STRATEGIC BRIEFINGS AND SPEAKERS

Thursday, September 24
10:00–10:20 am
The Road to Resiliency: Intelligent Enterprises and the Year to Come
Stephanie Nashawaty, Chief Customer Innovation Officer for North America SAP
Resilience is defined as the capacity to recover quickly from difficulties or to even emerge stronger from challenging times, but when it comes to businesses, it’s rarely that simple.
For an enterprise to have true resilience, it must always focus on customer and employee experiences. That entails having the right information and analysis immediately accessible to make decisions in times of change, both good and bad, to impact those experiences. When organizations have the ability to listen to both the people and the data, they break down organizational silos and can truly become Intelligent Enterprises.
In this session, SAP's Chief Customer Innovation Officer for North America, Stephanie Nashawaty, will share the insights her organization has gleaned from helping companies along the road to recovery, including industry trends with broad reaching implications and the critical role that data and technology play in building resiliency.
About Stephanie »
Stephanie is an innovative thought-leader with a breadth of experience across a multitude of industries and expertise in both back and front-office solutions. As the Chief Customer Innovation Officer, Stephanie’s team is responsible for delivering a seamless, integrated experience focused on industry expertise, solution engineering and advisory services dedicated to business value realization, with the customer at the epicenter of everything she does.
Stephanie’s career at SAP began in 2016 as Chief Strategist where she’s focused on some of our most significant accounts, including Amazon/AWS, Disney and Lockheed Martin. In April 2019, she was promoted to lead the Strategic Business Development team. She joined SAP from Oracle where she was group vice president of Customer Experience Sales. Prior to Oracle, Stephanie ran Global Sales for IBM’s marketing solutions, a team that was created after their acquisition of Unica Corporation. In this role, she led and integrated the global sales organizations of Unica, Coremetrics, DemandTec and Tealeaf into a single IBM business unit with yearly revenues in excess of $450M. Stephanie also held executive roles at PTC and Pegasystems.
Stephanie is passionate about what’s new and what’s next in tech and serves as an advisor to the Board for a Boston-based AI start-up in the customer experience space, Cogito Corporation. She holds a bachelor’s degree in political science from the University of Vermont, and a Master of Liberal Arts degree from Stanford University. She resides outside of Boston, Massachusetts with her husband, John and her two daughters, Lauren (22) and Daniela (19).

Thursday, September 24
10:00–10:20 am
From Chaos to Clarity: Gaining Visibility and Control in Your Distributed Workforce
Egon Rinderer, Global Vice President of Technology and Federal Chief Technology Officer, Tanium
2020 has quickly forced the way organizations now work - rapidly and radically transforming the state of IT. Distributed workforces revealed a hard truth: many organizations have critical visibility gaps and are operating from a lower maturity level in their endpoint security and response capabilities that are challenging even the most secure enterprises.
A recent survey revealed that: - 90% of CXOs reported an increase in cyberattacks since the world stayed home.
- 47% of IT leaders plan to improve patch processes
- The #1 concern among IT leaders is identifying remote endpoints
So, how do you prepare for what lies ahead when you’re in the midst of playing catch-up?
To address this transformation, organizations up-ended their traditional IT infrastructure and adopted decentralized networks, cloud-based services and widespread usage of employees’ personal devices.
During Tanium’s session, Egon will share use cases around gaining visibility and control in a distributed workforce operating environment.
About Egon »
With 30 years of Federal and private sector industry experience, Egon currently leads Tanium’s technology efforts as Global VP of Technology as well Chief Technology Officer of Tanium Federal. Joining Tanium at a time when the company numbered fewer than 20 employees, he has held roles ranging from Technical Account Manager to Federal Pod Lead to global Vice President of the global TAM organization. Prior to joining Tanium, Egon was with Intel Corporation and served throughout the US military and intelligence community in the United States and abroad in an operational capacity.

Thursday, September 24
10:00–10:20 am
Simplified Automation Architecture for Rapid IT Project and Service Delivery
Tim Curless, Chief Architect – DevOps AHEAD
In many enterprises, project sprawl, hand-off issues and a lack of visibility can create delays lasting 20, 30 or even 40 days to get an environment ready to launch/develop and deliver essential IT software and services. And when teams try to eliminate these roadblocks, they often have to do so within silos.
AHEAD’s Automation Hub empowers teams with a modern, simplified automation architecture that allows them to manage services, release software efficiently and ultimately serve internal audiences more effectively through improved project visibility. It does this across placement areas including IoT, the edge, on-premise, public cloud, SaaS and beyond.
Learn how with a focus on platforms as a foundation, the automation hub can connect your various locations to new technologies, APIs and best practice tactics, always with a focus towards applications and data.
About Tim »
At AHEAD, Tim works on the cloud team, where he focuses on DevOps and Automation. With a passion for solving complex problems, Tim helps clients build transformative solutions that drive real business value. Specifically, Tim takes a consensus building approach with business leaders, develops and IT operations to change the way applications are created, maintained and deployed. The end result is a solution that increases speed to deliver new features to customers, and decreased complexity for operations staff.

Thursday, September 24
10:00–10:20 am
Five Cost Saving Ideas for Contact Centers
Jake Beyer, Director of Customer Care EDCi
Amazon and Apple have always set the bar high for customer service centers. This year’s 2020 coronavirus pandemic has turned the tables for many businesses, contact centers included. Forward-looking contact centers, both global and local, are using this pandemic as an opportunity to improve customer service.
In this briefing, discussion of customer expectations, cost reduction, technology and human interaction are at the forefront. This briefing also includes real-time examples from local customer service centers on how they’re handling business during these unprecedented times.
About Jake »
Jake Beyer brings more than 15 years of customer service and contact center experience to EDCi where he serves as the Director of Customer Care. Jake and his team focus on helping organizations optimize their contact center software and processes. This seamless integration allows for maximum efficiency. EDCi’s numerous innovation and growth awards are a testament to the unique approach that EDCi has used to solve business problems using process and technology. Jake is passionate about technology and invests a great deal of time into keeping his skills current. From complex contact center integrations to optimization and consulting, he understands the vital task of aligning IT with the strategic goals of the business.

Thursday, September 24
10:00–10:20 am
Reset: Managing Risk and Resiliency in Your Supply Chain
Bill Byrkit, Principal WMEP
As a result of the global pandemic, 75% of U.S. businesses have reported supply chain disruptions. This has caused production shutdowns, temporary or permanent business shutdowns, shortfalls, outages and an increased reliance on a remote workforce to stabilize their supply chain. The ability to manage supply chain uncertainty and risk is more critical than ever. New realities call for increased supplier transparency, greater collaboration and an ability to pivot, while continuously improving skills and processes in procurement and supply chain. 93% of the global supply chain leaders are planning to increase their resilience in the next 12 months.
In this timely webinar, join supply chain, sourcing leader William Byrkit as he shares how to:
- Use key indicators to mitigate and manage the Supply Chain Risk
- Navigate through the disruption focusing on “run the business” activities
- Provide the most immediate impact on the end-to-end supply chain stabilization
About Bill »
Bill has more than 23 years of extensive experience in Strategic Sourcing and Supply Chain Management, with a strong track record of Supply Chain performance improvement in global businesses. He has worked internationally with global leaders in Consumer Packaging Goods, Off Road OEM, Tier 1 Auto and Building products, always focused on collaboratively developing and aligning Global Strategic Sourcing and Supply Chain effective teams and processes.

Friday, September 25
9:30–9:50 am
Contact Center Digitalization For the Pandemic Era and Beyond
Sam Hahn, Technology Evangelist eGain
COVID-19 has changed everything. Consumers are still very wary of exposure to the virus and want to get more things done digitally. While this had always been the case with millennials and Gen Z, COVID-19 has forced older demographics, who are even more concerned about virus exposure, to go digital, when it comes to interacting with businesses. The same old limited digital service capabilities do not cut it in this new environment.
What are the new digital requirements for contact centers? How are leading companies leveraging digital to scale customer service cost-effectively? Learn the answers to these questions and more in this session.
About Sam »
Sam Hahn is a Technology Evangelist at eGain, with multiple patents under his belt and years of experience holding engineering leadership positions. Currently, he leads a senior team that explores new channels, devices, interaction modes and business models.

Friday, September 25
9:30–9:50 am

Step-By-Step to Award Winning AI-Powered CX
Tiffany Anderson, Director CX Process/Initiatives
Purchasing Power and Brian Morin, CMO,
SmartAction
Hear from a multi-billion dollar eCommerce retailer who recently won “Excellence in Self-Service” from Frost & Sullivan as well as the Stevie Award for “Best Return on Customer Service Investment” about their step-by-step journey with AI-powered virtual agents from “Press 1” to “How Can I Help You Today?” Also joining is SmartAction who operates conversational AI for more than 100 brands including some of the most iconic brands in the world.
Key takeaways for attendees of this session will include:
- Understand the complexities to a great conversational AI experience
- How to mitigate risk to the CX and bottom line for a successful rollout
- Insights to typical pitfalls that can be easily avoided
About Tiffany and Brian »
Tiffany Anderson has led customer service technology initiatives at Toys R Us and more recently at Purchasing Power to streamline processes while improving the customer experience. Her recent conversational AI implementation resulted in a 25% deflection of call volume, 1-month ROI and 17% improvement in NPS.
Brian Morin is the head of marketing for SmartAction where their obsession with creating frictionless customer experiences with conversational AI has led to its standing as the top-rated Virtual Customer Assistant solution on Gartner Peer Insight as rated by customer reviews. SmartAction operates AI-powered Virtual Agents over voice and chat for 100+ brands including AAA, Office Depot, Hyundai, ADT, DSW, Choice Hotels, Penske, Siemens and more.

Friday, September 25
9:30–9:50 am

Extensibility Is Key: Snap-on + Zendesk on Unlocking the Right Tools To Find the Perfect Fit
Mike Mathison, Commercial Account Executive, Zendesk and Jason McCann, IT Support Supervisor, Snap-on
Hear how Snap-on, the #1 professional tool brand in the world is utilizing the Zendesk tools to stay on the forefront of the ever-evolving customer experience.
When Snap-on initially implemented Zendesk as their customer service software, the team was on legacy systems, needing to get off and consolidate everything into one place quickly in order to ensure they could ramp up agents for faster time to value. At the same time, there was confusion amongst the support agents - where should they be submitting tickets in order to ensure they were being escalated appropriately? In this briefing, you’ll hear how Jason built custom integration apps so that agents could see key data need to perform escalations. Hear about how they extended Zendesk even further, building custom queueboards, round robin, and UPS tracking apps to eliminate complexity and allow agents to work harmoniously without a breakdown in communications.
Key takeaways from this session include:
- The power in having the freedom to build something custom if the right tools don’t already exist
- How to begin the process of building a custom app to connect to other internal systems
- How to build the best customer experiences, starting with your own internal teams
About Mike and Jason »
Mike Mathison is a CX enthusiast who believes customer experience is at the heart of everything you do. His diverse background includes time working for Healthcare, Education, Logistics, and SaaS companies. He has consulted with C-suite executives ranging from small businesses to Fortune 500 companies throughout North America. Currently, Mike resides in Madison working as an Account Executive for Zendesk, a service-first CRM company that builds software designed to improve customer relationships.
Jason McCann is a seasoned IT Support Supervisor with 10+ years of technology implementation and solutions management experience in various sectors. Recognized for demonstrating a natural aptitude for systems analysis, as well as for software development and hardware support. Currently, Jason is the Supervisor of IT Support with Snap-On and under his leadership has administered the design, deployment, and maintenance of the Support Suite while migrating from multiple products into an omni-channel solution containing a self-service knowledge base, chat, email, phone, and text.

Friday, September 25
9:30–9:50 am
Rise of the Data Cloud
Kent Graziano, Chief Technical Evangelist
Snowflake
Every company in the world struggles with how to take the vast quantities of data and turn it into insight, quickly. Despite massive investments in technology and people, and consensus that data is a company’s key strategic asset, it’s something that even the world’s most innovative companies have not solved. The last couple decades have seen a massive migration to the cloud. Companies have made large strides in efficiently storing and processing massive amounts of data thanks to the emergence of the infrastructure clouds. But even with these innovations, companies continue to struggle with their old nemesis – data silos. How do we solve that problem? How can we make it easier for everyone to get seamless, governed access to all the data they need?
Enter the Data Cloud - a new cloud that creates frictionless but governed access to the world’s data. This talk will introduce you to the Data Cloud, how it works, and the problems it solves for companies across the globe and across industries.
About Kent »
Kent Graziano (AKA The Data Warrior), is the Chief Technical Evangelist for Snowflake and an award winning author, speaker and trainer, in the areas of data modeling, data architecture, and data warehousing. He is an Oracle ACE Director (Alumni), Knight of the OakTable Network, a certified Data Vault Master and Data Vault 2.0 Practitioner (CDVP2), and expert solution architect with over 30 years of experience, including more than 25 years designing data warehousing and analytics solutions (in multiple industries). He is an internationally recognized expert in Cloud and Agile Data Warehousing. Kent has developed and led many successful software and data warehouse implementation teams, including multiple agile DW/BI teams. He has written numerous articles, authored three Kindle books, co-authored four books (including the 1st Edition of "The Data Model Resource Book"), and has given hundreds of presentations, nationally and internationally. He was a co-author on the first book on Data Vault, and the technical editor for "Super Charge Your Data Warehouse". In 2014, he was voted one of the best presenters at OUGF14 in Helsinki, Finland.

Friday, September 25
9:30–9:50 am
Guarding Healthcare Networks Against Encrypted Threats
Martyn Crew, Director, Solutions Marketing
Gigamon
The old cliché “you can’t protect against what you can’t see” holds as true for cybersecurity as for physical security. That’s why
Gigamon designed the Gigamon Visibility and Analytics Fabric from the ground up to ensure that organizations’ InfoSec and SecOps teams have full visibility and access to the information-in-motion on their physical, virtual and cloud networks. In this
session, Martyn will discuss how Gigamon’s approach to visibility and SSL/TLS decryption are critical to guarding against encrypted threats.
About Martyn »
Martyn Crew is Gigamon’s Director of Solutions Marketing. In this role he works with Gigamon customers in the Federal, Higher Education, Healthcare and Financial Services markets to understand their needs and ensure that Gigamon presents its solution in a way that is relevant to these markets and their needs. Martyn brings over 30 years of experience in the applications and infrastructure market and is an experienced presenter, panelist and writer.
|
CONFERENCE APP
Download the UWEBC Annual Conference app
for all of the details you need to know to prepare for the day, including personalizing your own agenda with the
strategic briefing sessions that you don't want to miss.
The CONFERENCE At a Glance
Your two-day Business Best Practices & Emerging Technologies Conference
virtual experience is packed with content:
Thursday, September 24 |
8:30-9:00 am |
Registration and Networking |
9:00-10:00 am |
Opening Session and Keynote |
10:00-10:35 am |
Networking &
Strategic Briefings |
(Strategic Briefings are from
10:00 to
10:20 am) |
10:35 am -12:30 pm |
Track Sessions |
12:30-3:00 pm |
Networking & Master Classes |
(Master Classes are from 1:00-3:00 pm) |
Friday, September 25 |
8:30-9:00 am |
Registration and Networking |
9:00-9:30 am |
Opening Session |
9:30-10:05 am |
Networking &
Strategic Briefings |
(Strategic Briefings are from
9:30 to
9:50 am) |
10:05-11:15 am |
Track Sessions |
11:15 am-12:00 pm |
Closing Session and Keynote |
|