Mark Schwartz is an iconoclastic CIO and a playful crafter of ideas, an inveterate purveyor of lucubratory prose. He has been an IT leader in organizations small and large, public, private, and nonprofit. As the former CIO of US Citizenship and Immigration Services, he provoked the federal government into adopting Agile and DevOps practices. He is pretty sure that when he was the CIO of Intrax Cultural Exchange he was the first person ever to use business intelligence and supply chain analytics to place au pairs with the right host families. Mark speaks frequently on the role of the CIO, innovation in IT, and Agile and DevOps approaches in challenging and low-trust environments. With a BS in computer science from Yale, a master’s in philosophy from Yale, and an MBA from Wharton, Mark is either an expert on the business value of IT or just confused and much poorer.

Mark is the author of The Art of Business Value, which—he is proud to report—has been labeled by his detractors “The Ecclesiastes of Product Management,” and “Apocryphal.”  The book takes readers on a journey through the meaning of bureaucracy, the nature of cultural change, and the return on investment of an MBA degree, on the way to solving the great mystery…what exactly do we mean by business value and how should that affect the way we practice IT? Mark promises that his new book, Seat at the Table, is more canonical and less apocryphal.

Mark is the winner of a Computerworld Premier 100 award, an Amazon Elite 100 award, a Federal Computer Week Fed 100 award, and a CIO Magazine CIO 100 award, which strongly suggests that there are less than 99 other people you could better spend time reading.  

Randy Shoup is a 25-year veteran of Silicon Valley, and has worked as a senior technology leader and executive at companies ranging from small startups to mid-sized places to eBay and Google. Randy is currently VP Engineering at Stitch Fix in San Francisco.

Earlier, Randy was Chief Engineer at eBay for 6 1/2 years, where he was responsible for multiple generations of eBay’s realtime search infrastructure. He was CTO and co-founder of a startup, and learned just how difficult and different it is to build a company from scratch. He was Director of Engineering at Google for Google App Engine, building and operating the world’s largest platform-as-a-service. He also spent a year and a half applying eBay and Google lessons consulting with startups and large enterprises on how to improve their organizations and technology.

He is particularly passionate about the nexus of culture, technology, and organization.