Phil Bertolini is vice president of the Center for Digital Government, a national research and advisory institute on information technology policies and best practices in state and local government. Previously, he served as deputy county executive and CIO for Oakland County, Michigan. During his 31-year tenure, Phil built a world-class IT organization in the second-largest county in Michigan, just north of Detroit. As Oakland County CIO, he oversaw more than 150 employees serving over 1.2 million residents. In 2005, he was also promoted to deputy county executive, holding dual positions until his retirement. Phil’s efforts earned the county national attention, winning numerous awards for technology innovation and excellence. He was named Governing Magazine’s Public Official of the Year and Government Technology Magazine’s Top 25 Doers, Dreamers & Drivers. He was also honored by the President Obama White House as a Champion of Change.

Alan is Executive Vice President of e.Republic and Publisher of Government Technology magazine and Techwire. In this role, Alan is involved in the annual production of dozens of events as well as the strategic direction for Governing, Government Technology, Emergency Management, the Center for Digital Government and the Center for Digital Education. Alan is also the senior executive that has overall charge of e.Republic’s research organization which includes, custom research, the Digital Government and Digital Education Navigator tool and the Content Studio (webinars and custom content).
Alan has been a guest lecturer at universities and a frequent speaker for key government and industry organizations. For over 35 years, Alan has worked with industry, education and government officials to help them better understand the importance and use of information technology. Alan received his Bachelor of Science degree in Business Administration at California State University, Sacramento.

As the Minneapolis CIO for seven-plus years, Otto Doll was responsible for all city IT services. He also served as South Dakota’s CIO for 15 years with responsibility for all state government computing, telecommunications, radio and public broadcasting. While with IT research firms, Otto has advised Fortune 1000, federal, state and local government CIOs on information technology assessment and alignment to business needs. He has served as a director with the United States General Services Administration, developing information technology strategic plans and oversight policy.
Otto received his computer science degree from Virginia Tech and is a senior executive fellow of the Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University. He is a past president of NASCIO – a national organization of state CIOs. He also is a past president of the Metropolitan Information Exchange (MIX) – a national organization of city and county CIOs. Otto was named to Government Technology's 2004 Top 25 Doers, Dreamers and Drivers.

With 10 years of experience at NIC, Tamara Dukes has performed multiple, senior-level roles across NIC, including general manager of portal operations in Maine, regional manager of portal operations and, now, vice president of Partnership Solutions. In her role, Tamara has been a driving force in the improvement of NIC’s delivery of services and accessibility to next generation services. She is a constant advocate for our partners as NIC develops and executes critical business initiatives, and always strives to maintain close relationships with NIC government partners in order to meet their needs.

Steven Ferguson is a 25-year veteran of the IT industry. As the Chief Information Officer for the Technical College System of Georgia (TCSG), he leads a talented team of IT professionals in support of TCSG’s technical education, adult education, economic development, and workforce divisions across the 88 campuses of Georgia’s 22 technical colleges. Ferguson was selected as the 2019 Georgia Non-Profit CIO of the Year and the 2021 Technology Leader of the Year for Innovation. He is currently driving innovation in higher education through the launch of TCSG’s eCampus platform.
Ferguson holds an M.S. in Information Technology from Southern Polytechnic State
University, a B.S. in Business Administration, Information Technology from Columbia
Southern University, an A.S. in Engineering from Gainesville State College, and is a proud graduate of TCSG’s Executive Leadership Academy.
Beyond his service to the State of Georgia, Ferguson is very active in the community, currently serving on the Board of Directors for the Technology Association of Georgia (TAG), as an Advisory Board Member for GeorgiaCIO, and as a volunteer for various non-profit and educational organizations.

Viggo Forde serves as the Chief Information Officer and Director of Information Technology for Snohomish County. Prior to joining Snohomish County he had a long career as Senior Director in Customer Service and Support at Microsoft where he was a leader of large global transformation programs. He also brings experience from Amazon.com where he defined and led the global knowledge management and localization of information for Amazon Sellers. He holds a masters and bachelors degree in Industrial Engineering from the University of Washington. In addition to being CIO, he also holds the position as Honorary Consul of Norway to the States of Washington, Oregon and Idaho and is a boardmember of the National Nordic Museum, the University of Washington Scandinavian Studies Department, the University of Washington Industrial and Systems Engineering Executive Advisory Board.
Viggo is on LinkedIn, at linkedin.com/in/viggoforde

George is a subject matter expert for Partners/Integrators as well as customers in government & healthcare. George provides illustrates use cases and workflow designs to mitigate cyberthreats from increasing use of stolen identities and bot attacks. Workflow solutions include ThreatMetrix Digital Identity risk assessment with physical identity verification and step-up authentication via LexisNexis Risk Solutions physical identity products. George works with various LexisNexis® Risk Solutions business development teams to define Identity solutions for increasing threats to work-from-home environments and partnering with leading Identity and Access Management (IAM) vendors.

Heidi Geathers is an experienced IT leader with over 25 years in the technology field. She has been a part of the technology evolution, applying many principles she has learned over the years to technology initiatives today. Currently, Heidi is an executive leader within the Department of Revenue. She provides strategic leadership and oversight to the Information Services, Business and Financial Services, Human Resources, and Information Governance programs within the agency.
Heidi has leveraged her skills in both the private and public sectors to make a valued difference. She notes that the fundamental structures and cultures of business may be different, the need for technology to successfully execute the organizations mission and vision is the same. Heidi worked for two decades in the banking world and began her public sector career as the CIO at the Liquor and Cannabis Board. During her tenure, she led the technology team in implementing solutions for the legalization of marijuana. She transitioned into the Deputy Director role at WaTech, offering services to state government agency’s that included on premise, cloud solutions, brokered services, security governance, and application development. Her current role encompasses all of the administrative services of the organization to continue to provide customer centric support, enhance partnerships with business operations, and grow the organizational strategies to effectively achieve the mission and vision of the Department of Revenue.

As a managing director for experience transformation focused on public service and health, Alicia Graham specializes in reimagining service by rewiring organizations to obsess about human needs, innovate experience as an everyday habit and sync technology, data and human agendas. She is focused on delivering sustainable value through personalized experiences, optimized workflows and lifelong relationships that improve how people live, heal, work and play.
With over 20 years of experience, she brings industry-leading know-how spanning clients such as airbnb, Disney, DARPA, Kaiser Permanente, Salesforce and University of Texas. Her education includes a B.A. in Economics from University of California, Berkeley, an M.B.A. from Columbia Business School and many years of travel and user research.

Tanya Hannah believes using technology in new, surprising and smart ways to ensure all King County residents can thrive. Ms. Hannah oversees all teams supporting 64 lines of business within the County. That includes everything from emergency services to the courts to vaccination sites. She’s passionate about ensuring King County residents have equitable access to digital technology so they enjoy full participation in our society, democracy and economy. Under her leadership, the Center for Digital Government has for the past four years recognized the King County Department of Information Technology (KCIT) as one of the top digital counties in the nation. KCIT has likewise been recognized for the past two years as a CIO 100 award winner for technology innovation and has been awarded several Digital Edge and Government Experience awards.

Lisa is the Deputy Director for Snohomish County Department of Information Technology. Her current role focuses on the IT business office which excels at project delivery, customer centric support, enhancement of business relationships with 27 county departments and agencies, seeking out innovative solutions to complex challenges. The business office focuses on aligning organizational strategies to accomplishing department strategic goals and the county vision and mission. Prior to her role at Snohomish County Lisa spent 13 years at King County Information Technology Department in a variety of leadership roles. Lisa has an extensive history in technology leadership in both private and public sectors.

Sagay provides 12 years of expertise in enterprise IT management, and he has engaged with clients from diverse socioeconomic and cultural backgrounds to define their IT needs. His vast experience comes from more than 100 enterprise implementations centered on help desk, monitoring, endpoint management, and IT security solutions. He currently serves as the Manager, Strategic Account Management team (North America) at ManageEngine, offering consulting services to enterprises in many industries. Sagay focuses on clearly identifying an organizations' IT needs and helping his clients achieve their organization's unique IT management goals.

Chris has served 14 years in CIO/IT Director roles with the State of Washington for the Department of Retirement Services, the Department of Social & Health Services and in his current role for the Office of Financial Management. Chris’ career has spanned 31 years; all but one of which has been in the public sector. Chris is a graduate of Washington State University with a Bachelor’s Degree in Mathematics. He is also a graduate of the University of Washington Executive Management Program and holds Prosci certification in Change Management as well as Project Management certification, also from the University of Washington.

Daniele Loffreda is marketing lead for Ciena’s Virtualized Edge Solution State/Local Government and Education (SLED) and Healthcare in Ciena’s Solutions Development organization. In this role, he leads Ciena’s initiatives applying next-generation networking technologies to help these sectors deliver higher quality experiences to their constituents through disruptive technologies, optimized cloud strategies, virtualized infrastructure and improved data security.
Daniele has more than 25 years of experience helping customers leverage information, communications and technology solutions to provide greater value, streamline their operations and generate higher returns on network investments. In addition to his role at Ciena, Daniele has worked in pioneering roles at AT&T, Sprint and Fujitsu. He has presented at numerous industry conferences and published articles and posts on next-generation network connectivity as a critical foundation of enterprise transformation.

Aaron is a Systems Engineering Manager (SEM) at Palo Alto Networks. Prior to his SEM role Aaron was a security focused Systems Engineer for 12 years, helping customers with their journey toward a zero-trust environment. Before becoming a Systems Engineer, Aaron spent 15 years implementing and maintaining cyber security solutions for multiple organizations, to include Higher Education, Service Provider, and Department of Defense.

David McCurdy is an Executive Government Advisor at Amazon Web Services (AWS) guiding state and local government executives through strategy, policy, and governance challenges to help accelerate their cloud journey. David brings 20 years of experience transforming technology across government, healthcare, and telecommunications industries. Previously, David spent five years as Chief Technology Officer at the State of Colorado leading digital transformation and 10 years at Catholic Health Initiatives leading technology transformation.

Joseph Morris is the deputy chief innovation officer for the Center for Digital Government and a national keynote speaker on issues, trends and drivers impacting state and local government and education. He has authored publications and reports on funding streams, technology investment areas and public-sector priorities, and has led roundtables, projects and initiatives focused on issues within the public sector. Joe has conducted state and local government research with e.Republic since 2007 and knows the ins and outs of government on all levels. He received his Bachelor of Arts in government and international relations from the California State University, Sacramento.

Thomas Nisbet is an Associate Partner with IBM, assisting clients apply cognitive capabilities in their enterprises. Over 10 years of AI and advanced analytics experience across State and Local and Federal government have given Thomas a diverse background and experience with how cognitive capabilities can help deliver on the promise of the digital reinvention of Government. He is currently focused on using AI and automation to transform agencies with goals to increase program satisfaction, lower costs, improve employee efficiency, and overall program outcomes. Thomas lives in Raleigh, NC with his wife and 2 children.

Matthew Oram is the CIO for Washington State Department of Fish and Wildlife and has served as the CIO since July of 2017. Prior to working for the state Matthew started his career working at the customer service desk for a start up company that did international online registration. Working his way up in the company he worked as a consultant, system administrator, developer, and Operations Engineer. The fast pace of working for a startup company that started acquiring other companies to grow and eventually got purchased itself offered opportunities to grow diverse cross business perspective and experience. Bringing these lessons learned with him to the state, Matthew has developed a strong IT team at Fish and Wildlife that is focused on customer satisfaction, staff satisfaction and financial health. Between April and September of this year Matthew was appointed as the Acting Deputy Director of Technology and Operations for Washington Technology Solutions to help provide perspective and leadership through as the recruitment and transition of a new agency director and State CIO. With Bill Kehoe stepping in as the State CIO, Matthew is excited to return to the Fish and Wildlife team to focus on executive leadership through the COVID and post COVID operating environment dedicated to conservation and recreational technology opportunities to serve the state of Washington.

Rick brings the Fortinet OT-CI team more than 37 years of cybersecurity and global partnering experience working across foreign, domestic, and commercial industry sectors at the National Security Agency (NSA). As Fortinet’s Operational Technology North American CISO, he delivers cybersecurity defense solutions and insights for the OT/ICS/SCADA critical infrastructure environments. Prior to Fortinet, Rick led development of cyber capability across Endpoint, Infrastructure, and Industrial Control System technologies at the agency. Previously, Rick also served as an executive leader supporting the Information Assurance Directorate at the NSA. Earlier in his career, he served in a broad range of leadership and Engineering roles including Chief of Staff for the NSA Cyber Task Force and a 5-year forward liaison charged with directing integration of cyber and cryptologic solutions for U.S. Air Force Europe, Ramstein AFB, Germany.

Zach Patton is the Chief Editor of the Content Studio at e.Republic and Government Technology. He has been covering the public sector for nearly 20 years. Until 2019, he was the Executive Editor of Governing magazine, where he also had served as a staff writer for more than a decade.

Robin serves as the Enterprise Cloud Computing Manager in the Office of the Chief Information Officer (OCIO) for Washington State, developing and leading the state's cloud computing strategy. Robin has nearly 21 years of IT management experience including 16 years with Microsoft. He held multiple management positions within Microsoft’s Service and IT organizations, including driving Cloud early adoption within Microsoft. Robin worked as an independent cloud consultant in recent years, collaborating with multiple cloud service providers in the U.S to offer their cloud services in the China market. Robin holds a Masters’ degree of engineering from Harbin Engineering University, he also had multiple professional certifications including Project Management Professional, ITIL V3 Foundation, Microsoft Azure and 365 Fundamental, and AWS Cloud Practitioner.

Rob Silverberg is the chief strategy and innovation officer for Dell Technologies and leads the Smart Cities focus for Dell Technologies’ state and local government team. In his role, Rob works with state and local government customers across the nation to help these agencies understand how Dell’s broad portfolio of technologies and solutions can help them achieve their goals.

Dave Sohigian is Global Chief Technology Officer (CTO) at Workday, and tasked with helping customers to get the most out of Workday. He runs the Global Office of the CTO and his team is responsible for communicating Workday’s strategy to customers and prospects, and informing the development organization about market needs to influence future innovation. Dave joined Workday 11 years ago and most recently served as CTO for EMEA. Prior to joining Workday, he held a number of development and technical consulting roles and joined the organization as Principal Enterprise Architect. Dave holds a BSc degree in Fermentation Science from the University of California, Davis.

Teri Takai is vice president of the Center for Digital Government, a national research and advisory institute on information technology policies and best practices in state and local government. She worked for Ford Motor Company for 30 years in global application development and information technology strategic planning. From Ford, she moved to EDS in support of General Motors. A long-time interest in public service led her to the government sector, first as CIO of the State of Michigan, then as CIO of the State of California and, subsequently, the CIO of the U.S. Department of Defense, the first woman appointed to this role. She then served as the CIO for Meridian Health Plan.
Teri is a member of several industry advisory boards. She has won numerous awards including Governing magazine’s Public Official of the Year, CIO Magazine’s CIO Hall of Fame, Government Technology magazine’s Top 25 Doers, Dreamers & Drivers, the Women in Defense Excellence in Leadership Award and the Department of Defense Medal for Distinguished Public Service.

Herb is a State, Local and Education Strategist. Having history in various government CIO roles he is responsible for assisting customers achieve their strategic outcomes through understanding their business issues and how policy can impact business outcomes. He has been sharing best practices learned from around the country on optimization, workforce modernization and hybrid cloud. He also is providing insight in practical implementations of AI, Smart Communities and blockchain at many government conferences. Prior to joining in 2018, VMware Herb served as the State of Wisconsin Deputy State CIO and CTO, CIO for Health and Family Services and Corrections.

Steve is the Director of Public Sector for Nintex. He works closely with government customers and partners at both the Federal and State/Local level on transforming the way they handle processes. A champion of ‘no code’ solutions and the citizen developer, he has a passion for helping customers solve real world business problems with Nintex. Prior to Nintex, Steve worked as a technology consultant servicing customers across a number of verticals including Associations and Non-Profits, Financial Services and Banking, Media and Entertainment and Commercial.

Kumar Yajamanam is the Deputy CIO for the Washington State Department of Transportation since 2019. Kumar has over 28 years of experience in implementing cutting-edge information technology solutions and organizing teams for success in both public and private sector. Kumar worked with some of the largest private sector clients such as American Express, AIG and Fidelity Investments where he was responsible for system modernization, innovation and the development of IT strategies for multi-million-dollar technology portfolios. In his role as program manager at Microsoft, Kumar was involved in rolling out Microsoft Cloud Services to some of its earliest enterprise customers. Kumar has been with Washington State since 2009 where he has focused on bringing enterprise architecture, strategic management of IT and IT governance to public sector agencies in delivering business-focused solutions.
Kumar has Masters in Information Systems Management from Harvard University, an MBA in Strategic Management and Finance from the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania and numerous certifications including Project Management Professional (PMP) and ITIL v3.