Brilliant Strategy Meets Brilliant Execution

Deidre Paknad
CEO and co-founder

Deidre is CEO and co-founder of WorkBoard. She’s led several high growth organizations as CEO and founder and as an executive at IBM. She’s seen first hand how alignment, accountability and transparency drive results and create resilience. Deidre has over a dozen patents and has twice been inducted into the Smithsonian Institution for innovation. Goldman Sachs named her one of the 100 most intriguing entrepreneurs of 2019.

John Walsh
Chief Digital Officer

John is currently the Sr. Director of Operations & Chief of Staff responsible for leading global operations for the Intel Validation Engineering (iVE) organization.  Prior to his current role, John held various leadership positions across a variety of organizations spanning operations, engineering and finance over his 18+ year career at Intel.

He holds an MBA from Babson College and a Bachelor of Arts in Finance & Management from the University of Washington.

Rich Bayes
Director of Product Management

Rich is a Director of Product Management for Video Devices at Cisco. He has a wealth of expertise spanning over a decade in this industry. Rich is responsible for all experiences the Room and Desk video devices expose and how they can further complement the world of hybrid work. His passion is helping people connect & collaborate to achieve their greatest potential and using technology as a vehicle to progress that aim. Rich holds an Bachelors of Engineering Degree in Network Security from Staffordshire University in the UK.

Jason Gunderson
VP, Intel Accelerated Computing Systems & Graphics, GM of the AXG Execution Office

Jason Gunderson is a Vice President for Intel Accelerated Computing Systems & Graphics, and General Manager of the AXG Execution Office, where he leads the organization responsible for program management, central operations, supply chain, and roadmap operations. Jason has 25 years of experience in the semiconductor industry, spanning areas such as circuit design, top-level composition, design lead/management, program management, engineering business operations, and general management.

Jason holds a BS in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and an MBA from Colorado State University. He is a PMI® certified Project Management Professional (PMP)®. He is based in Fort Collins, Colorado, and enjoys hiking, biking, skiing, running, and enjoying life in the Rockies with his wife of 18 years and two daughters.

Rich Barger
Global Director, Cyber Threat Intelligence Operations & Product Strategy

Rich Barger is the director of global operations and product strategy for Accenture’s Cyber Threat Intelligence practice. In his role, Rich leads a multi-disciplinary team of passionate cyber intelligence professionals who monitor existing and emerging cyber threats to enable secure business operations for clients. He is responsible for integrating and delivering actionable threat intelligence to some of the most highly regarded, world-class enterprises. Prior to Accenture, Rich was the director of Splunk’s security research team and global director for Security[RC1] Operations where he led the security operations center.

Rasha Dwidar
Chief of Staff

Rasha been with IBM for over 15 years and has led in many leadership roles across the development and product management organizations. In her most recent role, Rasha was the Program Director for Z Software Product Management and Strategy, and Chief of Staff to the VP of IBM Z Software. She drove key strategic initiatives across product management, sales, marketing, and finance to drive portfolio growth and transformation.

Prior to that, Rasha held management and technical leadership positions in the IMS and Hybrid Cloud Foundation and Db2 organizations to deliver solutions that are core to the IBM Z Hybrid Cloud strategy including Red Hat Ansible Certified Content for IBM Z, Z/OS Cloud Broker, Db2 for Z and Db2 tools. Rasha has been instrumental in leading transformation in the areas of Agile development, delivery pipeline automation, OKR's (Objective and Key Results) and software quality across IBM Systems. She holds a Master of Science in Computer Science from San Jose State University.

Rasha recently joining IBM Systems Transformation and Growth team. She leads the Product Management for Growth Initiatives for IBM Systems working with several teams across IBM as IBM Systems, IBM Cloud and IBM Software. Rasha plays a broader role across IBM Systems to help manage strategic business planning, enabling go-to-market teams, and facilitating other requirements and priorities to accelerate the evolution of the strategic growth initiatives from conception to delivery to the market.

Sreekanth Ramakrishnan
Program Director

Sreekanth Ramakrishnan is a Program Director of the IBM zSystems AIOps Product Management team, based in San Jose, CA. In this role, he leads the product management and strategy for the AIOps portfolio. From 2020-21, he was the Senior Technical Staff Member leading the IBM’s hybrid cloud strategy for IBM zSystems. He has also led the IBM Systems client advocacy mission from 2016-20, wherein he was responsible for designing and implementing analytics-based client insight applications for IBM’s client experience organization. He is an IBM Design Thinking facilitator and has used these skills in corporate wide initiatives from HR processes to global complaint management functions.

From 2008-15, Dr. Ramakrishnan was a data scientist and transformation consultant with IBM Learning (CHQ, Human Resources), based in Cambridge, MA, where he had global responsibilities for facilitating business transformation across IBM Corporation by enabling process excellence through Lean, Six Sigma and Agile practices and organizational culture change. He also was the lead researcher to create and implement a framework to evaluate IBM’s management and leadership development program, which was recognized externally with the Brandon Hall Gold Medal (2016). Besides these roles, he also was an industrial engineer with IBM’s Integrated Supply Chain in Poughkeepsie, NY where he was responsible for developing discrete event simulation models to study the capacity of the various manufacturing locations.

Dr. Ramakrishnan is a certified Lean Master and Lean Six Sigma Black Belt. He has won international awards such as the 2020 Medallia EXPY award, 2016 Brandon Hall award, 2016 and Institute of Industrial and Systems Engineering’s (IISE) Lean Best Practice Award and the Engineering Manager of the Year.

Dr. Ramakrishnan has a Ph.D. (2008) and M.S. (2005) in Industrial and Systems Engineering from the Department of Systems Science and Industrial Engineering at Binghamton University – State University of New York. He has 12 patents, over 100 publications in reputed conferences and journals. His first book, “Lean for Sales: Bringing the Science of Lean to the Art of Selling”, was released in April 2016. He has served on the board of directors for various organizations related to Systems Engineering. He is also an Adjunct Professor at San Jose State University’s (SJSU) Lucas College and Graduate School of Business.