Ken Anderson has worked in Information Technology for the Arkansas Department of Labor for 17 years. A former store manager for Wal-Mart Stores, Inc., he is currently the Senior Software Analyst for the agency and manages a staff of 3 other IT professionals. He and his wife Donna have been married 34 years and have one daughter, one son and three grandsons (Britni, Sam, Abram, Saul, and Jack). Ken has earned certifications with Hewlett Packard, Laserfiche, and FEMA. He attended Arkansas State University and under his guidance the Department of Labor the Wage and Hour Division won a 2016 Laserfiche “Run Smarter®” Award for innovations in the Public Sector Arena. Under Ken’s leadership the Department of Labor’s IT Division is broadening the scope of digital transformation at the agency.

Phyllis Bell is the Child Welfare Senior Advisor and Intern Director to Governor Asa Hutchinson. Phyllis spent much of her career self-employed managing her family’s chicken and cattle farm, construction business, and her own consulting firm before coming to work in the governor’s office in January 2015.
In her leisure time she enjoys cycling, running, kayaking, skydiving, quilting, and spending time with her family. She and her husband have two daughters, Victoria (25) and Hannah (22).
Due to many personal experiences, she sees potential in those around her that often is overlooked by others. As time permits and opportunities present themselves, she travels the state sharing her CHOiCES presentation and challenges individuals to Dream BIG, make wise CHOiCES, and offer hope to individuals whose lives they touch.

Melissa Bridges is the Performance & Innovation Coordinator for the City of Little Rock. This is a new position at the City that grew out of their work on Bloomberg Philanthropies’ What Works Cities initiative around Open Data, Results Driven Contracting and Performance Measurements. The City passed an Open Data Policy in May 2016 and their goal is to push out meaningful data sets on their open data website https:/data.littlerock.gov for use by citizens and those interested in Little Rock. With the addition of performance measures, Little Rock will put their data to work and break down more of the departmental data silos to set goals and priorities for the betterment of their city.

Jim Carlson’s career with CenturyLink has spanned 29 years and he has held roles in IT, Finance, Billing, Product Management, Product Development Marketing and Sales. Jim has lead initiatives at CenturyLink to bring new technologies to market, rationalize CenturyLink’s product portfolio and CenturyLink’s entry into the “web world”. He currently works with CenturyLink sales teams across the country helping them describe the power of CenturyLink’s portfolio of solutions to their customers.

Keith is equal parts Dark Web tour guide and CyberSecurity evangelist. Yet, he still struggles to outline the current threat landscape in our connected world without scaring people back into the Dark Ages.
Trained as a network engineer he started his career into CyberSecurity when he joined a training team teaching people to hack and defend Cisco network infrastructure at BlackHat.
As the Solutions Architect for Mainstream Technologies Keith leverages his experience as a Certified Ethical Hacker and engineer to help organizations use technology to be more effective, transparent, and secure.
Keith truly embodies that contradiction by oversharing on social media (@tsudo) while preferring email encrypted with GPG (0xC4C53435).

Amy Fecher is the Executive Vice President of Operations at the Arkansas Economic
Development Commission (AEDC). Ms. Fecher has over fifteen years’ experience working in the public, private and not-for-profit sectors; this includes being the former Director of the Arkansas Department of Rural Services (now a division of AEDC) and working in former Governor Mike Huckabee’s administration.
Ms. Fecher serves as Governor Hutchinson’s designee to the Delta Regional Authority’s Board of Governors where she works to improve regional economic opportunity by helping to create jobs, build communities, and improve the lives of the citizens in the eight-state Delta region. She also serves on Governor Hutchinson’s Cabinet.
In December of 2016, Governor Hutchinson selected Ms. Fecher to serve as his Chief
Transformation Officer for the newly established Office of Transformation. The Office of
Transformation will prioritize efficiencies throughout state government such as formulating a statewide strategic plan, centralizing state services and increasing utilization of online services and citizen participation. Ms. Fecher embraced this position which is an added responsibility to her other positions and one that she receives no additional compensation for from the state.
Currently, Ms. Fecher volunteers as a coach and mentor with the Miracle League of Arkansas, and serves on the Information Network of Arkansas Board. Her past service includes positions on the Arkansas Capitol Arts and Ground Commission and the Arkansas Natural and Cultural Resources Council.
Ms. Fecher is a graduate of the University of Central Arkansas in Conway, Arkansas. She and her husband Shawn, along with their three boys, make their home in Sherwood, Arkansas.

A U.S. Navy veteran, Ralph has a BS in Organizational Management from John Brown University and is a certified Paralegal. His public service background includes holding elected office as a JP in Washington County, serving as District Director for Governor Hutchinson who was then serving as the U.S. Congressman for the 3rd District of Arkansas, and as Deputy Director of Labor in Arkansas where he manages day-to-day operations for 6 agency divisions. Managing people and solving organizational problems are areas of emphasis in his professional career. As a Certified Toastmaster he is an accomplished public speaker and enjoys reading and coin collecting in his off-time.
He has been married to the former Melva Gardner from Springdale for over 38 years. Melva is a paralegal for Arvest Mortgage and they have 3 children: Matthew of Charlotte, NC, David of Little Rock, AR, and Lorén of Springdale, AR. They have 7 grandchildren.

Yessica Jones is the Arkansas chief technology officer (CTO) and director of the Arkansas Department of Information Systems (DIS). As DIS director, Jones leads more than 250 information technology (IT) professionals responsible for the state network, telecommunications services, and information systems.
Jones joined DIS as deputy director in January 2016. In November 2016, Governor Asa Hutchinson designated her as the acting director subsequent to the resignation of the previous director. She accepted the governor’s offer to serve as the agency’s permanent director in March 2017.
As CTO, Jones is the appointed chairperson for the Arkansas State Technology Council and chairperson of the Technology Oversight Council. She is also the designated state broadband manager. Jones is a member of the Open Data and Transparency Task Force, Arkansas Homeland Security Executive Committee, Arkansas Geographic Information Systems (GIS) Board, Information Network of Arkansas (INA) Board, and Arkansas Interoperable Communications Executive Committee.
In 2016, Jones was the recipient of a StateScoop Top 50 Up and Comer Award. In 2017, StateScoop named her as one of its Top Women in Technology. She was also nominated for a StateScoop Top 50 Award as a Golden Gov: State Executive of the Year.
Prior to joining DIS, Jones was an assistant professor in Harding University’s Department of Management Information Systems where she taught data management, database design and business applications programming. She has also served as a solutions developer for Little Rock-based Acxiom and as a database developer for Pennzoil. Jones also served as Gov. Asa Hutchinson’s outreach liaison to the Hispanic community.
Jones holds a B.S. in Computer Science and an M.B.A. from Harding University.

John Kimberly is a veteran of 38 years in the IT industry, initially focused on high end UNIX systems, he developed his skills to become a Senior UNIX Instructor/Manager for such companies as Siemens Information Systems Worldwide and Dun & Bradstreet. He holds multiple certifications from Redhat, IBM, HP, VMWare, SANS International, and others. For the last 18 years, he has been an enterprise architect and security engineer for Fortune 500 companies, where he also served as the Open Systems representative to the State of Georgia IT Security Counsel. Today, he is a Senior Systems Engineer for Centrify, and regularly helps customers recognize their IT security vulnerabilities, and assists them in mitigating those vulnerabilities by the deployment of Centrify Identity Services, while also providing improved adherence to governmental regulations and ease of enterprise management.

Jeff Mullins is an Executive in Residence and Associate Director of MIS Programs in the Information Systems Department. Jeff holds a B.S. in Computer Science and a Master of Information Systems (MIS) from the University of Arkansas. Upon completion of his bachelor’s degree, Jeff worked as a business and technology analyst with Tyson Foods for ten years. He joined the UA faculty in his current role in 2007, and regularly teaches graduate courses in Data Management, Enterprise Resource Planning, and Data Analytics Fundamentals. Jeff is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in Information Systems. His research interests include analytics and decision making, gamification, and deviant behavior. Jeff’s work has been published in the Journal of Business Ethics and the Proceedings of the International Conference on Information Systems.

Phil Poje, a serial entrepreneur, draws on more than 30 years of executive leadership and ownership experience to manage TechOrchard. Having founded four companies in the areas of technology and financial services, Phil has a unique understanding of the challenges that exist within these industry segments and develops innovative ways to overcome them. The creation of TechOrchard — a mobile IT solutions company that assists organizations in securing mobile devices (smartphones, tablets, wearables and laptops) and leveraging the productivity of mobility across vertical markets that include business, government, education, healthcare and banking — stemmed from the need he recognized in this critical and rapidly growing aspect of business. Phil holds an bachelor’s degree from the University of Missouri-Kansas City; and associate’s degree in technology in business.

Rick Sugg is a cyber operations officer and Captain in the Arkansas Air National Guard (ANG) and has been a member of the Air Force for 23 years. After leaving active duty, he began his full-time career in Information Technology as a network engineer and C4 (command, control, communication and computer) system manager for the ANG in 2001. Since then, he has held various technical and managerial positions to include cyber security specialist with the Arkansas Department of Information Systems and also owns a technology support company. Currently, Rick is the Commander of the 189th Communications Squadron, Arkansas ANG where he manages 30 technical experts and day-to-day communications operations for the wing. He has a BS in Management of information Systems from Central Baptist College in Conway.

Scott holds a BSBA degree from the University of Arkansas in Computer Information Systems. Scott is currently the Chief Enterprise Architect at the Arkansas Department of Information Systems (DIS) where he has been employed for 30+ years. As Chief Enterprise Architect since 2009, he is responsible for strategy, planning, governance, IT procurement, project management and quality.
Previous roles within DIS include IT management, security and software development in data warehouse and mainframe environments.
Certifications Scott holds include PMP, CISSP, CISA, CISM, CCP, CDMP, TOGAF, ITIL v3.

Director, Chief Data Officer and Information Quality Program, MIT and
Founder & Executive Director, Institute for Chief Data Officers, University of Arkansas at Little Rock

Richard Y. Wang is executive director of the Institute for Chief Data Officers (iCDO) and professor at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock. He also serves as director of the MIT Chief Data Officer and Information Quality Program. He previously served as the deputy chief data officer and chief data quality officer in the U.S. Army. He received his Ph.D. in information technology from the MIT Sloan School of Management in 1985.