Dr. Cedric Alexander has spent nearly four decades in search of a better way to police our nation. He’s the author of The New Guardians, and he has served as a law enforcement analyst on ABC, CBS, NBC and CNN. In 2015 he was appointed to the President’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing. He has served at every level of government: as a Federal Security Director in the US Department of Homeland Security, as a Deputy Commissioner for Criminal Justice in New York State, as Public Safety Director in a major county, and as a City Chief of Police and Deputy Mayor.

Mike Beddow is the IBM Hybrid Cloud and Analytics Solutions Leader for the Public Sector and Healthcare industries. Mike graduated from Lehigh University with a dual major in Computer Science Engineering and Business. He has technical experience solving complex business challenges leveraging a variety of IBM and open source solutions. Mike focuses on advising clients at various stages of their cloud and AI journey.

Bob Bennett became the Chief Innovation Officer for the City of Kansas City, Missouri, in January 2016 after a 25-year career in the US Army. He led Kansas City’s Smart City initiatives, a suite of projects designed to create a 21st Century Cityscape for 21st Century Citizens from 2016 through April 14, 2019. During his tenure he oversaw completion of 2.2 mile connected corridor adjacent to the city’s Streetcar line that became “the smartest 54 blocks in North America.” Kansas City’s initiatives earned the city an Edison Award (Gold) for “Collective Disruption” and civic innovation in 2017, and Bob was named one of GovTech’s 25 Dreamers, Doers and Drivers in 2018.

Rob leads Accenture’s Public Sector Management Consulting practice in the Southwestern United States. For over 25 years Rob has worked with state and local government agencies and educational institutions in developing transformation and modernization programs that help improve outcomes that matter. This includes digital transformation, journey to the cloud, change management, IT strategic planning and operating model development, shared services design, business architecture, financial modeling, and system implementations. Prior to Accenture, Rob was a Senior Managing Partner and Industry Segment Leader within Gartner Consulting’s State & Local Government group. Rob has also held leadership roles at other leading public sector advisory and technology implementation firms, as well as served in public service roles for the State of Texas. Rob is a Certified Public Accountant with a BBA from the University of Texas.

COO Davidson serves as a member of Governor Ducey’s senior staff and oversees operations of all state agencies.
Prior to coming to the State, he served in local government management as a credentialed City Manager for the cities of Marana and Willcox. He has also served as president of the Arizona City/County Management Association, served on the National Alumni Association Governing Board for the University of Arizona and currently serves on the University Of Arizona Foundation Board Of Directors. He has a graduate degree from the University of Arizona in Public Administration and attended the Harvard Kennedy School for State and Local Government Leaders.

Building on his former role as enterprise architect for the state of Iowa, Chris serves as a trusted advisor to state leaders. He has helped numerous states modernize systems, migrate to the cloud, automate workflows, and deliver impactful services.
With his deep technical expertise, commitment to client success and insight into public sector priorities and challenges:
Tennessee Dept of Human Services reduced time to resolve citizen inquiries by 70%,
Texas Dept of Information Resources achieved 83% CSAT
Iowa DOT reduced worker onboarding from 6 hours to 30 minutes
Chris is a proud native Iowan, actively involved in the Boys & Girls Club and coaches youth judo.

Sean Feeney has held a variety of roles at Fortune 500 companies across the United States. Most of his professional career has been in the areas of cloud and DevOps consulting, helping companies transform culture, skill sets and technology to stay market relevant. He joined Nerdery, the Minneapolis-based digital consultancy in 2018 as their Cloud Engineering Practice Director. He holds a B.S. in Software Engineering from Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology, an M.B.A. with a concentration in Management, Innovation & Change from Wright State University, and all five AWS associate & professional certs, among others.

Ryan is a tech evangelist and 18 year veteran of Verizon with an expertise around emerging technologies, smart communities and utility space. Ryan lives in Gilbert, AZ and takes extreme pride in aiding cities across the country to harness technology to improve the way that citizens live, work and play.

Jason Graun is a Solutions Engineering Manager and a member of the Office of the CTO. He has been with Fortinet since 2011. Jason has supported Fortinet’s largest carrier and MSSP customers as a Consulting Security Engineer. He brings nearly 20years of experience in IT having worked for a large international bank and several startups along the way. Jason’s focus is solving the problem of how to automate security to bridge the gap between cyberattacks and the needs of business drivers.

Heather Sheston is the Google program manager for the State of Arizona. Arizona became the seventh state to go Google in Fall of 2017. Through a phased approach, Heather has led the migration of more than 70 agencies, for a total of more than 25,000 users. Upon completion of the project, another 30 agencies, boards and commissions and another 15,000 users will be added to the platform. Prior to her current role with the state, Heather has served in a variety of roles at both the Department of Administration and the Department of Commerce, now the Arizona Commerce Authority. Prior to that, she served for two years as the project manager for a county wide initiative called Fix, Adopt, Save which focused it's efforts on reducing animal euthanasia and controlling the pet over population in the Valley. She holds a bachelor's and master's degree from Arizona State University.

Eric Jorgensen has worked for the state of Arizona since 2004. Most recently, he served as the deputy director for administration at the Arizona Department of Child Safety (DCS), where he oversaw the separation of the DCS from the Department of Economic Security and the creation of the administrative structure for the new agency. Previously, he served as chief financial officer for the $800 million self-insured state employee benefit program and as assistant director for the Arizona Joint Legislative Budget Committee. Eric received his bachelor's degree in international political science from Brigham Young University, and his master's degree in international affairs with an emphasis on economic policy from Columbia University.

Mr. Knigge has more than 30 years of experience in the technology field with a diverse range of experience from executive to consultant to IT project delivery roles. For more than a decade, he has worked primarily in the Motor Vehicle Industry with an exclusive focus on the DMV business.
Mr. Knigge has had delivery roles including Project Director on enterprise projects providing DMV legacy system modernization for half a dozen states. As a strategic consultant and advisor, he has supported technology efforts for several other states as well.
As co-founder in an enterprise class DMV software and solution provider, Mr. Knigge was President taking the organization from startup through acquisition by a Fortune 100 company. Relating to technology procurements, Mr. Knigge has experience both from the acquirer and vendor perspectives.

Paula Mattingly is Assistant Director/CIO for the Arizona Department of Health Services (ADHS). She has been with the department for 13 years and has been working to better align IT resources with agency priorities, to leverage technologies to improve agency performance, and to improve customer service. Her previous experience includes senior information technology management roles at Honeywell, and several computer consulting organizations. While at Honeywell’s Satellite Systems Division, she also managed their total quality initiative, during which time they received the Arizona Governor’s award. She possesses over 35 years of experience in software development and management/project management within technical environments. She has a Bachelor of Science in Business Administration from Arizona State University. In 2014 she received an Outstanding CIO award from the Phoenix Business Journal in recognition of her efforts in implementing health information technology and Meaningful Use for public health.

Harry has been leading the technical side of the Smart City program at the City of Mesa for the past year. He’s the lead architect for the City of Mesa IT Dept, and has been working in City govt IT for the last 12 years. In 2009 he helped bring to Mesa Arizona’s first hackerspace Heatsync Labs. He takes a community focused approach to designing systems that serve the residents of the city and region.

Eugene has 13 years’ experience of Local and County government in Information Technology. During that time, he has held roles in Applications, Desktop, and Infrastructure supporting critical applications for Public Safety and Municipal environments. Eugene is currently serving as the IT Infrastructure Manager/Interim-Co IT Director and has been part of Team Gilbert for over 6 years. In partnership with internal stakeholders he has been a technical liaison for exploring and recommending IoT solutions where it makes sense. He is a Gilbert resident and has a true passion for improving the quality of life through the use of technology.

Dominic Papa is the Executive Director of the Institute for Digital Progress (iDP), an innovation-driven, smart city nonprofit. iDP provides the unified leadership structure to drive innovation through collaboration, and empower governments with the mechanism to create, develop, and deploy emerging technologies across jurisdictions, across sectors, and across industries. iDP provides governments at all levels with tools, skills, and knowledge to leverage smart technologies together.
In 2016, Dominic built the Smart & Connected AZ Council, which provides cities with an “Innovation as a Service” model, a platform that allows local governments, private industry and academic research institutions to collaboratively design and develop new innovative technology pilots that advance solutions to public challenges, have a measurable impact, and the potential to scale. Within its first six months of operation, the Smart & Connected Council helped the region secure a $6 million DOT grant around congestion management technology.
Dominic founded iDP after working for two years with the city of Phoenix. Prior to the city, he worked for ASU’s Center for Urban Innovation.

Morgan Reed joined the State of Arizona in 2015 after two decades of working in the technology industry at large enterprises in the private sector. As the Chief Information Officer, Morgan is responsible for driving the State of Arizona’s overall technology strategy and executing the transformation of government services to a people-centric approach.
During Reed’s tenure with the state, he has implemented a statewide cloud-first strategy and successfully migrated 80 percent of servers from the state’s datacenter to the public cloud, including a multi-agency mainframe. Under his leadership, significant enhancements have been made to cybersecurity making Arizona one of the best-protected state governments in the nation.
Prior to joining the State of Arizona, Morgan led global infrastructure delivery teams at GoDaddy and Expedia and worked in IT at large organizations including Intel and Wells Fargo.
During his off hours, Morgan enjoys spending time with his three children and two dogs.

James Smith has over 21 years of municipal government experience, primarily in economic development. With the City of Chandler, he has managed numerous attraction and expansion projects with major corporations, including Allstate, Liberty Mutual, Voya, Republic Services, Northrop Grumman, NXP, and Rogers.
He is also responsible for the implementation of innovative and Smart City solutions. A focus of this effort is growing Chandler’s reputation as the Innovation and Technology Center of the Southwest through strategic partnerships with technology companies to address identified service delivery issues. An additional focus is furthering the City’s leadership role in Autonomous Vehicle (AV) research and development, testing, and implementation.
He holds Bachelor of Science (Economics) and Master of Public Administration degrees – both from San Jose State University - and is a Certified Economic Developer (CEcD) through the International Economic Development Council (IEDC).

Jung Thai is a Senior Project Manager for the Arizona Department of Health Services and has been supporting the Arizona Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) for 7 years. Mr. Thai managed the successful multi-state agency implementation of WIC Electronic Benefits Transfer for the Arizona, American Samoa, Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands, Guam, and Navajo Nation WIC Programs which concluded in May 2018. Mr. Thai is currently managing the EzWIC Android and iOS mobile application, which is available in the Apple App Store and Google Play store

Benjamin VandenBerg is an accomplished IT leader and Solution Architect with extensive experience in design, build out and management of large-scale platforms and technology environments including private, public and hybrid clouds. Benjamin has over twenty-three years in the IT field and is adept at leveraging emerging technologies and innovative strategies to cut costs, improve productivity, enhance service quality, and increase service metrics at mission-critical operations. Benjamin is currently working for the State of Arizona's Strategic Enterprise Technology office as the State's Enterprise Cloud Architect.

Jeff Wolkove joined the Arizona Department of Administration Strategic Enterprise Technology Office (ADOA-ASET) in 2012 to launch a statewide data management (DM) program and became the State Data Management Architect in 2017. Among his accomplishments, Jeff is most proud of the statewide Data Stewardship Training Program launched in the fall of 2018, a Data Sharing Memorandum of Understanding signed by 27 agencies, and many data governance policies that are establishing a data management culture across state government. Arizona now has an active State DM Steering Committee, a State Data Interoperability Council and holds an annual DM conference.
Jeff is a Chartered Professional Accountant (Quebec, Canada) and has specialized in information systems throughout his career. He moved his family to Arizona in 1992 and held senior IT positions in the health care industry, realizing millions of dollars of savings through innovative process improvements. He owes his success to a rich mixture of business and technology expertise.