CIO STRATEGY MEETING

Monica Maria Sanchez, Executive Vice President, and Chief Information Officer
United Automobile Insurance Company

Monica Sanchez is an accomplished and top-performing IT executive with a 25+ year’s career transforming organizations by means of technology and innovation.

She possesses management expertise in insurance and financial services, telecommunications, construction, and oil & gas. She served in various leadership roles including EVP & CIO, VP Information Officer for Latin America and the Caribbean, as well as Business Unit CIO for large organizations such as AIG.

Ms. Sanchez is a frequently requested speaker on topics ranging from technology trends to women in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math). She holds both a bachelor degree in Information Technology and an Executive MBA from Universidad Argentina de la Empresa.

Julio Gonzalez, Chief Information Officer, Senior Vice President, Information Technology
United States Medical Supply

Julio Gonzalez joined US MED in 2017 as SVP, Chief Information Officer.  In his role, Mr. Gonzalez is responsible for transforming the systems and technology that drive US MED’s business in a highly competitive healthcare related segment.

Julio is a Miami native and has spent over 30 years helping South Florida companies in the areas of healthcare payer and provider, transportation, and travel/tourism reduce costs while improving business value by tightly integrating business and technology strategies.

Julio is an accomplished public speaker who has presented at industry conferences on topics such as security, compliance, and service delivery, and has held board positions at several South Florida non-profit and educational organizations.

Julio holds a Masters in Business Administration with specialization in Technology Management from the University of Phoenix.

Matthew Ghourdjian, Chief Information Officer
777 Partners

A former Arthur Andersen Consulting and KPMG Consulting Partner, Matt is an entrepreneurial, hands on IT executive with a 40-year track record of creativity and execution, designing, building, implementing and operating information technology solutions. For the last 20 years, as the CEO of Ceira and Cogility Software and the CIO of DiTech.com and CashCall, he has worked almost exclusively in the financial services industry designing, building, implementing loan underwriting and servicing solutions for mortgage, auto, small business and personal loans for companies. Since 2013 Matt has been focused on applying cloud technologies to the lending space, building cloud native underwriting, servicing and lead generation systems.

Kevin Burns, Chief Information Officer
City of Melbourne

Kevin Burns is the inaugural CIO for the City of Melbourne. Kevin is charged with aligning strategic goals and objectives of the digital transformation of the city. Improving business processes and procedures to provide more effective and efficient customer services.

Kevin previously served as the Chief Information Officer/Director of Information Technology for the City of Miami for 5 years and has over 30 years of experience in progressively greater leadership positions.  Focused on strategic alignment, technical innovations, customer service, service delivery, and business relationships that provide enhanced and efficient process improvements and customer experiences.

Prior to the City, Kevin spent a 20-year career with the U.S. Army serving in challenging positions with prestigious units such as the 10^th Mountain Division, Fort Drum, NY; 8^th US Army, Seoul, Korea; 172^nd Infantry Division and US Army Cold Regions Test Center, both in Alaska.

Todd Berger, Senior Director Technical Solutions
Blackberry

Todd Berger is responsible for the NALA Technical Solutions Team at BlackBerry.  Joining BlackBerry in 2015, as part of the Good Technology acquisition, where Todd managed the global Technical Solutions Team for 11 years, contributed to the transformation of BlackBerry to a software focused enterprise security endpoint security provider.  Todd has over 18 years of enterprise mobility/endpoint consulting experience ranging from application development, security and collaboration to device and data management.  He holds a Bachelor’s of Science degree from University of Connecticut with advance computer science studies at Boston University.

Andre Garcia, Senior Vice President, Information Technology Operations and Quality Engineering
TracFone Wireless, Inc.

Andre Garcia is SVP of IT Operations and Quality Engineering for TracFone Wireless, an $8B telecommunications company serving over 20 million customers. Andre and his team are responsible for all infrastructure technologies, operations, cloud services, carrier integrations, call center technology, and quality engineering. With over 30 years’ experience, he has held various consulting, technical, and leadership positions with JP Morgan Chase, Microsoft, IBM, and Compaq. He has worked in various capacities with organizations including the United States Army, United States Navy, NASA, The Walt Disney Company, Boeing, and American Express. Mr. Garcia has a B.S. degree in Business and has certifications including CCISO, CISSP, CISM, CCSP, and CEH.

Andre has been a speaker at numerous technology conferences in the US and Europe and has been featured in articles in the Wall Street Journal, CIO Magazine, Network World, and in case studies by VMware and Microsoft.

Jag Tailor, Senior Vice President Global Information Systems
Sony Picture Tech

Jag Tailor has been with Sony for more than two decades. He currently holds the title of Senior Vice President, Global Information Systems, with responsibility for all application development and maintenance for the North America, the Latin America, and the Europe regions. Jag received his Executive MBA in International Business from FAU in 2012.

Otto Contreras, Deputy Chief Information Officer
City of Miami

Otto Contreras is a 30+ years Information Technology industry veteran, a verifiable record of delivering enhanced productivity, streamlined operations, and improved financial performance. Natural leader with strong entrepreneurial spirit and special talent for transitioning strategy into action and achievement.

Current Deputy CIO for the City of Miami – a city with more than 460,000 citizens, an annual operating budget of $1.1B, a $28M Information Technology budget, and 5,000+ employees.  As a member of the information technology leadership team he is responsible of planning, developing and implementing a comprehensive citywide information technology strategy, technical architecture, and creates and executes short-term and long-term plans and projects to be implemented within the architectural framework.

Ieasha Taitano, Innovation Lead
TracFone Wireless, Inc.

Ieasha is the Head of Innovation at TracFone Wireless, the country’s largest MVNA with 22 million subscribers.  Ieasha is an executive leader and consultant with 15 years of experience establishing, building and supporting transformational change and innovation practices across complex corporate environments.  She has built her career leading large scale innovation & strategy efforts across diverse industry sectors including Cisco, Travelers Insurance, Waste Management, The Stanley Works & Pfizer Pharmaceutical. Ieasha’s major leadership roles have included establishing and developing Innovation practices, Strategy Groups and Venture Capital Labs across large organizations – as well as designing and implementing customer centric services and product lines.

Ashish Dham, Director of Information Technology Audit
Watsco, Inc.

Leader in the areas of IT Security/Cybersecurity/IT Audit based on experience at Fortune 500 companies (Ryder & The Hartford Insurance Group) and Big 4 firms (PwC & Anderson). He excels in partnering with executive management to build and execute on Strategic Vision. He has a proven track record of advising and resolving emerging enterprise level risks, while focusing on sustaining both sound governance and implementing controls across the organization. He is on the board for the South Florida ISACA chapter; he holds a CISSP and CISA certification.

Nat Kami, Interim Chief Information Security Officer
Insurance Care Direct

Nat is currently the Acting Chief Information Security Officer for Insurance Care Direct. Nat also held several executive positions within AIG including Group CIO – Chief Integration Officer for AIG Japan Holdings. In addition he was Senior Corporate Officer, where he led multiple business units and business functions within a variety of operating companies including the merger and integration of a $6B Property & Casualty and Life Company and digitization of claims and underwriting processing. Nat also oversaw the architecture and delivery of several policy administration initiatives that included over 200k agents and captives.

During his AIG tenure Nat was also the SVP Global Head of Network and Data Center Infrastructure and Co-Vice Chairman of the Separation and Divesture committee divesting 40 companies from AIG and collaborated with the Fed and FSA regarding security, risk and compliance. Nat has also held roles as Transformation Executive enabling the delivery of several programs across critical applications including cloud, application authentication and cybersecurity portfolios.

Prior to AIG, Nat held a variety of executive technology roles within Verizon Business, NTT, MCI, Lehman Brothers and Merrill Lynch respectively.

Nat serves on the Rutgers University Big Data Innovation Program as a Board Advisor. Nat is a Six Sigma Black Belt. Nat is also a graduate of the Lubin School of Business at Pace University and holds Cybersecurity Certification from Harvard University Kennedy Extension School, and HIPAA privacy and security certification. Nat has held FINRA series 7, 6, 63/66 licenses. Nat is fluent in conversational Japanese.