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Paul Gibson

Pollyanna Pixton developed the models for Collaboration and Collaborative Leadership through forty years of working at, and consulting with, corporations and organizations. She was primarily responsible for leading the development of the Swiss electronic stock exchange. In addition, she led the development of control systems for electrical power plants throughout the world, and the merging of the technologies and data systems of large financial institutions. Ms. Pixton speaks and writes on topics of collaborative leadership, trust, and business ethics and is currently working on a second book focusing on leadership tools that make a huge difference in changing environments. Her education includes an M.A. in computer science, three years of graduate studies in theoretical physics, and a B.A. in mathematics. Ms.Pixton is the president of Evolutionary Systems, a business consulting firm that takes companies to the next level through collaboration and collaborative leadership, and director and cofounder of the Institute of Collaborative Leadership.

Paul Gibson is passionate about improving software development effectiveness, believing that this can both improve the business value delivered and also provide high levels of motivation and reward to team members. In 1998, he was one of the founding members of a group created by the IBM Board to focus on improving quality and effectiveness across the company. As one of six members of the Agile adoption steering committee, he helped guide this community-based approach to deliver improved results across all 35,000 IBM software developers. Since 2006, he has helped lead, guide, train, and transform IBM software development teams worldwide in collaborative, agile, and lean approaches to improving both product quality and business value delivered. Paul is a hugely experienced software development manager. He has extensive—over thirty years—experience in product development at IBM. During that time, he has held significant development and product revenue responsibilities, approaching $1B per annum. Having retired from IBM, Paul now works as a consultant with several large companies in the areas of development effectiveness and quality assurance. In addition to his consulting roles, Paul also taught software development management as part of the Oxford University software engineering masters and diploma programafter chairing their industrial liaison committee for many years. Paul is also a Fellow of the British Computer Society and was a member of their Academic Accreditation Committee, which ensured that university courses have the content and quality sufficient to contribute to formal professional accreditation up to chartered engineer.

Niel Nickolaisen is the CIO at Western Governors University—a fully accredited, 100% on-line, nonprofit university. He has held technology executive and operations executive positions; typically in turnaround roles. His strategic and tactical alignment model significantly improves returns on technology and business initiatives. He has a passion for helping others deliver on what he calls the dual role of enterprise IT: 1) Enable strategy and 2) Achieve operational excellence. He writes an enterprise CIO column for SearchCIO and is a contributor to CIO Magazine. He is the coauthor of an Addison-Wesley book on Agile Leadership. CRN Magazine named Niel one of the top 25 IT Executives of 2008. He holds an M.S. in engineering from MIT, a B.S. in physics from Utah State University, and an M.B.A. from Utah State University.