Guests

Ryan Anderson serves as VP of Digital Innovation at Herman Miller, where his work focuses on creating new innovation strategies to grow Herman Miller’s business. With over twenty-five years of industry experience, much of Ryan’s work has centered on how technology can enable new ways of working and how the future workplace can support positive, productive work experiences. Ryan’s regularly speaks about the future of technology and the workplace, and his work has been featured in Fortune, the Wall Street Journal, Wired, Fast Company, the BBC and beyond.

Tina Arnoldi is a marketing consultant, qualified in both Google Analytics and Google Ads, part of the Google Partners program, and was part of the Google Developer Expert community from 2016 - 2019. She has an MA in psychology, a UX nanodegree and trains others in design thinking principles. As a former IT professional, she co-founded and served as the director of a Google-funded grant initiative to match volunteers in her community with nonprofits in need of technical help. She was recognized in 2007 by the Charleston Business Journal with a "Forty Under 40" award and again in 2011 as an "Influential Woman in Business". Tina resides in Charleston, South Carolina.

Elena is an intranet consultant and managing director of Rivelty.Intranet, speaker at Russian and world conferences in Australia, Denmark, Germany, Sweden. Elena works with some of Russia's top-ranking companies in the retail, banking, telecoms, and metal industries. Her team runs unique benchmark research in Russia for 5 years. Elena has been tireless in fostering the Russian intranet community. She is organizing Russian Intranet Awards (#RIawards) and #RiveltyConf - a conference for internal comms and DW leaders, blogging and running Russian intranet community. Elena is a jury member at the "Intranet and Digital workplace award" and Intranet Italia Champions.

A desk inside London Zoo - just yards from a mob of meerkats - means Clare is never short of content or inspiration for the suite of internal Comms channels that keep 1,000 colleagues at ZSL connected, informed and engaged. But meerkats are easy customers compared to a diverse workforce spread around the globe, and Clare has been able to draw on the considerable experience gained in roles at NHS Blood and Transplant and HMV to design new digital channels, encourage user buy-in and create online communities that drive advocacy and engagement with the organisation. Clare taps into people’s passions to get them sharing stories that connect them with their colleagues, as well as improving their relationships with internal and external stakeholders. With colleagues flung far and wide - including a team based in Outer Mongolia - Clare uses creative approaches across a variety of channels to ensure two-way communication that is inclusive for all. Clare’s skill in working with all colleagues to co-create creative and inspiring messages that resonate has resulted in award-winning communication campaigns, a history driving up response rates for employee engagement surveys and generated crucial advocacy for internal comms within multiple senior leadership teams.

Andrea Brant, an account manager at DWG, is passionate about optimizing employees’ digital experiences. Prior to joining DWG, Andrea worked for Adobe for nearly 20 years. Most recently she led Adobe’s Digital Communication Channels team, driving the strategy for and implementation of Adobe’s internal digital communications channels to improve employee communication and collaboration, and increase executive transparency for Adobe’s 20,000+ employees worldwide. Adobe’s intranet, Inside Adobe, was a Nielsen Norman Group 2015 Intranet Design Annual Winner and received Honourable Mention in DWG’s 2014 My Beautiful Intranet.

Martha Brown is the Product Owner on the team that has evolved Duke Energy’s intranet from infancy to a cloud-based, responsive solution. She’s passionate about user-centered design’s power to enable engagement, inspire innovation, and improve the employee experience.

Kim Clark is a documentary filmmaker, trainer, writer, and speaker focusing on conscious communications. She works with companies on employee and diversity and inclusion communications, she's a partner at the talent journey innovation firm Employera and speaks for Ragan Communications while teaching at San Jose State University. She's working on her first book, The Conscious Communicator.

Morten Dal is empowering enterprises and employees to work remotely while fighting Covid-19. He is helping organisations and people to adopt to New Ways of Working beyond the current crisis. Global award-winning corporate communications and change manager, now senior customer success manager with Microsoft, coming with 15+ years of corporate experience from the customer side.

James Dellow is the founder and director of Chief Technology Solutions. He is a human-centred designer and a workplace technology consultant, specialising in how people connect, communicate and collaborate with each other. He brings nearly two decades of experience working in intranet and knowledge management roles and as a consultant with a wide range of government, professional and blue-chip companies. James has worked with an extensive range of digital workplace solutions advising on strategy, governance, user experience design, information architecture and content management. James is well known for his past work with social business pioneers Headshift / Dachis Group, global IT services and solutions company CSC (now DXC), and in Ernst & Young's global knowledge management division, the award winning Center for Business Knowledge.

Patrik has multifaceted expertise encompassing business needs, corporate culture, digitalization and technology as well as people experience. With a versatile experience and human centered leadership, Patrik has brought meaningful change across ever-growing, dynamic organisations from defining cultures to enhancing employee/customer experience. Patrik has been responsible for diverse and challenging transformation projects where employee experience, strategic cornerstones and corporate culture have been the key elements for design. The TietoEvry new head office in Finland, is one of the most visible transformation initiatives Patrik has driven. The head office is a showcase corporate culture and new ways of working meeting a physical work environment and digital experience, achieved through human centered design. Employee experience is based on three main elements; culture, physical space and the digital/technological environment. How do you create an environment where employee experience is at the center and the company culture becomes visible? As the competition for talent becomes more intense, the well-being and experience of employees as well as the company's values and sustainable development are becoming an increasingly important part of the efforts to attract talents. For companies to be at the top of their game, they have to invest in employee experience. The cost for not doing so, is a risk not worth taking!

Katie Fennell is a communication specialist at UPMC. As a member of the intranet team for the last four years, she discovered and developed a passion for the digital employee experience. Her focus is streamlining user support for the intranet to help UPMC's 90,000 staff get the answers they need efficiently and facilitating two-way communication with Office 365 tools. Her team continuously improves the digital landscape and is transforming the way UPMC staff get information.

Nancy Goebel is DWG’s Managing Director for Member Services. In addition to heading up service delivery, Nancy is responsible for member engagement, retention and growth. Nancy also sits on DWG's Board of Directors. Prior to joining DWG, Nancy was an accomplished executive at JPMorgan Chase, where she built and led a global team in designing and implementing an award-winning intranet. She also led digital enablement and business re-engineering initiatives. Outside work, Nancy is an enthusiastic wine-maker, fundraiser, meditator, wife and mother of two. Outside work, Nancy is an enthusiastic wine-maker, fundraiser, meditator, wife and mother of two.

Brad Grissom is a Technology Strategist at Microsoft where he advises executives and technology teams at strategic accounts as they progress through their digital transformation journeys. By providing leadership across Microsoft, partner, and customer organizations, his charge is to deliver technology strategies and architectures that support vital customer business outcomes and goals. Brad's 20-year career has spanned both technical and business roles that at their core have focused on setting vision and strategy, building programs, and leading change. He considers himself very lucky to have worked for such iconic brands as Harley-Davidson, Southwest Airlines, and now Microsoft. His passion for technology combined with his formal education in communication and writing, keeps Brad busy blogging, speaking, and sharing ideas on digital transformation, the digital workplace, and the future of work. You can find him on Twitter @grissombrad or reach out to connect on LinkedIn.

Elizabeth Marsh leads DWG’s Research Programme with its library of 80+ best practice reports. She also regularly gets involved in consulting and benchmarking projects. Elizabeth is co-author, with Paul Miller, of The Digital Renaissance of Work: Delivering digital workplaces fit for the future. She is studying part-time a Digital Society PhD at the University of Nottingham.

Karissa is the Lead SharePoint Architect for Duke Energy’s intranet. With over 8 years of experience in enterprise Microsoft products she has built 10+ portals for various industries from healthcare to banking. As a certified change management professional, Karissa knows what truly drives product adoption - identifying and solving the right problems for users.

Katelyn Mayak is manager of Internal Communications at UPMC. She began her career by assisting with an intranet upgrade to SharePoint 2013. At the time, she had little knowledge of what an intranet was, but quickly gravitated towards the concepts surrounding the upgrade: putting users first and implementing a robust governance strategy to ensure content accuracy. Today, her team manages the organization's intranet for 90,000+ employees that features personalized content and news and a topic-based information architecture. Her passion for helping staff find what they need when they seek it has led to a vision that will transform the information-based intranet to a transactional digital tool in SharePoint Online. Her team is currently working towards hyper targeting and a de-centralized content ownership strategy.

Once described as “human caffeine” on Twitter, Dr Nicola Millard injects a positive, people-centred expresso shot to innovation and future strategy. Half social scientist, half technologist, all academic, she uses techniques from disciplines such as design thinking, psychology, anthropology, computing, and business consulting to generate data, provocations and stories which can engage and create conversations from the board room, to the front line. No frothy coffee; just solid research.

Business and social entrepreneur Paul Miller is CEO and Founder of Digital Workplace Group (DWG). His latest book, The Digital Renaissance of Work: Delivering digital workplaces fit for the future (co-authored with Elizabeth Marsh), was shortlisted for the Management Book of the Year 2016 Award, and his previous book, The Digital Workplace: How technology is liberating work, helped to popularize and explain the term “digital workplace”. Paul hosts the Digital Workplace Impact podcast, is Executive Producer of the 24-hour global digital experience Digital Workplace 24, and hosted the pioneering internet radio show Digital Workplace Live for five years. He has given many inspirational talks on the digital future of work, for audiences at Microsoft, IKEA, Google, Accenture, Harvard Business Review, Cisco, European Commission, IMF, Adobe and Oxford University. Paul was ranked one of the world’s Top 50 Social Employee Advocacy Leaders in 2015. Prior to founding DWG, he was Founder and CEO of communications company The Empowerment Group; Publisher and Editor of social and digital innovation magazine ‘Wave’; and, in pre-internet days, Co-founder of the Ideas Café salon. He lives in the Cotswolds in the UK.

Jennifer Newton is Chief Communications Officer of HAVI, a global, privately held company focused on innovating, optimizing and managing the supply chains of leading brands. In this role, she oversees all aspects of communication (internal, external and customer) and is focused on building the HAVI brand and helping drive customer satisfaction and business results through compelling messages and stakeholder engagement. Prior to joining HAVI, Jennifer operated her own consulting business, Jenerate Communication, for eight years serving such clients as McDonald’s, ITW, Jenner & Block, Hyatt, Toys R Us and Caterpillar, in addition to HAVI. She helped leaders and organizations use communication to connect with key stakeholders, influence behavior and drive business results. Before starting Jenerate Communication, Jennifer spent seven years working in Corporate Communications at McDonald’s Corporation. During that time, she provided communication counsel and support to the Chief Restaurant Operations Officer and the Presidents of the following divisions: McDonald’s Europe, McDonald’s Asia-Pacific, Middle East and Africa, and McDonald’s Partner Brands. Prior to McDonald’s, Jennifer worked as a communication and change management consultant for Towers Perrin, a global human resources and management consulting firm. There she worked with Fortune 500 companies to develop and implement communication/change management strategies and tactics related to reengineering, culture change, mergers, business literacy, compensation, performance management, benefits, diversity and other human resource issues. Jennifer holds a B.A. in English, Phi Beta Kappa, from Wellesley College and a Master’s of Journalism from Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism.

Geert Nijs is learning architect. During working hours, he is engaged in modern learning techniques like team learning and social learning. During his "free" time he is passionated about social technology and the new possibilities this technology offers, in this area he advices companies and organisations. The combination of modern learning techniques and knowledge about social technology makes it possible to introduce new digital tools in the workplace with a very different approach. In addition, he is keynote speaker about smarter collaboration with social technology and about communities. He contributed to several books and is author of the book "De Netwerkexpeditie" (in Dutch), "collaborating smarter with social collaborating".

Tori is the Director, of IT Client Services at Pega Systems. In this role, Tori is responsible for ensuring that end users are provided the most current, enhanced, enjoyable, and stable environment in which to perform their work. In 2018, Tori began to structure a narrative of Human Centered IT to draw our attention away from providing tools and instead drive the conversation back to the people who are the most valuable asset to your Digital Workplace program. By building a diverse community of executive stakeholders, business champions, and viral influencers, Tori’s has consistently increased the most crucial measurement of success: adoption. Tori has directed end user technologies in entertainment, non-profit, education, financial services, and software development. Tori serves on the Board of Directors for Pride In Our Workplace a Massachusetts, a nonprofit corporation founded to improve equity, diversity, and inclusion in the workplace for LGBTQ professionals in the Greater Boston area.

James Robertson is the founder and managing director of Step Two, headquartered in Sydney, Australia. James is the originator of the current global movement towards digital employee experience (DEX), as well as a 20-year reputation as an intranet expert. He's the author of two books, "Essential intranets" and "Designing intranets". He's keynoted events around the globe.

Ricky is a Business Analyst at Stagecoach and was the Project Manager responsible for the Blink Project. With over 17 years’ experience working with Stagecoach, he has held various roles around the business such as Pay Clerk, Special Projects Manager, Recruitment Manager, Communications Manager, and is now part of the Group Change Team. Usually based out of the London office, Ricky spends his time with his Son, watching sports entertainment, playing FIFA (which he’s very bad at!), and keeping up to date with the latest technology… especially if it’s Apple related!

Edward has worked in the digital sector for over ten years, in consulting and client management roles. His experience spans numerous sectors, from global corporates to non-profits, covering clients based in North America, Europe and the Far East. As part of DWG’s leadership team his main focus is to work closely with our member organisations to enable them to establish effective digital workplaces. His previous clients have included: Southwest Airlines, PNC Bank, Foreign and Commonwealth Office, Estee Lauder, 3M, Charles Schwab and KPMG. Key Experience: Business and market analysis, requirements gathering, workshops and focus groups; Technical appraisals, business case creation and feasibility studies; Content evaluation and analytics reviews; Advanced technical knowledge of Microsoft 365; Expert in change management, governance, adoption and analytics; Advisory to project boards and leadership teams; Published research papers for DWG.

A decade of international experience in building and managing delivery of end-to-end global digital products, platforms and channels, driving the vision and strategy in line with clients' needs in banking, asset management, insurance and IT sector. Currently Product Owner for the new Fidelity's Intranet platform.

Oxfam's Digital Workplace comprises a set of collaboration and productivity tools for Oxfam's global staff worldwide. This ecosystem of tools helps power Oxfam's vision of a just world without poverty, and supports Humanitarian, Campaigning, Advocacy and Long-Term Development Programming. Alongside running a set of well-established collaboration tools – Box (file sharing and storage), Microsoft Teams (project communications), Workplace by Facebook (internal communications and collaborative conversations), Drupal intranet (for knowledge management), Moodle (learning and development) – we’re introducing a set of new services including DocuSign (electronic signature), PowerBI (data visualization) and Microsoft Power Automate (workflow automation). We strive to offer a great digital employee experience that empowers staff and to create porous collaboration boundaries that support our work with partners.

Passionate about digital communication and working in this field for more than 15 years. Involved in strategy, processes, tools, solutions, training, user adoption and collaboration & social.

By day, Dr. Lauren 'L' Vargas is a digital dragon wrangler with 19 years experience assisting organizations with their community and communication strategies. Vargas is an independent researcher and consultant of Your Digital Tattoo, as well as, a 'One by One' Research Associate with the University of Leicester - delivering a "practical approach to building digital literacies within specific museum contexts" for UK and US museums.

Will has worked at Fidelity International for 5 years in the digital workplace domain, and now work on improving the effectiveness of Fidelity's digital tools in making Fidelity a great place to work. Recent projects have included our global Office 365 implementation, the rollout of Microsoft Teams and Zoom, and supporting the business through the transition to home working in 2020.