Jean Olive is the Chief Technology Officer for Best Buy Health responsible for technology strategy and architecture, product design and delivery, digital transformations, and operational excellence. Jean's career has been centered on global companies with a mission to improve and save lives where she progressed through a variety of engineering, supply chain and leadership positions at Raytheon Technologies, Royal Philips, and Schneider Electric.
Jean is a champion for advancing women in technology and leadership, and inclusion and diversity as a competitive advantage. She advocates for women to help other women through coaching, mentoring, career opportunities and taking the path with a heart – love what you do. Jean and her husband Stephen have five grown children, enjoy lake life and traveling.
Jean received her B.S. in Chemical Engineering at the University of Connecticut, is a member of the UConn Academy of Distinguished Engineers and serves on the School of Engineering advisory committee.
Elaine Montilla is the Chief Technology Officer (CTO) for US School Assessment at Pearson and an accomplished senior executive with over two decades as an IT leader in education. Montilla is also a TEDx speaker, a Forbes Technology Council member, and the founder of 5xminority, Inc., a company with a mission to demonstrate how businesses can be powerful platforms for social change through elevating the voices of women and underrepresented minorities in tech.
Originally from The Dominican Republic, Elaine is recognized as a dynamic and solutions-oriented IT Executive with 20+ years of progressively responsible experience providing vision and leadership while developing and implementing large-scale IT strategies and initiatives within the higher education industry. She drives operational excellence through improved business processes and enterprise systems and has been recognized for staff professional development, change leadership, and talent for communicating with diverse groups of people.
Kristie Grinnell is Senior Vice President and Chief Information Officer (CIO) for DXC Technology. She is responsible for leading business transformation including defining IT strategy for new digital capabilities, streamlining current operations and improving overall efficiencies and performance of DXC’s IT environment – all with the goal of enabling DXC to provide excellence and innovation to its customers worldwide.
Kristie previously served as global CIO and vice president for supply chain at General Dynamics Information Technology (GDIT). There she led the transformation enterprise IT strategic plan and IT Shared Services center for customers, along with supply chain management. Prior to that, Kristie was director of planning and governance and director of client delivery enablement for Computer Sciences Corporation (CSC), a predecessor of DXC.
Her career in professional IT leadership spans more than 20 years. Kristie has led four major IT transformations while overseeing changes to enterprise-wide technology, cyber and risk management, culture skills and behaviors. Before joining CSC, she served as CIO, chief of staff and global IT strategy executive for PricewaterhouseCoopers.
Kristie serves as chair of the Capital CIO Advisory Board and is a member of STEMforHER Advisory Board. A strong supporter of academic STEM programs for young women, she is a recipient of the 2018 Women in Technology STEM Leadership award, Washington Business Journal’s 2020 Women Who Mean Business Award, a 2020 Capital CIO of the Year ORBIE Award Winner and a 2021 National CIO of the Year ORBIE Award Winner.
Kristie earned her BS in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Pittsburgh and holds an MBA from Cornell University’s Johnson Graduate School of Management.
An accomplished executive and business leader, Fern is passionate about driving positive change, creating collaborative and inclusive work environments, and building highly effective, high-performance teams. As an IT executive within PepsiCo, Fern serves as CTO Vice President – Sector CTO and Delivery since Jan 2021. Here Fern is leading a large organization to ensure high quality delivery and availability of global IT infrastructure, while delivering exceptional end user experiences. Prior to this role Fern led a global program to extend and build cybersecurity capability across PepsiCo's supply chain (350 manufacturing plants; 2,500 distribution centers/ warehouses). She has broad technical and functional expertise with global program management best practices and delivery, collaborative senior management partnerships, a drive for increased productivity and strong organizational leadership.
In addition to her work within the IT organization, Fern has been an active participant and champion of PepsiCo's Diversity, Inclusion and Engagement initiatives. Her efforts in this area have led to best practices and programs in Diversity which have effected positive change, helped to advance the careers of hundreds of employees, and vastly improved the organization. She has led and worked with affinity groups to enhance awareness through educational and community-based events, activities, programs, and projects encompassing all dimensions of diversity. She has been recognized for her contributions with three Harvey C. Russell Chairman’s Awards for Diversity.
Fern has Bachelor of Arts degree from Pace University in Pleasantville, NY. She sits on several boards and advisory councils - IT Senior Management Forum, North Texas Business Council for the Arts, DFW Alliance of Technology and Women and is a board of trustee for the Dallas Museum of Arts. Fern is quite the world traveler and foodie! She enjoys entertaining her family and friends in her home in Frisco, TX.
Wendy is the Former Chief Data Officer for Tableau. In this role, Wendy manages our enterprise Data Strategy, Data Platforms & Services, Data Governance & Management Maturity, Data Risk, and Data Literacy efforts while also serving as Chief Data Strategy Advisor to our customers. Wendy is responsible for the delivery of trusted, high business-value data and supporting culture to meet our business operations, automation, or transformational decisioning making needs.
Wendy has 20+ years in data, software, and digital transformation including enterprise roles at Salesforce, and Microsoft. Wendy is a tenured data thought-leadership author with publications through Forbes, Gartner, and Forrester, and an active speaker at events like Grace Hopper, Gartner D&A, etc.. Wendy is on the Advisory Board of the Data Leadership Collaborative and is a graduate of Oklahoma State University.
Nickoria is Credera's Chief Diversity Officer and a Partner on their executive leadership team. As Chief Diversity Officer at Credera, Nickoria is responsible for accelerating the mission of amplifying voices of underrepresented groups and synergizing diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts toward unified goals to ensure accessibility, focus, and visibility of DE&I for the firm. Prior to this role, Nickoria served as a Principal in the Management Consulting practice for two years, leading the firm's go-to-market strategy for program leadership and change leadership. She is a seasoned technology leader for over 25 years, with global experience leading large-scale IT strategic transformation efforts, modernizing portfolio management and IT governance processes, defining and implementing change management initiatives, and establishing deep partnerships across business teams and vendor partners.
Fun fact: Outside of the office, Nickoria is a passionate advocate for Girls in STEM and enjoys mentoring and coaching a student dance team in her spare time.
Cathy is Managing Director, Global Identity Access Management (GIAM) Operations at JP Morgan Chase & Company (JPMC). In this role she leads and manages a function whose primary mission is to provide access entitlements in a safe and secure manner. Cathy’s organization supports all the lines of business by provisioning system access for end users across the firm and in ensuring adherence to Controls and Standards to reduce identity and access management related risk. Her team also supports all access management related audits and regulatory reviews. Cathy joined JPMC in October of 2016 as an Executive Director managing Platform Operations across Global Identity and Access Management (GIAM) and she was based in New York City. In August of 2017 she was named Executive Director for Enterprise Access Administration which included Platform Operations, Applications, Databases, and GIAM Production Support. Cathy relocated to Tampa in July of 2018 and she was promoted to Managing Director in May 2019.
Cathy was named the JPMC Tampa Technology Center leader in 2021 for the 1900 technologists in Tampa. In addition, she leads several key Diversity, Equity and Inclusion initiatives for Global Technology which is comprised of over 55,000 technologists.
Prior to joining JPMC Cathy had a long career at IBM. In her last role she was Director, Global Identity and Access Management Operations for IBM’s Global Technology Services Division. She has extensive experience managing security, privacy, risk and controls, business operations, information technology and management development. She has led several teams and key functions, collaborated globally, built alliances with business partners, and improved delivery of services to clients across multiple industries including financial services, healthcare, retail, telecommunications, energy and utility, and government.
Over 35 years of leadership (CTO, VP of Engineering) and hands-on engineering experience in the Telecom/Wireless industry started out being a long-time embedded software engineer, signaling protocol developer, wireless networking architect, and moving on to lead large Engineering Organizations to deliver commercial Telecom/Wireless products/services for the last 15 years; heavily involved in standards bodies (IEEE, 3GPP, ITU-T/R, ETSI, IETF) working with the ‘G’s from TDM to IP, fixed-mobile convergence, 2G, 3G, WiMAX, 4G/LTE, 5G & now 6G.
Worked at large companies including Verizon Labs, Motorola, IBM, Ericsson, Polycom, Computer Associates, etc. as well as many startups including one of her own successful entrepreneurial ventures. Last 10 years focus include M2M/IoT horizontal service platform technology, IoT vertical apps e.g., Smart Cities, VR/AR/MR, Drones, Smart Grids; E2E wireless deployment using autonomous networking (SON), SDN/NFV network transformation, Network Slicing, O-RAN, Intent-Based Networking design, Blockchain apps, Quantum Computing/IBM Q Experience, etc.
Dr. Tam is also a professor at the University of Massachusetts as faculty in the Computer Science department teaching graduate and under-graduate CS & EE courses.
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