Brenda Decker was appointed as the Chief Information Officer for the State of Nebraska by Governor Dave Heineman on February 4, 2005. Prior to this appointment, Brenda held various IT positions within Nebraska state government for several years. Brenda received her Bachelor of Arts Degree from Doane College in 1989 where she majored in Business Administration. She received her Masters degree in Management from the same institution in May 2001. Brenda is a member and/or chair of numerous commissions and councils in Nebraska State Government. She holds membership in numerous professional organizations and has a national certification as a Professional Manager from the Institute of Certified Professional Managers. As a member of the National Association of State Chief Information Officers, she recently served as the 2012-2013 President of the organization, as well as having served as the Co-Chair of the Awards Committee and the Security and Privacy Committee, and an Executive Board member. In 2012, through Governor Heineman’s nomination, Federal Communications Commission Chair Julius Genachowski appointed Brenda to serve on the FCC Technical Advisory Board for First Responder Interoperability. In 2003, Government Technology magazine recognized Brenda nationally as one of the top 25 Doers, Dreamers and Drivers of Information Technology, and in 2007 as one of the “5 Most Influential Women CIOs” Brenda was selected as one of the Premier 100 IT Leaders for 2008 by Computerworld Magazine. In April of 2008, the AIM Institute honored Brenda with the Outstanding Community Service in Technology Award. The National Association of State Chief Information Officers honored Brenda with their 2010 Meritorious Service award in September. Less   View all posts

Richard is a member of Forrester's Infrastructure & Operations research team and has coverage responsibilities for servers and data center architecture and transformation. Among the core technologies he focuses on are blade and modular servers, converged infrastructure, virtualization and management of virtual data center resources, enterprise cloud infrastructure, and techniques for data center transformation. Richard recently returned to Forrester after spending four years as director of BladeSystem strategy at Hewlett-Packard. He was responsible for planning future technology products as well as serving as an executive sponsor for large financial service companies; participating in merger and acquisition projects; and serving as a member of HP's Technology Advisory Council team, which solicited input from a group of senior customer representatives. Richard was also a member of the startup team at Egenera, an early blade server and virtualization pioneer. During his 10-year tenure at Forrester, Richard consulted with many large companies on their technology road maps and strategy, emerging technologies and their role in the organizations, vendor management and selection, and data center migration and transformation. Less   View all posts