IT Leadership Forum Speaker Profile: Kathleen Barret President and CEO, IIBA

Kathleen Barret
President and CEO, IIBA

Kathleen Barret is the Program Manager for the Global Resourcing Centre of Competency within BMO Financial Group. With her team of GR consultants, Kathleen oversees BMO’s relationships with its multiple suppliers of India-based development resources for its information technology organization.

Kathleen started with BMO Financial Group in 2000 as a Business Analyst within the Call Centre business area. In January 2003, she moved to the BMO IT Best Practices group to lead the organizational charge to standardize and ISO certify its requirements management process. From 2004 to 2006, Kathleen further refined and integrated the requirements management process as BMO adopted the CMMI software development framework. In late 2006, she accepted the role of Program Manager for GR, leveraging her experience and knowledge of business analysis to ensure effective off-shoring of development work.

In March of 2004, Kathleen became the first and current President of the International Institute of Business Analysis, a professional association focused on defining the Business Analysis Body of Knowledge^® (BABOK^®) and implementing a certification program for qualified practitioners.

Kathleen has over 20 years experience in the Information Technology field. Particular fields of expertise include networking, research, benchmarking, retail and e-business in large and small enterprises. In addition to BMO Financial Group, Kathleen has worked for major corporations such as Manulife Financial, Bell Canada, KPMG and IDC, and spent 10 years with a benchmarking consulting company, Real Decisions, that was later acquired by Gartner Group.

Kathleen received her degree in International Economics from Georgetown University.

Don’t miss her session Back to Basics - Coming out ahead after the recession is over at the IT Leadership Forum this November held in Phoenix, AZ.

http://iirusa.com/itleadership

Kathleen's biography courtesy of theIIBA.org

Intel Taps Facebook Multitudes for Massive Research Efforts in Volunteer Computing

According to TechNewsWorld.com, Intel has built an application that will connect Facebook's More about Facebook masses to a volunteer computing application designed to boost the research efforts of three nonprofit organizations.

Progress Thru Processors is launching as a public beta and is available to all Facebook users. It runs as a background process on the computer, automatically directing idle processing power to the researchers' computational efforts. When the user's computer needs the processor performance, the application shifts into idle mode.

Progress Thru Processors' desktop client and application are based on software developed by the National Science Foundation-funded BOINC project at the University of California, Berkeley.

The process utilizes volunteer computing, which according to the report, has been around for a long time.

Progress Thru Processors is starting out with only three research endeavors:

* Rosetta@home, which uses computing power to help find cures for cancer and other diseases such as AIDS and Alzheimer's;
* Climateprediction.net, dedicated to understanding global climate change by predicting the Earth's climate and testing the accuracy of climate models; and
* Africa@home, which is currently focused on identifying strategies to combat malaria by studying simulation models of disease transmission and the potential impact of new antimalarial drugs and vaccines.

What do you think about utilizing volunteer computing for the greater good? Would you like to implement or join this effort with your business? We'd like to hear your thoughts.