas and the University of Dallas.

Jay Kerley

“In today’s world of cloud-based services, every employee with a credit card is their own CIO. It’s more important than ever that IT remain engaged with the business, stay in front of emerging trends and find ways to say ‘yes’ to new capabilities.” Mr. Kerley has more than 20 years of industry experience across business verticals including pharmaceutical R&D, global logistics and high-tech, leading IT transformation and globalization.  Under his executive leadership, he and his teams have been recognized for IT leadership in Computerworld’s “100 Best Places to Work in IT” (five years running) and “Premier 100 IT Leaders,” the “InformationWeek 500” and CIO’s “100 Business Technology Leaders.” 

John Tonnison

“Striking an effective and tolerable balance between the strategic IT bookends of innovation and regulation will, in my opinion, be the biggest issue facing CIOs in the near future. With digital disruption at the forefront of mind and opportunity, the expectation and alternate paths for innovation are at an unprecedented high. The challenge is to ensure that ideation and enablement of such valued creation is given enough fuel, while still meeting the duties of governance, cybersafety and architecturally-led reliability, efficiency and economics.”

Kim Stevenson

“This is a really unique time for IT. We have major trends impacting all of us: cloud, consumerization, business intelligence and social computing. Underlying those four major trends are significant security implications. Those five things are what we are focused on at Intel. My role is to help our IT employees understand those priorities and make sure that our IT plans not just align to those priorities, but enable the successful execution of those priorities. The skills needed to be successful in this new computing era by and large don’t exist. So we have to invest and develop those skills and take our workforce forward. Things like data curator; that’s a skill that’s needed in big data. We didn’t even know of that a few years ago.”

Marcy Klevorn

Klevorn has spent her entire career in IT with Ford, serving in a variety of positions in The Americas, Ford of Europe and Ford Credit.

She began her career at Ford in 1983 in Telecommunications Services and worked at various positions within Ford IT and Ford Credit through August 2003. In late 2003, as consulting program manager for the purchasing business systems initiative eVEREST, Klevorn led the analysis and decision to migrate back to legacy systems.

In 2005, she was appointed Product Lifecycle Management global director and implemented process changes in data and information management across product creation. In 2006, as Enterprise Defragmentation director, Klevorn led the strategy and implementation of infrastructure defragmentation, data center consolidation and overall systems management at Ford. From May 2006 through September 2011, she led Ford's IT Infrastructure organization. From September 2011 through September 2013, Klevorn served as IT Director for Ford of Europe, and was a member of the Ford of Europe Operating Committee (EOC).   In her role as CIO, Ms. Klevorn oversees the information technology services for all of the company’s operations globally

Michael Hedges

Mike oversees the Global IT function and provides strategic IT leadership for the company. Mike has spent the last 15 years of his career at Medtronic and is respected across the organization for his pragmatic leadership and vision. Under his leadership, the company has been successful in implementing a global IT organization, including enterprise-wide systems such as SAP. Before being named CIO in 2008, Mike held positions as international information technology director and vice president for enterprise applications.

During his tenure as CIO, Medtronic has received many industry awards and honors, including Computerworld Top 100 Best Places to Work in IT, InformationWeek 500, and PilotHouse Best Overall IT Innovator. Mike was named a Top 10 CIO Breakaway Leader by the CIO Leadership Network in 2014 and 2010.  He is also a champion for STEM-related education opportunities, partnering with Genesys Works to provide IT internships for underprivileged high school students. 

Mary Krakaeur

Ms. Krakaeur leads EMC’s Information Technology, Global Business Services, and Global Centers of Excellence organizations. Together, these teams deliver world-class services to EMC, enabling everything from innovation to revenue generation to service and support and more. This includes leading EMC’s own IT organization, with its award-winning IT Proven program for customers.

A 30-year industry veteran, ML has worked with many customers to transform their IT infrastructures and deliver business value. She joined EMC in 2008 to lead EMC’s Technology Services & Solutions business, focused on designing, implementing, and integrating EMC technology and solutions into customers’ IT environments, as well as EMC’s Managed Services business, focused on operating customers’ IT environments at best-in-class levels.

Prior to her current role, Krakauer was Executive Vice President, Business Development for Global Enterprise Services. Before that she led EMC's global Human Resources organization for three years, during which time EMC was recognized as a Top 25 Multinational Great Place to Work in 2014 and 2015, a Noteworthy Company by Diversity Inc. in 2015, and a Top 100 HR organization by Workforce Magazine in 2014.

Ramesh Nair

"IT is dead. Long live IT!

In the old days, the computer folks in organizations knew what they were dealing with: computers. Not any longer.

Those computers resided, very visibly, somewhere on the company premises. Now the IT people deal with technology that at once is more pervasive and (ironically) less visible. We saw that for the first time when smartphones became popular and organizations brought in BYOD policies allowing employees to use their personal technology in the workplace. Floating above all this is the cloud, allowing access to a vast range of technology to anyone anywhere with an internet connection.

The challenge for CIOs is how to make meaningful sense of the technological power available in traditional computers, devices, and the cloud, and to use it for business advantage. The opportunity for the CIOs is huge, but so is the risk of getting it wrong. In this scenario, CIOs need to let go of some of the past conceptions about how technology is managed in the organization. In the past, all the technology used to be run, controlled and made available by the IT organization under the CIO. We need to be more open in terms of where the technology comes from and who runs and controls it, while making sure that the basic tenets of technology management are intact.

CIOs need to be able to embrace the fact that technology will come in different forms from different sources, including traditionally non-technology products like appliances, vehicles and machines. Much of the technology will also come from the ‘tap’ through a consumption model. Tomorrow’s CIO needs to see his or her role more in terms of looking at the components of ready-made, available technology and integrating them seamlessly and securely to deliver business needs. For example, a self-driving car could become an automated component of an organization’s technology framework for delivery and logistics.

This also means CIOs should be more wary of larger investments that will tie them to longer payback schedules. We need to be able to leverage investments faster and flex the technology landscape as the ecosystem changes.  That also means that CIOs will need to work on greater speed to market for technology changes, and more flexible and service based architecture.

Some aspects like connectivity and computing power, which used to drive technological change and decisions in the past, have become universally-available commodities. CIOs will perforce need to spend less time in implementing and sustaining these.

We are moving into an ‘everything is IT’ paradigm where everything is a computer in the old sense, or nothing is a computer in the old sense, depending upon the way you want to look at it.

So, again I say, IT is dead. Long live IT! "

Ryan Neading

Ryan Neading leads the Rackspace IT team as Chief Information Officer, a role in which he steers the decisions that shape the company’s information technology strategies and policies. His responsibilities include: internal IT systems and tools, technology operations, global billing systems, operational metrics, and consulting with external suppliers, providers, and customers on their journey to the cloud.

Ryan is passionate about technology. He joined Rackspace after more than a decade in various leadership roles at eBay Inc.—most recently as co-leader of the eBay Inc. development site in Austin.

Ryan is active within the Teravista Elementary School community, serving in and donating technology equipment to The Leader in Me—an innovative, school-wide program that emphasizes a culture of student empowerment and helps children reach their full potential. He also participates in GirlStart, an initiative that encourages girls in science, technology, engineering, and math.

Sherry Neubert

Neubert joined Goodyear in 2002. She has held various leadership roles in the company’s information technology operations, and since November 2010 has been vice president of the Global Project Management Office at Goodyear. As CIO, Neubert holds responsibility over Goodyear's TireTrac program. Tire Trac is a cloud-based tire-performance tracking tool with a centralized database and Web user interface. Tire Trac records detailed tire performance data and then processes that data into easy-to-understand reports on tire and maintenance program performance. Commercial tire dealers use Tire Trac to help trucking fleets understand how tires and maintenance programs are performing and identify opportunities for commercial fleets to save money and operate more efficiently.

Neubert holds a bachelor’s degree in industrial management from the University of Akron and an MBA from Case Western Reserve University’s Weatherhead School of Management. She serves on the board of trustees for Leadership Akron and is a graduate of the program. Neubert also is a community advisory board member for the LeBron James Family Foundation.

Timothy Campos

"Growing our workforce effectively is the No. 1 determinant of our ability to continue to be successful as a corporation. We take it very, very seriously and we put a ton of tools around the recruiting process.

We found that tweaking off-the-shelf software would force us to adapt our process to the tools. We want to do the opposite: make our process better, more efficient, faster. Our tools are very purpose-built. It tells me all of the people I have to interview today. I submit my opinion on whether someone should be hired or not, and the report goes on its merry way. When recruiters schedule interviews, they have a pipeline of candidates, roles and interview panelists. All of that is in a database. All of the complexity of detail here is managed by the tools. The tool makes the scheduling decisions. It says, 'Here is the link to the feedback form,' and it makes sure that the right resume gets there. It is all taken care of.

The effect is that we can interview thousands of people with much less effort than if we tried to do all of this stuff manually or with off-the-shelf tools. The best way to make a business process efficient is to completely automate it."