Senior Director, Technical Solutions, BlackBerry

Todd Berger, is an accomplished mobility strategist focused on providing innovative secure collaborative mobile solutions into the marketplace. He has over 18 years of enterprise mobility consulting experience ranging from application development, security and collaboration to device and data management.

In August 2014, Deborah (Debbi) Blyth became the state’s Chief Information Security Officer (CISO), bringing a diverse background including 14 years of information security experience. As the CISO, she serves as the point of contact for all information security initiatives in Colorado, informing the Secretary of Technology & Chief Information Officer and executive agency leadership on security risks and impacts of policy and management decisions on IT-related initiatives. Together with her team, she will be responsible for determining the strategic and tactical security direction for the State to meet established objectives.
Debbi brings a desire for building collaborative working relationships, and a highly praised leadership style. Before joining OIT, Debbi spent five years as an Executive Director at TeleTech leading the Information Security and IT Compliance program. Among her many achievements, Debbi built the business case and led a two-year effort to evolve and mature the information security program.
As the Information Technology Security and Compliance Manager at Travelport, Debbi was responsible for establishing and managing a global enterprise information security and compliance program. During her tenure, Debbi led the endeavor to achieve compliance with the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) for the company’s first time in 2007.
Debbi earned a Bachelor of Science degree from Regis University, graduating Summa Cum Laude while working full time. Calling herself a native even though she wasn’t born in Colorado, she loves all things Colorado, including the mountains, the sports teams, the weather, and especially the people! She is truly passionate about information security, and is very enthusiastic about this opportunity to perform her career ‘calling’ in service to the residents of the state that she loves.

Formerly Chief Technology Officer for Kiewit, Scott Cardenas has been Chief Technology Officer for the City and County of Denver since.
The City and County of Denver, Technology Services, offers a unique opportunity to work with a diverse business and technology environment that supports over 56 agencies. We employ over 12,000 people, of which 9,000+ are daily technology consumers in support of a diverse population in excess of 500,000 citizens.
Scott is an innovative leader with experience in developing strong teams that achieve desired results. He has an extensive history of managing complex large-scale projects and diverse teams and creates bottom line financial impacts through standardizing systems and operations for reliability and efficiency. Scott translates multipart goals into succinctly designed plans while developing informed client relationships resulting in effective deliverables and successful projects. Having experience in construction and engineering, healthcare, financial, telecommunications, aviation and government arenas Scott possesses a strong ability to communicate effectively with all business partners.

Jerry Eastman is a Cyber Security Intelligence Analyst at the Colorado Information and Analysis Center (CIAC), our state’s fusion center. His primary role is to understand the cyber threat information sharing needs of our critical infrastructure partners and provide them a connection to resources and mitigation measures. Jerry directly supports organic cyber threat information sharing groups that have emerged in Colorado as well as national information sharing and analysis centers. His role in the CIAC allows him to be a nexus for cyber threat information ranging from strategic to tactical threats. Jerry’s position gives him a unique view on cyber threat information flow in both the vertical (between local network operators and federal entities) and the horizontal (across all critical infrastructure sectors). He holds the FEMA Master Exercise Practitioner certification which he applies to numerous cyber exercises with the Colorado National Guard, Regis University, State Office of Information Technology, and critical infrastructure partners. Jerry’s more than 21 years of military service in both the nuclear and space command & control fields, kindle his desire to have a positive impact on the state of cybersecurity in Colorado, and the nation. Jerry holds a Master of Science degree in Information Assurance from Regis University and the GIAC Certified Incident Handler Certification from the SANS Institute.

Allan is currently VP of Standards & Technology at ForgeRock. As one of the founders of ForgeRock, he has helped build it into a multinational Identity Management software vendor with offices on four continents. Having served in multiple positions during its startup, Allan is now responsible for leading the worldwide ForgeRock community. This includes the contributing developer community, as well as the representation of ForgeRock on multiple standards committees.

Geo George joined Salesforce Public Sector Team as a Senior Manager in January 2014. In this role, he leads the marketing initiatives for the State and Local business unit. Geo is passionate about enabling state and local governments to do more and achieve more in a mobile-first, cloud-first world. Prior to Salesforce, Geo worked extensively at DC Government in various leadership roles. He led key initiatives to simplify government operations, advance technology applications to improve public services, and drive the innovation economy. Geo's experience at the crossroads of government and private sector gives him a unique perspective.

Daniele Loffreda is Advisor, State/Local Government, Education and Healthcare market development and consulting. In this role he leads Ciena’s initiatives to apply innovative communications technology and public private partnership models help the public sector ensure broadband access to all constituents, optimize their cloud strategies, deploy solid Business Continuity/Disaster Recovery strategies and improve data security. Daniele has more than 20 years of experience helping the public sector and healthcare industry leverage Information, Communications and Technology solutions provide greater value to their constituents, improve operational efficiencies and generate higher returns on public funds.

David McCurdy is an accomplished professional and thought leader who has been sought after to speak both nationally and abroad. Before joining the public sector in September 2014, he acquired more than 17 years’ experience working in IT as a programmer, system engineer, architect, and executive across the telecommunications, finance, healthcare fields.
David spent the past ten years at Catholic Health Initiatives (CHI). In his roles as CHI’s Associate Vice President and Chief Enterprise Architect, David led a 1,000-person IT organization that serviced hospitals and clinics across the country and was responsible for setting standards and strategic direction of IT. His key accomplishments include the build out of three primary data centers, centralization and reorganization of IT, the build out of new ERP and business management systems, and the implementation of the Electronic Health Record (EHR). Today David holds multiple certifications and memberships from leading organizations, such as the College of Healthcare Information Management Executives (CHIME), Citrix, CompTIA, Microsoft, Cerner, and Gartner.
A family man, David, his wife, Jennifer, and two sons have called Colorado home for the last 15 years and wouldn't live anywhere else. After serving patients and hospitals around the country, he now looks forward to serving the State and people of Colorado. "My passion is knowing how our work with technology makes a positive difference in the world every day.

Stacy has worked on several transformation projects for multiple public entities and successful agile integration has occurred each time using practical approaches opposed to rigid, religious implementations that are exclusively applied by and for small development teams. For example, what most people learn first when it comes to agile is the Scrum framework. Granted, industry standard agile terminology comes from Scrum and is important to learn, however, Scrum states team members should be solely focused on one project at a time and that the Scrum team does not include a project management role. Is that practical? Maybe for a startup team. Does that allow large, complex organizations to gain the the full benefits agile can provide, absolutely not. Many of Stacy’s current and past roles have been supporting practical agile integration, and the results have not only allowed organizations as a whole to mature to 21st-century work models, but to start practicing and delivering solution components more often and more targeted to customer needs.

Anthony Neal-Graves is the Executive Director of the State of Colorado’s Broadband initiative. Prior to joining the State, Tony work at Intel Corporation where he was the vice president in the Internet of Things Group. He worked at Intel for more than 15 years on numerous domestic and international businesses requiring strategic vision, aggressive timelines, and creative technology solutions. Prior to Intel, Neal-Graves spent more than 20 years in the communications industry working for AT&T Bell Laboratories and Lucent Technologies. The Broadband Office is housed in the Governor’s Office of Information Technology and collaborates closely with the Colorado Office of Economic Development and International Trade and the Department of Local Affairs, among others.

Jason is an Associate Director at Cask, LLC, Service Management and ITIL expert, and has over 20 years of hands-on Service Management, IT Operations, Management and Solution Consulting experience. Jason has partnered with customers across Technology, Health Care, Financial Services, and Entertainment industries to create, design and improve business processes. His focused areas of expertise include Business Service Management, IT Service Management, Cloud Computing, Sales & Presales processes and execution and Business Process Improvement/Optimization.

Mark Pfaffinger has worked in various IT management roles at Larimer County for over 17 years and was promoted to Chief Information Officer in 2013. Mark's has worked hard to build trust and connect IT to the business goals and values of each County department. Through the blending of ITIL process, enterprise services and Agile practices, Larimer has developed a unique approach to improving customer connections and developing a culture of business alignment that ultimately results in better services to the citizens. Mark holds an ITIL Expert V3 certification and balances his process geekery with a common sense approach to working with people.
Mark has worked in the field of Information Technology for over 25 years in various technical and leadership positions. He is a creative thinker and has the ability to troubleshoot complex business issues and turn them into actionable iterative improvement plans.
Mark is blessed to live and work in Fort Collins, one of the top ranked small cities in the country. Mark's loves food, cooking, and the Colorado outdoors. He is an avid fly fisherman and enjoys skiing, hiking, backpacking and mountain biking.

Jacquelyn Pyun works with project teams at the Governor's Office of Information Technology (OIT) to build enticing, effective digital experiences centered around actual customer needs. Through a deep understanding of these customers, she champions improvements to elevate the user’s experience -- whether it is training for state employees on how to better use a state-issued device or the design of a completely new digital service application for Coloradans.

As President and General Manager of Colorado Interactive, LLC, Fred leads a team of 38 employees in Denver dedicated to providing eGovernment services to state agencies and local governments through a contract with the Statewide Internet Portal Authority (SIPA). Fred has extensive experience, having worked with State and Federal Government for more than twenty years, and having served as President and General Manager of NIC portals in Montana, Indiana, Arizona, and for the past 7 years, Colorado.

Hayri Tarhan is the Vice President for Oracle Public Sector Security. He is responsible for sales, go-to-market strategy, and overall growth for Oracle’s security cloud services, management cloud services, identity and access management, and database security product lines in the US and Canadian government and higher education space. Hayri helps government agencies across North America protect their most critical asset, their data. He and his team work extensively with customers as they design and evaluate solutions to secure and optimize their on-prem IT assets and workloads in Oracle & 3rd party cloud services. Previously, Hayri led sales engineering for Oracle’s North American Public Sector & Healthcare Security business. Hayri has been with Oracle since 1995. He earned a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.

John Thompson serves Douglas County, Colorado as the Data Services Manager, providing over 20 years of leadership experience gained in IT, software development, telecom and aerospace industries. John is a skilled facilitator and Agile Coach, and uses these abilities to help teams achieve their goals and help leaders achieve their executive vision.