SPEAKER BIOGRAPHIES

Paul Eichamer, Director, IT Financial Planning & Analysis, CNA Insurance

Paul Eichamer, Director – Financial Planning and Analysis established a Metrics and Reporting team which leads the cleansing of IT operational data, develops executive and operational reports, and measures CNA IT’s projects, resources, financials, and data quality to support executive and operational decision making. Paul currently focuses on the intersection of Human Resources and Financial data for use in enterprise resource planning and expense allocations.

Paul is a leader offering twenty-five plus years of technology experience, who was the first project manager to deploy Wireless LANs globally; founded a Metrics, Reporting, Data and Analytics practice; implemented Application Development delivery processes across 8 global locations; first in the industry to architect and design predictive pricing integrations with Guidewire PolicyCenter; implemented CNA’s first successful common customer implementation and initiated the transformation of C-Suite discussions portraying IT as a business. Relentless change management agent able to bridge technology – business gap to achieve process improvement and return on investment. He is considered a trusted IT advisor for senior business leaders.

Paul held several business, scientific, and IT roles through his career. He previously served as CNA IT’s Director of Application Development – Planning and Management, where he led a team of Portfolio Managers and Enterprise Demand Management to develop views of needed resources across all projects, provide financial and strategic insights, and release manage deployments. Prior to CNA Insurance, Paul worked in Andersen’s (formally Arthur Andersen) Global Technology Organization, where he focused on improving technology for tax, audit, and consulting teams. Paul began his career commercializing technologies from the US Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory.

Paul earned a Master of Science in Operations and Technology Management from the Illinois Institute of Technology, a Bachelor of Engineering Science and Mechanics from the Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech), a PMP, Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe), and a green belt.

Kent Graziano, Chief Technical Evangelist, Snowflake

Snowflake Chief Technical Evangelist Kent Graziano is an internationally recognized expert on agile data warehousing and cloud analytics. He is an award-winning author, speaker, and trainer in the areas of data modeling, data architecture, and data warehousing. He also is an Oracle ACE Director—Alumni; a member of the Oaktable network; a certified Data Vault Master and Data Vault 2.0 Practitioner; an expert data modeler; and a data warehouse architect with more than 30 years of experience, including two decades focused on data warehousing and business intelligence in multiple industries. Follow him on Twitter or on his blog, The Data Warrior.

Karthik Kandamuri, Enterprise Architecture, AbbVie

Karthik Kandamuri works for Corporate IT group at AbbVie, providing thought leadership in information management and strategy, impacting entire organization. Over the years, Karthik led multiple initiatives covering Master Data, Internet enabled B2B/B2C strategy, Cloud, Big Data, Information/Data Catalogs. Currently he is leading initiatives in Digital Transformation and Artificial Intelligence area.

Sue Laine, VP of Strategic Technologies, ASG Technologies

Sue is the chief evangelist and VP of Strategic Technologies for ASG’s Data Intelligence solution. A thought leader in the application of technology and business process to solve real business problems, Sue has over 18 years’ experience working with metadata on the buy side as a customers and the sell side as a vendor, including implementation, showcasing, and program support. She has worked to structure and drive enterprise metadata/data governance programs. Additionally, Sue has extensive support experience to sustain these initiatives within an organization. She has supported a wide range of clients, including financial, insurance, healthcare, manufacturing and e-Commerce with a general need to provide data-driven business practices. Sue is responsible for launching and guiding ASG’s Enterprise Data Intelligence solution’s superior Metadata/Data Governance technology in fresh, modern offerings that deliver excellent value for today’s challenging business demands.

Sue is a frequent speaker at industry events regarding enterprise metadata management, data lineage, data governance and engaging training for end users and partners.

Recent topics include:

• Data Governance, Data Lineage and Data Quality Policies and Processes to meet Existing and Incoming Regulatory Reporting Requirements
• Aligning with the Business and Advancing a Data Management Strategy
• Mastering Business Metadata and Providing Data Lineage: Cross Functional
• Perspective on the Data Management Journey
• Leveraging the Investments in Data Management to Drive Value beyond Reporting: Walk Before You Walk Before You Run, Data Governance Essentials
• The Art of Data Traceability and Data Lineage

Edward Marchewka, Director IT/CIO, Gift of Hope Organ & Tissue Donor Network

Edward Marchewka is the Director of Information Technology for Gift of Hope Organ & Tissue Donor Network. In his role, Edward is responsible for maintaining and securing the infrastructure for 24/7/365 operations, supporting the IT customer environment, and delivering and supporting the enterprise applications that run Gift of Hope. His teams work with Gift of Hope’s internal and external customers to deliver high quality information and technology services. Edward is also the Founder and Creator of CHICAGO Metrics™, a platform to a program to help manage your company’s key IT and Information Security risks enabling you to have a better conversation with business leadership in terms that they understand.

Tyler Roesler, Business Intelligence Analyst, Gift of Hope Organ & Tissue Donor Network

Tyler Roesler is the Business Intelligence Analyst for Gift of Hope Organ & Tissue Donor Network. In this role, Tyler administers and develops Gift of Hope’s data visualization and analysis tool (Qlik Sense), performs regular data collection and analysis for strategic planning, and designs predictive models for improving operational efficiency. Tyler also assists in process design and project implementation in addition to generally improving data literacy across Gift of Hope. Prior to his work with Gift of Hope, Tyler was completing his BS in Economics from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. He has recently finished a Certificate in Nonprofit Management from the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University and is actively pursuing a Masters of Accountancy from Northern Illinois University.

Paige Roberts, Open Source Relations Manager, Vertica

In 23 years in the data management industry, I’ve worked as an engineer, a trainer, a support technician, a technical writer, a marketer, a product manager, and a consultant. I’ve built data engineering pipelines and architectures, documented and tested open source analytics implementations, spun up Hadoop clusters, picked the brains of stars in data analytics and engineering, worked with a lot of different industries, and questioned a lot of assumptions.

Now, I promote understanding of Vertica, distributed data processing, open source, high scale data engineering, and how the analytics revolution is changing the world.

Steve Shelton, RSM, Vertica

Steve Shelton has over 15 years of IT sales experience helping organizations protect their people, processes and data. Steve brings a variety of knowledge to his customers, which he developed from his tenures at CDW, Verizon, Symantec, RSA and Proofpoint. He believes the best working relationships come out of integrity, trust and care. Steve’s main goal is to make the lives of those around him better in any way he can.

Steve has a variety of interests outside of work, including Tai Chi, yoga, nutrition, parent coaching and staring at goats.