Speaker Biographies
Sonja Noben
digitalscaler, Founder and Chief Executive
Sonja is an inspiring Strategic Transformation Leader with extensive experience in defining and leading Enterprise-wide Agility and Digital Scaled Strategies & Operating models, able to (re)shape the future of Companies in today’s digital economic context.
Sonja is a Strategic visionary and can drive and lead large scale end-to-end transformations. She leads the way in how Companies can match similar digital and agile competences as native web-born players.
Sonja has completely redefined Digital and Agile Scaled Strategies and extensively changed operating models and environments at large corporates. She helps Companies travel an amazing distance and help them make their future ready for strong competition.
Sonja acquired her extensive vision and experience through several Top Management and CIO/COO positions at large divisions of ING Group and BNP Paribas Fortis, combined with several years of business consultancy. Over the past 10 years, she followed the strategies, the culture and behaviour, as well as the methods and approaches of native web-born companies and intensively attended Digital and Agility seminars, summer classes and business school programs. This in-depth knowledge combined with her hands-on experience makes her a thought leader in defining scaled Digital & Agility Strategies and detailed Roadmaps for Companies ready to take on or already underway on their digital and agile transformation challenge.
Based on her in-depth insights in both do’s and dont’s in company-wide scaling of agile & digital operating models & capabilities, she can advise Boards and Top management how to scale first time right, from Digital Incubator to Company-wide scaling. As a result, a much shorter learning curve, much less repair, faster and robuster increase of Time2Market & delivery capabilities and higher operational Excellence will be reached for Companies in transformation.
Sonja co-leads companies through the disruptive changes impacting their Sector in this rapidly changing digital era. Companies needing to become Agile@Scale, Digital@Scale, fully CustomerCentric and operated by Delighted Employees, needing to change their end-to-end operating model to a constantly changing World Context. She is able to create joint high-performing delivery teams together with her customers and Ecosystem Partners, leading to strongly increased innovation capabilities, business growth and operational efficiency.
Sonja holds a Master in Commercial Engineering, and specialized in Management of Information Technology at the LUC. She is tri-lingual and speaks fluently French, Dutch and English.
David Norton
CISQ, Executive Director
David Norton leads the Consortium for Information & Software Quality (CISQ), a not-for-profit IT leadership group that develops international standards for software measurement. He is passionate about enterprise agility, DevOps and quality. David spent over a decade as a Gartner analyst in the Application Governance and Strategy group. He has a background in defense and logistics and practical hands-on experience of complex mission-critical system delivery.
Paul Bentz
CISQ, Director of Government and Industry Programs
Paul Bentz has been running large international IT organizations for more than 30 years, essentially in multicultural environments and financial institutions. He worked for 20 years in Paribas, the investment bank, being group CIO when it merged with BNP in 2000 to become BNP Paribas. He then moved to Allianz, the insurance giant, as Regional CIO to rationalize the merge of three companies and build a strategy in line with the group guidelines. He was a member of the Group IT Committee. Paul is now the Director of Government and Industry Programs for CISQ in Europe where he promotes the standards of CISQ with regulators and governing bodies in various industries, Finance and Healthcare in priority. Paul graduated from the ENSAM and the ENSPM in France, is married with three children and six granddaughters.
Harold van Heeringen
METRI Senior Consultant Financial Data Analysis
Harold graduated from the university of Groningen in business economics in 1997 and has worked in the information technology industry ever since. In METRI, he is mainly involved in services in the application domain, e.g. Supplier Performance Measurement, Value Driven Contracting, Contract Benchmarking, Market Price Models and Software Cost Estimation.
Harold is active in several not-for-profit organizations that try to improve the use of software metrics in the industry. He is the president of the International Software Benchmarking Standards Group (ISBSG, since 2011). He also is board member in Nesma, the international organization connecting people regarding software estimation, benchmarking, outsourcing, sizing, performance measurement and project control.
Harold is an expert on the functional sizing methods Nesma FPA and COSMIC and he is a certified practitioner in both methods. Furthermore, he is an expert on different software estimation models and benchmarking practices. In his role as senior consultant, he advises clients regarding the performance (productivity, speed, cost and quality) of their (internal and external) suppliers in Application Development and Maintenance contracts.
Harold regularly publishes strategic reports through the METRI Innovation Centre, and articles in software metrics related magazines. Furthermore, he frequently speaks at international conferences.
Prabha Anand
Cognizant AVP Delivery Excellence
Prabha Anand is part of the Delivery Excellence Team in Cognizant and she leads the Delivery Platform and Tools Portfolio. Her primary focus areas include the Enterprise Program and Project Management Platform, Engineering Tools for different service offerings including Agile and Devops tools, tools to assess and measure Code Quality, accelerators to help in Application Modernization and Forward Engineering.
Prior to joining Cognizant, Prabha worked for DSQ Software, Scandent Networks and Hexaware Technologies. She began her career as an AS/400 Programmer and has handled many portfolios like Systems Analyst, Database Designer, Project Manager and Program Manager. In the Process and Quality Domain, she has held positions of Software Quality Assurance Manager and SEPG Head. She has participated in Organization wide CMMI Assessments as Lead Assessor.