CIO Panelists:

Don Olender
Executive Vice President & Chief Information Officer
Wells Fargo Capital Finance

Don Olender is Executive Vice-President and Chief Information Officer of Wells Fargo Capital Finance, a multi-billion dollar commercial financing subsidiary of Wells Fargo’s Wholesale Banking Division.

Wells Fargo Capital Finance offers traditional asset-based lending, specialized senior secured financing, accounts receivable financing, purchase order financing and supply chain financing to companies in a wide range of industries. Wells Fargo Capital Finance delivers these secured financing options to middle market businesses through its 30+ domestic offices, two Canadian offices (Toronto and Montreal), and its newly-acquired London business, Burdale Financial, LTD. Wells Fargo Capital Finance is based in Santa Monica, California.

Olender has been with Wells Fargo Capital Finance for 17 years and has served as its CIO since 1997. Throughout his career, Olender has served in technical management positions working previously as an application development manager, a senior project manager and programmer/analyst at Providian Bancorp in Northern California for eight years, and as a senior project manager and computer operator at Bank of America in their card services division for 13 years.

Olender is a current member and former Board Chair of the UCLA I.S. Associates. He is also a member of the Southern California Chapter of the Society of Information Management (SIM) and is the founding chairman and member of the Commercial Finance Association’s Technology Committee. He earned his B.A. in Business Administration and Human Resource Management from Golden Gate University, San Francisco, graduating magna cum laude.

Members: $70
Non-Members: $100
At the door: add $15

Visit Southern California SIM’s new website: www.scsim.org

James A. DiMarzio
Chief Information Officer, Information Technology
Mazda North American Operations

James A. DiMarzio is Chief Information Officer, Information Technology for Mazda North American Operations. In this position, he guides the IT team in setting the strategy and plans for systems, technology, and support of the US, Canada, and Mexico operations.

Since joining Mazda in 2001, DiMarzio has helped to set the strategy to implement a partnership with the business areas to ensure alignment of information technology projects with the company’s business strategy and goals. This strategy also promotes the search for opportunities to improve the efficiency of business operations through the use of cost-effective new technologies.

DiMarzio has spent over 25 years in Automotive IT including positions at Subaru of America and Land Rover North America. He has a bachelor’s degree in Mathematics from Franklin and Marshall College, and an MBA from Rutgers University.

Sue-Jean Lin
Senior Vice President & Chief Information Officer
Allergan

Sue-Jean Lin is Senior Vice President and Chief Information Officer for Allergan, a multi-specialty pharmaceutical company headquartered in Irvine, California. The company discovers, develops and commercializes innovative pharmaceuticals, biologics and medical devices that enable people to live life to its greatest potential. Allergan has more than 9,000 people worldwide and operates state-of-the-art R&D facilities, world- class manufacturing plants and is present in more than 100 countries with revenue over $4.5 billion in 2009.

Lin is a senior business leader with over 25 years broad based management experience in both Financial Management and Information Technology. She joined Allergan in 1989 and has held a series of positions, each succeeding position accompanied with growing responsibilities, including Finance Manager, Senior I.S. Project Manager, Finance Director for the North America Shared Service Center, Assistant Corporate Controller, Global Application Development Director, and for 7 years as Vice President and Controller of the Europe/Africa/Middle East Region based in London, England. Since March 2007 she has been the CIO. In her current position, she oversees global information technology function, serving thousands of employees around the world, connecting global businesses through system applications and network infrastructure, most importantly aligning technology investment and resources allocation in order to support the growth strategy of the company.

Prior to joining Allergan, Lin worked for Sierra Pacific Power Company in Nevada and Northrop Grumman Corporation in California.

Lin attended the University of Nevada, Reno, where she completed a Bachelor of Science degree and later, a Master’s of Business Administration degree. She is a certified management accountant.

Jennifer Sepull
CIO, American Honda Motor Company, Inc.

Jennifer Sepull is Vice President (VP) of the Information Services Division and Chief Information Officer (CIO) for American Honda Motor Co., Inc (AHM).

As VP & CIO, Jennifer emphasizes the importance of thought leadership, innovation, communication, teamwork, and the value of a strong partnership between the Information Systems Division and Honda business units. She is responsible for leading Global enterprise strategy and solutions for business applications/technology, IT operations and assets worth over $1 billion, information security, dealer systems, and Business to Consumer (B2C) systems for AHM’s 14 business divisions and supporting 23 Honda Companies.

Jennifer is an officer of the company, and serves as the Leader of North America Information Systems (NA-IS) and is a Governing Member of the Honda Global Information Systems Management Board (GISMB). Jennifer is a member of the American Honda Ethics Committee, and on the Board of the Honda Patent & Trademark Company. These committees help Honda to collaborate and leverage Information Services across Honda’s Global Enterprise.

Jennifer has worked in the Industrial Sector for over 23 years. Jennifer also brings a significant amount of technology and consulting expertise to her position as VP and CIO of Honda’s Information Systems Division. In addition to her experience, Jennifer is recognized as an innovative global IT leader with credits such as:

• 2012, CIO 100 Award – Recognized as one of the top 100 IT organizations that create business value through the innovative use of IT.
• 2010, 100 Leading Women in the North American Automotive Industry – Recognized by Automotive News as one of the top 100 industry’s most accomplished women.
• 2010, Top 10 Break Away Leaders – Recognized as one of the top 10 CIOs who have shown the ability to most effectively adapt, innovate and capitalize during challenging of economic times.

Jennifer is accredited with a Law Degree from Chapman University. Her educational background also includes attending Cambridge University in England with a focus on International Legal and Business Studies and a Bachelor of Arts in Criminal Justice from Chapman University.

Moderator

Joel Manfredo
Chief Information Officer
Acies Consulting Group

Joel is a multi-disciplinary executive offering leadership and vision based upon over thirty years of experience working for major organizations in a broad spectrum of functions. He’s spent the last 16 years in transformational Chief Information Officer roles and the prior 18 years in many functions in commercial real estate including leasing, finance, development, operations, marketing, securities, construction, energy and utilities. He is known for the 3Ts: Transformation, Turnaround and Technology.

As the Chief Technology Officer of the County of Orange, Joel ran an IT Service Delivery business for the central shared service IT function. Results included increasing customer satisfaction by a sustained 16% over three years and achieving a top 10% industry benchmark for IT operations while simultaneously reducing costs by 27%. Operationally, he improved the Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) of the County’s 66,000 square foot data center by 10%… In the CIO role at The Irvine Company results include managing hyper growth while quadrupling output and achieving technical reliance on system-generated financial statements… At The Rouse Company, Joel executed a five year IT transformation including ERP, CRM, Business Intelligence and e-Learning; the program was delivered under budget, on time and on scope with hard cost savings twice the pro-forma realized one year ahead of schedule.

Also at The Rouse Company, he orchestrated a $9.1 million turnaround of a large commercial real estate business including executing energy saving initiatives that resulted in $4.0 million in annual energy cost savings and $3.0 million in utility company rebates. Joel consulted with the EPA in the early 1990s and was instrumental in the applicability of the EnergyStar program to commercial real estate; he had one of the first EnergyStar buildings in the US. He was named one of the top 100 CIOs in the US acknowledging work in Green Technology and received a Digital Impact Award for lifetime technology achievement in real estate.

Joel currently serves on 5 Boards: Society of Information Management, Technology Business Management Council, CleanTechOC, Corporate Committee of the Dean’s Leadership Circle at UC Irvine and the Trojan Club of South Orange County. He is also a mentor in the Executive MBA programs at UC Irvine and Chapman University. He frequently lectures at professional events and at academic institutions.

Guest Speakers:

Gil Elbaz

President and Founder of the CommonCrawl Foundation

Gil Elbaz is an accomplished entrepreneur and pioneer of natural language technology. In 1998, Gil co-founded Applied Semantics Inc. (ASI) which developed contextual advertising products including ASI’s AdSense. In 2003, Google acquired ASI and Gil stayed on as the director of engineering for the Santa Monica office and continued to work on AdSense and other products. Prior to founding ASI, Gil worked in engineering roles at IBM, Sybase and SGI.

In 2007, Gil left Google to explore new ideas and passions and went on to found a new company, Factual, an open data platform. Factual launched its public beta in October 2009 and has set out to develop an open data platform and community in an effort to maximize data accuracy, transparency, and accessibility. Since launch, the company has received early investor funding by renowned technology notables and investment funds including Andreessen Horowitz, Bill Gross, Danny Rimer, Esther Dyson, Founder Collective and many more. At the same time Gil founded Factual, he also founded the non-profit foundation, Common Crawl. Common Crawl is dedicated to building and maintaing an open repository of web crawl data in order to drive innovation in research, education and technology.

Gil earned his bachelor’s degree from the California Institute of Technology with a double major in Engineering & Applied Science and Economics. Active in a number of non-profits, Gil is on the Board of Trustees at California Institute of Technology as well as the Board of Trustees for the X-Prize Foundation. Gil is president and founder of the CommonCrawl Foundation and is an angel investor, and sits on the board of Opposing Views.

Directions

Members: $70

Non-Members: $100

At the door: add $15

Visit Southern California SIM’s new website: www.scsim.org

Tom Soderstrom

IT Chief Technology Officer

NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory

Tom is the IT Chief Technology Officer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. He leads a collaborative, practical, and hands-on approach with JPL and industry to investigate emerging IT technology trends that are relevant to JPL, NASA, and large enterprises — and to infuse these into JPL’s environment.

Tom has led remote teams and large scale IT best practices and tools development and change efforts in small startups, large commercial companies, in international venues, and in the US Government arena.

Tom serves on many industry- and government advisory boards, steering committees and awards committees and is a frequent speaker on the future of Information Technology. He is currently consulting with industry leaders on where the U.S. Government and industry is heading in information technology, especially focused on cloud computing, big data, mobility, and how to transform IT into Innovating Together.

Michael J. Carey

Professor of Information and
Computer Sciences at UC Irvine

Michael J. Carey is currently a Bren Professor of Information and
Computer Sciences at UC Irvine. Prior to joining UC Irvine, Carey worked
at BEA Systems in San Jose as the chief architect of, and an engineering
director for, their AquaLogic Data Services Platform product. He also spent
a number of years as a Professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison,
then at IBM Almaden as a database researcher/manager, and as a Fellow
at e-commerce software startup Propel Software. Carey is an ACM Fellow,
a member of the National Academy of Engineering, and a recipient of the
ACM SIGMOD Edgar F. Codd Innovations Award. Carey’s current research
interests are centered around data-intensive computing and scalable data
management.

Bill Schmarzo

CTO, Enterprise Information Management Practice
EMC Consulting

Bill Schmarzo is responsible for setting the strategy and defining the service line offerings and capabilities for the EMC Consulting Enterprise Information Management and Analytics service line. He’s written several white papers and is a frequent speaker on the use of Big Data and advanced analytics to power organization’s key business initiatives.

Bill has more than two decades of experience in data warehousing, BI and analytic applications. Bill authored the Business Benefits Analysis methodology that links an organization’s strategic business initiatives with their supporting data and analytic requirements, and co-authored with Ralph Kimball a series of articles on analytic applications. Bill has served on The Data Warehouse Institute’s faculty as the head of the analytic applications curriculum.

Previously, Bill was the vice president of Analytics at Yahoo where he was responsible for the development of Yahoo’s Advertiser and Website analytics products, including the delivery of “actionable insights” through a holistic user experience. Before that, Bill oversaw the Analytic Applications business unit at Business Objects, including the development, marketing and sales of their industry-leading analytic applications.

Bill holds a masters degree in Business Administration from the University of Iowa and a bachelor of science degree in Mathematics, Computer Science and Business Administration from Coe College.