Featured Speaker(s)

Denise Cox, Vice President, Americas CX Centers Cisco

Denise Cox is vice president of Cisco Customer Experience Centers in the Americas. She leads an organization of 3,000+ people who deliver effortless support, architecture, and implementation services throughout the region. Prior to this, Denise was a vice president in Cisco Technical Services, where her team helped customers and partners consume technology, mitigate risk, and transform their operations.

With more than twenty years as a services and support executive, Denise is passionate about customer success. She sees services as a differentiator that can drive product sales and customer loyalty. Denise specializes in a proactive and preemptive approach that helps customers avoid downtime.

Before joining Cisco in 2016, Denise spent more than a decade at NetApp, where she led the team responsible for personalized, high-touch consulting, delivery, and management services. Under her leadership, NetApp redesigned its support model to improve efficiency and customer satisfaction, even as the install base grew more than twenty percent per year.

A First North Carolina Leadership board member, Denise is a frequent speaker at Women in Technology events, including Grace Hopper, Simmons Leadership Conference, and Watermark. She has a Master of Science in Information Technology and a Bachelor of Arts in Communication. Denise and her family live in North Carolina.

Ruth Sleeter, Executive Director, Business Transformation and IT - Data Center Group, Lenovo

Ruth leads Business Transformation and IT for Lenovo's Data Center Group (DCG). Previous to Lenovo, she was the CIO of the Business Inrelligence & Global Head of Shared Applications for Deutsche Bank, and spent eight years at NetApp where she held a number of engineering and sales leadership roles. Ruth holds a degree in Computer Science from Columbia University. Ruth is an avid endurance athlete, swim coach for the Special Olympics, and loves mentoring and building engineering cultures which embrace diversity.

Kristi Dent is the Director of the Verizon Global Network Management Center in Cary, NC. Her organization is accountable for the timely identification and restoration of service impacting events and ensuring the security, performance, and reliability of Verizon's core network, global transport, IP, switch networks and facility environments. Her team of experts monitor and manage core networks and applications that are the foundation for Verizon's internal and external products.

In her eighteen-year career with Verizon she has held positions of increasing responsibility including leading high performing teams in Network Service Delivery, Network Capacity Planning, Core Traffic Engineering, and Data Analytics. Prior to leading the Network Management Center, Kristi was responsible for Verizon Maintenance Engineering lab ensuring end to end responsibility of integration testing, new technology, agile service deployment, and defining network maintenance engineering standards for the Intelligent Edge Network architecture.

Kristi supports our customers through a wide range of collaborative projects and is taking the lead on Robocall efforts across Verizon Wireline and Wireless products and services. Kristi attended the University of Texas Permian Basin, majoring in Business Administration. Originally from Dallas, TX she now resides in North Carolina with her husband, Todd and their three sons.

Aldara Moum is an IT Director at Blue Cross Blue Shield of North Carolina, where she leads four teams supporting Claims, Membership, and Customer Service business areas.

Aldara started at Blue Cross of NC straight out of college. When she started, she was one of twenty individuals who completed a boot camp in preparation for a large multi-year system migration. At Blue Cross of NC her career evolved from an Associate Developer to an IT Director. With twenty years at Blue Cross of NC, Aldara has grown as an IT professional climbing the corporate ladder over the years. She has led several teams that primarily work in the back-office systems at Blue Cross of NC. This has given her the experience needed to overcome a number of challenges during the multi-year large system migration.

In 2016, she led a solutions team of over fifty individuals, to work through a number of challenges from a failed system migration. The solutions team worked over 15 months to stabilize a number of system issues. Under Aldara's leadership, this team collected, documented, and reported progress and status to VPs and C-level Executives on a regular basis. She was recognized for her efforts and was nominated by her IT Leadership team for the NC Tech Awards in 2017.

Over the last two years, Aldara has been tasked to lead and own the company's #1 migration efforts. This last migration has been filled with successes; the latest of which is the effectuation of our Large Group Line of Business in the future state Claims Processing system.

Moderator:
Graig Paglieri, President of Randstad Technologies and Engineering

As president of Randstad Technologies and Engineering, Graig Paglieri is responsible for overseeing the day-to-day operations and strategic direction of the Randstad Technologies and Engineering brands. In addition, Graig leads Randstad's central delivery team, whose charge is to develop disruptive and industry-leading delivery capabilities and technology-enabled business models. Previous to his current role, Graig served as Randstad's chief innovation officer and was committed to driving continuous transformation into an increasingly digital and technology-driven organization. While his start in the staffing industry was over a decade ago, Graig's first career was with the U.S. Marine Corps, which provided him with the unique ability to develop leadership capabilities and enhance decision-making skills and dexterity - all of which he applies today. Graig holds a bachelor's degree from Boston College and an MBA from Wake Forest University.