Neal Puff has served as CIO of Yuma County, AZ since 2005 and has over twenty years experience leading technical groups in high-tech manufacturing, consumer electronics and big-five accounting industries.  Yuma county has been ranked in the top ten counties in the nation by the Center for Digital Government's annual Digital Counties Survey since 2006, and received a Best of the Web award in 2008.  Puff is the author of the award winning book, "Security for People and Computers", and holds current CISSP, GSEC, PMP and CPM certifications, along with an undergraduate degree from Purdue University and an MBA from Indiana Wesleyan University.

Virtualization is much more than just packing several servers onto one physical piece of hardware. To fully capitalize on the benefits of virtualization requires a shift in thinking, but it can pay big rewards.

Yuma County has been using various forms of virtualization in production environments for over three years. In this session you will hear about what things worked, as well as some of the potential problems you may encounter while virtualizing.

Matthew McGraw is a Territory Manager for APC by Schneider Electric.

Matthew has been with American Power Conversion for 10 years. For the past 7 years his primary focus has been with the education and training of the channel and engineering community on APC’s solutions and design.

Matthew is a frequent speaker at various industry conferences on topics such as physical infrastructure of information technology and data center design.

Matthew holds a Bachelor of Science degree from the University of Rhode Island   

We've all been there. The latest physical change to your data center is the straw that breaks the camel's back! Now you are faced with a HUGE and costly change as a result of haphazard and unplanned growth. IT management is often faced with a legacy data center that needs to be rethought. In the past this meant custom crafting a new data center plan which would take many, many months and huge costs to implement. Well, with the introduction of APC's Infrastruxure, that is no longer the case. This solution addresses the realities you face. Costs are very low compared to the legacy methods of data center build outs. In addition, this product has a far shorter design and implementation timeframe and can be modularly expanded so the future is truly "built in". The Infrastruxure solution provides the time and costs sensitive solution to the problems you face with legacy data center design. You will learn where and how to get answers about Data Center Physical InfraStruXure capital costs and operating costs for ROI and payback analysis. Learn strategies on how to effectively increase the life of your outdated data center. Learn how to greatly reduce anxiety that arises as the unknown virtualization project is rolled out. We will discuss tools and solutions for you to use in your data center upgrade project when you are Out of date, Out of space or Out of money.

Coming Soon...

Over the last decade, organizations have collectively spend billions of dollars protecting their IT infrastructure from outside intruders and malicious code. While this protection is certainly a necessity, it is insufficient in addressing one of the most compelling security risks organizations face today: the loss of sensitive data. In reality, the data that organizations create and communicate across their networks and systems is far more valuable than the infrastructure assets themselves.

Jeff Thomas is the manager of a West Coast team of VMware specialists for EMC Corporation based in Los Angeles, CA. With more than 12 years of experience in information technology, Jeff has developed a breadth experience in systems and database administration, network and physical security, and architecture specializing in Microsoft, Oracle, Linux, and VMware technologies.  Jeff has worked in IP storage for over 5 years. In the last few years, Jeff has been evangelizing the use of VMware and iSCSI technologies to customers and at industry related events.  He can be deeply technical as well as being able to articulate the business justification behind technology projects.  Previously, he ran Data Center Operations for companies in the Denver, Colorado area.

Jeff is a VMware Certified Professional.  He has a B.S. in Geology from the University of New Hampshire where he supported server environments and networks for an international group of scientists on the summit of the Greenland Ice Sheet and in Antarctica.

15 years IT experience from a diverse arena.  Initially as an Information Systems Manager, my projects included LAN and client server implementations.  Later I supported a nationwide distributor for presales in the growing x86 client server platforms.  As many of us did for survival in the wake of the dot com compression in the late nineties, I became proficient in many complementary practices.  I helped many customers with IT success when their Linux and Windows systems worked together on dissimilar hardware vendors. Virtualization provided a viable solution in many cases.  As a Technical Consultant, I was responsible for the design, validation and implementation of compliance, archive and resilient storage systems.  Virtualization soon became an essential part of every solution.  With the support of platform vendors, customers and application developers' world wide VMware established x86 x64 virtualization as a datacenter platform.  I joined VMware in early 2008 with responsibilities for presales design, validation and proof of concept delivery.  My territory includes New Mexico and Arizona.

Join this session and learn about infrastructure technologies purpose built for the virtual datacenter and the private cloud. You will discover new innovations in ultra-scalable, and ultra-flexible storage technologies, as well as management and data protection products that enhance your vSphere environment through vStorage and vCenter integrations. Learn about key storage technologies that work with, are complementary to, and integrated directly with vSphere that include various capacity optimization technologies such as de-duplication. Discover also various methods and techniques for managing the entire virtual data center and hear about future technologies developed to move assets in and out of the cloud, such as best practices for setting up VMotion domains over long distances using existing hardware technology and VMware vSphere product.

Jonathan Harber has 29 years in Information Technology, Application Development and Business Operations, with 25 of this in senior management.

He is currently CIO & Vice President, Information Technology for Blood Systems, Inc. in Scottsdale AZ.  Blood Systems is the second largest transfusion medicine organization in the US and is recognized as the global leader in quality, process and technology.

He is the 2009 Arizona Technology Council CIO of the year and holds positions on the Americas Blood Centers (ABC) Information Systems Committee, and currently serves as Chairman of the ABC Special Interest Group for the Health Level Seven (HL7) International Transfusion Messaging Standard.

He has also held positions as:

• Senior Vice President of Global Operations for eFunds Corporation
• Vice President, Chief Information Officer, and Chief Security Officer for Corporate Systems, Inc.
• President and Managing Partner of CIO/CTO Solutions
• Senior Vice President and Chief Technology Officer at FundsXpress Financial Network
• Director of Technology Operations for Foundation Health Systems
• Vice President for Value Added Resellers and Internet Service Providers at WinStar Communications
• Senior Telecommunications Analyst at NORAND Corporation

Jonathan also served 11 years in the United States Marine Corps where he held positions as a Scout, Sniper, Data Systems Officer, Communications Officer, Intelligence Officer and Information Warfare Officer.  In his final tour in the Marines he was responsible for Command, Control, Computers, Communications, and Information Warfare for the military Counterdrug effort in Latin America.

He has a Bachelor of Science in Physical Science from the United States Naval Academy and an MBA at West Texas A&M University with a concentration on Finance and Economics.

Project governance is the pivot point to aligning all support entities with strategic business goals. When the company places priority on and works on projects that are agreed upon by all the key business owners and stakeholders, alignment is automatic. This discussion will describe how Blood Systems built and implemented its Prioritized Project Portfolio management process, how projects are scored according their contribution to strategic company goals, how the governance board works, and how all organizations within the company responsible for providing resources to work on those projects align and balance their resources against the approved project list, and thus, the company’s strategic goals.

Mr. Phillips has 16 years of experience in the Enterprise Content Management industry with the last 5 years focused exclusively on Document & Data Capture at Kofax, Inc. Most recently, Mr. Phillips was responsible for providing one of the world's largest security services firms with an enterprise-wide capture solution which automates paper-based business processes. As Account Executive for the Rocky Mountain Region, he works with government, commercial, healthcare and other customers in bringing Kofax Capture technology solutions to the market. He has shared his wealth of experience and information at numerous industry events throughout the Western region.

Organizations have experienced major changes during the past year. Companies, agencies and institutions are seeking new ways to improve risk management, increase efficiency and ensure compliance while reducing costs throughout the organization.

If you are looking to improve document-driven business processes in your organization, join us at this informative breakout session, featuring Loren Phillips, Account Executive, of Kofax. This one-hour presentation will demonstrate how you can dramatically improve the efficiency of many core document and data-centric processes across departments. With Kofax you can:

• Capture documents at any location

• Transform any document type

• Deliver documents to any channel

The session will also focus on how to accelerate customer-facing and back-office processes and significantly reduce operational costs. Kofax will also discuss methods to help you identify which processes can offer the most improvement and maximize your return on investment.

Touchstone Behavioral Health is a recognized leader in providing positive outcome, evidence-based, behavioral health services to youth and their families throughout Arizona. For the past three years, Steve Porter has been an instrument of change as the agency equipped it’s workforce with mobility tools and adopted a SaaS solution for Electronic Medical Records. Touchstone is continuing their evolution, using the occasion of merging two physical locations to rebuild their infrastructure, leveraging the best of Unified Communications and virtualization technologies to design a model for the next generation of social service providers. Mr. Porter began his IT career as a commerce developer, working on the first version of SkyMall.com. He advanced his skills through the dot-com bubble, working with companies providing innovative solutions for consumer-focused catalogs, the legal industry, and golf course equipment. Prior to moving into Information Technology, Steve worked in broadcasting, producing live NASCAR events and motorsports news programming for a national audience.

Dr. Colleen Carmean serves as Digital Knowledge Architect at Arizona State University. Her work lies in research and design of integrated knowledge systems, including environments for e-learning and enterprise social media. She teaches critical thinking and applied computing, and is currently doing research on affordance of emerging technologies.

Nationally, Dr. Carmean is a 2002 EDUCAUSE NLII Fellow, a 2004 Frye Fellow and has been a 2006-2008 Arizona Wakonse Teaching Fellow.

Susan A. Silberisen is much more than a leading edge technologist and change agent.  As a strategic business executive, she has an intuitive approach to driving business efficiencies, growth and competitive core competencies through technology innovation.
During a 24-year career that progressed rapidly from database developer to executive level technologist and business entrepreneur, Ms. Silberisen enjoyed success building and managing world-class IT solutions, operations, enterprise projects, and teams that create significant revenue growth, productivity, service delivery, operational efficiencies, and client satisfaction.
Ms. Silberisen’s most recent role as Chief Information Officer for the State of Arizona Department of Revenue highlights her value as a senior executive in many ways. Her success proves her ability to handle high levels of executive authority with management scope including 20+million annual budget, large-scale enterprise projects that support the processing, collection and management of 13 billion in State assets, and technology operations supporting 24/7/365 tax collection for the State of Arizona.  As a stand-out achievement, Ms. Silberisen led the large-scale IT migration of a 30 year legacy system to an integrated, browser-based ERP solution and distributed computing environment  simultaneously managing the talent management and infrastructure upgrade necessary to support the new solutions. Through these and other strategic initiatives, she delivered massive efficiencies and return on investment, expanded e-services to the Arizona tax base, 2-fold decreased existing maintenance costs, and introduced a sustainable IT governance process to the State.
Prior to the AZ Department of Revenue role, Ms. Silberisen delivered similar results as Chief Information Security Officer for First National Bank of Arizona (FNBA). Most notably, she authored an enterprise-wide information security assessment and regulatory posture approach and policies to address gaps in controls. At the presentation of the 18-month plan for the securing of the financial institution, she was granted 4 million in funding to build the department and solutions from the ground-up.  This program development effort had enterprise-wide impact, assuring compliance with regulatory agencies. Change initiatives instituted the following corporate processes:

• IT Change Management
• Employee Information Security Awareness
• Software Development Lifecycle
• Enterprise List Management
• Defense in Depth
• Network Security Monitoring
• Physical Access Controls
• Identity Management
• Vendor Management
• IT Testing Policy, Procedures, and Environments
• Telecommuting Policy and VPN Technology
• Enterprise Application Security Architecture

Ms. Silberisen’s  success with FNBA was founded on earlier roles as Asst. Chief Information Officer at Northern Arizona University (NAU) and Chief Executive Officer at New Perspective Software, Inc.  She served as change leader to NAU to build a Project Management Office and ensure the successful three year implementation of PeopleSoft Student Administration and HR/Payroll.  As CEO of New Perspective Software, Inc., Ms. Silberisen was responsible for attaining venture capital funding of 4 million to grow the .dot com era software firm to over 8 million in total sales within 2 years of incorporation.
As a recognized industry thought leader, she has frequently been invited to attend such events as Mac/PCWorld’s Innovation Series and is a member of the Women in Leadership and the National Association of Technology Executives.

As Vice President of First Credit Union, Catherine is responsible for managing the entire Information Technology.

Catherine started her career after graduating in Computer Science in a small company in Palo Alto associated with Stanford where they rented time from the university. She started as Unix Sys. Admin. Catherine worked over twenty years in Silicon Valley at various companies in steady progressive IT management roles. After her recent move to Arizona she mostly focuses on Disaster recovery and Business Continuity by volunteering in Arizona First Coalition, Green Initiatives, and state exercises in her spare time.

Catheriner Radndo holds a Bachelor of Computer Science (Cum Laude) from Central State University of Oklahoma.

Kevin Sauer has over 25 years of global experience working in several different industries with responsibilities across the US, Asia, Mexico, and Europe.  During this time he has been responsible for areas including Information Technology, Engineering, Quality Assurance, HSE (Health, Safety & Environment) and other areas within Operations.  His diversified background and international experience has enabled him to better understand the needs of organizations and lead cross-functional teams to continuously improve processes that help drive revenue.

Mr. Sauer currently sits on two non-profit Board of Directors and is the President of the AZ Chapter of SIM.  Previously he was the Vice President, Chief Information Officer for Merchants Information Solutions and before that was the Corporate Vice President of Information Technology for Suntron Corporation.

Mr. Sauer holds a BS degree in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Texas at Arlington.

While working with Dale Dauten as Marketing Director for The Innovators' Lab, we focused on providing creativity leadership training. When leaders in various business industries would come to us looking for innovative solutions to customer problems, we helped in providing ways to re-train the brain. With fun techniques and creative locations, we've been able to provide new possibilities to members from NASA, CAT, Citibank, Kraft Foods, Wells Fargo and a variety of other groups. Currently we are doing internal Lab sessions and coaching for groups looking to be innovative in their leadership roles.

The Governing Body Members have chosen the topic of "Re-thinking IT" as the conference theme. We have all cut costs and tried to be as frugal as possible however for many this still is not enough. It is time to dig deep and explore a whole new approach to the IT process and see true innovation come to life. At this discussion we intend to give you ideas that will ignite you to help save your company and serve as a chance to collaborate with panel members and other attendees on this throughout the year.

Kimberly Samuelson joined Laserfiche in 2001 as a Regional Manager. Since then she has served the company in several roles including Creative Director and Director of Government Marketing. Her ability to create and deliver compelling content has been instrumental in engaging and educating users and prospects in the Public Sector.

It’s certainly not news that governments are under increased pressure to ensure operations are responsive to the needs of their constituency-without increasing head count or spending. Citizen expectation of service has been raised thru interactions with the private sector. He sees no reason why he shouldn’t be able to work with his municipality in the same way he does with Amazon. Governments are also being asked to work independently and interdependently. It’s not uncommon for municipalities to contract their law enforcement services to the county sheriff. The fuel that powers these efforts is information. The engine that manages this information is the technology department. Join us for this highly interactive session where we will discuss a dynamic yet controlled approach to Information Governance.

Assistant Ombudsman for Public Access. Liz joined the Office of the Arizona Ombudsman –Citizens’ Aide in February 2007, after serving three years as an Arizona Assistant Attorney General in the Civil Division and member of the Open Meeting Law Enforcement Team. Prior to working at the Office of the Arizona Attorney General, Liz spent two years working with the Arizona Department of Revenue as a Tax Analyst and Tax Counsel. She has a bachelor’s degree from Northern Arizona University, a law degree from Gonzaga University School of Law, and is licensed to practice law in Arizona. Liz also completed mediation training through Interaction Management Associates and investigator training through the Council on Licensure, Enforcement and Regulation. She is an active member of the Arizona State Bar Association, the United States Ombudsman Association, and the American Bar Association (ABA), currently serving as Vice-Chair of the ABA’s Administrative Law and Regulatory Section’s Ombuds Committee.

Records Management Specialist with the Records Management Division of the Arizona State Library, Archives and Public Records (ASLAPR), since July 2008. He serves as the primary contact for Retention Schedules and Imaging Requests, as well as providing Records Management training around the State. Prior to working with the ASLAPR, he was the Maricopa County Records Manager for four years, and has enjoyed working in the Records Management profession for 17 years. He graduated from Arizona State University in 1986, with a Bachelor’s Degree in History, and has been fascinated by history and records from an early age. His interest in records grew into a deep respect for Records Management during three years of teaching English for a University in Northeastern China (1988 – 1991). Talking with the families of his University students about book burnings, purges and rewrites of historical records, and experiencing a Nation’s leadership focused on the future only - at the expense of the past, made him deeply aware of the importance of preserving our records and history for those who will come after us.

Matt Morales was appointed to his current position in late April by Director and State CIO, Chad Kirkpatrick in April. Matt comes to the state government world a veteran of both the private sector as an IT consultant and the non-profit sector as a CIO of a major non-profit. As of late Matt has taken the lead as Arizona state government social networking guru. His advocacy has brought the tools of Social Networking and presence of emerging web technologies to places where they have not been utilized before. His work at GITA as the Director of Communications gives him the opportunity to work with the public relations aspect of the states technology teams and bring new levels of interaction between citizens and state agencies.

We're familiar with Twitter, MySpace, Facebook, blogs and other social networking opportunities, and many of us are using them in ways that blur the lines between public, business and private. What are our responsibilities for information we create or use from these sites and tools? Find out exactly what you are required to do from the following perspectives: Public Records Management, Open Meeting Laws and IT – and some best practices for doing so.