Month: March 2022

KoJo Addae-Mintah is president and CEO of WhirlWind Technologies. As the company’s founder, he has been responsible for the domestic growth and international expansion of WhirlWind since its inception in 2009.

According to Mr. Mintah, “WhirlWind is committed to inspiring positive change in the communities we serve across the nation and the world, so that businesses thrive, people are empowered, and everyday lives are improved.” He is a board member of the D.C. chapter of Entrepreneur Organization; mentors Washington-area students through the National Foundation for Teaching and Entrepreneurship; and co-chairs KoJo Works, an organization he established to develop and nurture entrepreneurs in Ghana, West Africa.

With a continuous thirst for knowledge, Mr. Mintah has completed executive education programs in entrepreneurship, business strategy, finance, and operations at Harvard, MIT, the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business, and London Business School.

Sean Trice will assume the role of Acting President of WhirlWind. He will lead all corporate strategy, operations, and management, in support of our domestic and international growth. All members of the executive leadership team will report directly to Sean. Sean has been serving as our outside corporate council and is a seasoned business leader, with more than 25 years of leadership experience. Prior to Sean’s legal career, he played a critical role in major initiatives at Booz Allen, managing a staff, in excess of 150, and programs and task orders that support the defense and intelligence community. Sean also has expertise in business strategy, technology and operations and will play pivotal part in our strategic transformation. We welcome Sean as a member of our team.

Annette Hagood is the director of Business Growth and Marketing and leads the business development and account efforts for frontier accounts. She is also responsible for the internal and external communications and branding efforts at WhirlWind. 

Prior to joining WhirlWind in 2021, Ms. Hagood was head of federal services strategy and business development at Ricoh where she was responsible for the go-to-market strategy and IT services growth. She has also held similar roles at Xerox/Conduent Services, Deloitte, AT&T Government Solutions, and IBM where she consistently made the 100% Club. 

Ms. Hagood holds a BSc double major in Chemistry and Zoology from the University of the West Indies and a MSc in Computer Science from Howard University. She has also completed certifications at the MIT Sloane school of management in business strategy for 21st century organizations. She has also competed training in Solution Selling, Challenger Sales and Marketing, Public Relations, Business Process Reengineering, and the Shipley Proposal Process. 

Ms. Hagood is also certified in Product Marketing and Product Management and is a published author of technology topics that include database, network, storage infrastructure and application development paradigms; management topics include treatises on establishing strategic alliances and launching products and Services. She created the “New Offer Enablement Framework” to accelerate the deliberation of bringing products and services to market. 

To give back to her community, Annette focuses on encouraging STEM education by volunteering with the Girls in Technology organization, The Taproot Foundation, and as an Adjunct Professor at the UMUC. 

Lacretia Pickett is director of finance and contracts at WhirlWind Technologies and a seasoned leader with over a decade of financial experience in the government consulting industry. In her role, Ms. Pickett oversees and manages the Finance and Contracts department, which includes planning, developing and implementing policies, procedures and objectives of the contracts administration and finance functions.

Before joining WhirlWind in 2016, Ms. Pickett held various finance and contracting roles. Most  recently, she served as the finance manager at Spartan Business & Technology, where she was responsible for managing the P&L. Ms. Pickett brings deep experience in driving transformational change in a rapidly growing organization.

Ms. Pickett holds a Master of Arts in procurement and acquisitions management from Webster University and a Bachelor of Science in business administration from Auburn University at Montgomery. She is certified in government contracting.

As Vice President of Operations, Carol Washington drives WhirlWind’s daily business operations to meet objectives for growth, profitability and sustainability.

Before joining WhirlWind Technologies in 2020, Ms. Washington held positions leading large multidisciplinary solution teams through transformation initiatives and was also responsible for developing and leading a large government Enterprise Program Management Office supporting 22 contracts and 200 projects.

Ms. Washington holds a Master of Science in administrative sciences, management information systems from the George Washington University. Additionally, she holds a Bachelor of Arts in business, computer information systems from Notre Dame of Maryland University. Ms. Washington is a certified Project Management Professional (PMP), Certified Scrum Master (CSM), ITIL v3, ISO 9001:2015 Internal Auditor, CMMI Professional, and CMMI v2.0 Associate.

Mark Fields is an Information Technology (IT) leader with over 25 years of professional experience. He is a change agent who designs and implements IT Enterprise Infrastructure, cyber security, and cloud system architecture. 

Mark leads the Client Delivery organization and maintains the corporate technology infrastructure. He also ensures that client deliverables create the highest NPS score for WhirlWind.

Prior to joining WhirlWind in 2016, Mr. Fields held several leadership roles delivering offerings that modernized and enabled government agency operations at the Department of Energy and the TSA. He was also instrumental in driving company growth at UUNET/MCI. 

Mr. Fields holds a BSc in Computer Information Technology, and a MSc in Information Systems Technology from the George Washington University. He maintains the following professional certifications – PMP, and CISSP. Mr. Fields also proudly served in the U.S. Air Force for 4 years as an avionics navigation systems technician. 

Rhonda Dobbins is executive vice president at WhirlWind Technologies. She leads financial operations and business development in support of the CEO’s vision of domestic and international growth. She is also responsible for all aspects of corporate social responsibility and other ESG initiatives.

Before joining WhirlWind in 2016, Ms. Dobbins held senior management positions at PWC, IBM and Booz Allen Hamilton, where she provided support for large federal agencies. Ms. Dobbins has also owned and operated a management consulting and professional services firm, RDG Business Consulting Group.

Ms. Dobbins holds an MBA and a Bachelor of Science in computer science from Morgan State University. She is PMP certified and a LeanSixSigma Black Belt.

National Harbor, MD

WhirlWind Technologies today announced they have partnered with CloverDX, the enterprise Data Management Platform company, to further enable Government agencies a path to rapid modernization. This announcement demonstrates WhirlWind’s commitment to the Data Management marketplace by ensuring that their portfolio of products and services can provide real business value to clients.

The CloverDX Data Management Platform facilitates automated data ingestion, multi-cloud data migrations, application integration, real-time data processing, data transformations and data quality management. As a result of this partnership, Whirlwind Technologies reenforces its commitment to the data management marketplace.

WhirlWind Technologies data experts are now armed with additional tools and expertise to help organizations manage complex data management use cases across the lifecycle of their data.

“The ability of our customers to now be able to access, harmonize, transform, process and move data spanning various endpoints and across any cloud or on-premises infrastructure has never been more important as agencies work to modernize, innovate and bring new services to citizens. We are pleased to be working with CloverDX and we look forward to demonstrating the real value this partnership delivers for our clients,” said KoJo Addae-Mintah, CEO, and founder of WhirlWind Technologies.

“Our data management platform offers a mature, well-proven environment for managing data pipelines of any complexity,” said David Pavlis, CEO and Founder of CloverDX, “CloverDX is a great fit to enable WhirlWind’s vision of delivering on a unified architecture to their customers, and we are delighted to have them as a partner to help tackle their customer’s data challenges.”

About CloverDX

CloverDX helps organizations tackle tough data challenges. The CloverDX Data Management Platform brings enterprise automation and a productivity boost to those who want to challenge the status quo and solve hard problems once and for all. CloverDX’s powerful transformation capabilities and focus on automation from A-Z, all backed by a reliable and scalable operations foundation, helps companies build and manage better data pipelines and deliver better data outcomes. Find out more at www.cloverdx.com.

Media Contacts:
Annette Hagood: ahagood@wwindtech.com

Jay Benedetti: jay.benedetti@cloverdx.com

WE HAVE MISSION-CRITICAL POSITIONS SUPPORTING OUR GOVERNMENT CLIENTS.

Come join our team of skilled “A” players who enjoy the flexibility of remote work and know that teamwork makes us winners. You will also receive a robust benefits package including 11 company-paid holidays, generous PTO accrual, and a company *401(k) percentage match*. If this sounds like the track for you, climb onboard.

Let’s take this down the homestretch!

https://wwtech.isolvedhire.com/jobs

Data Management in the New Year

AI Takes Center Stage

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is an area of computer science that studies the possibility of ‘thinking’ machines and computers.  According to the National Artificial Intelligence Act of 2020, the term ‘artificial intelligence’ means a machine-based system that can, for a given set of human-defined objectives, make predictions, recommendations or decisions influencing real or virtual environments.”

No longer the experimental darling of prior years, machine learning will take center stage in the data management space in 2022.  It is expected to be the most important technology adopted, transforming key processes and business models to take advantage of ML.  With the necessary algorithms, compute power, hardware, and skillsets, AI can become the fundamental driver for revenue and growth. Here are a few new AI use cases in the data management space, that will flourish in 2022

Green AI 

The UN Climate Change Conference, COP26, in Nov’21, continued to emphasize outcomes that directly impact climate action and the Sustainable Development Goals. How can AI help with this endeavor? The airline industry has a call to action, and they are beginning to respond. For example,

Alaska Airlines is using an AI platform, Flyways, to produce the best ways to route aircraft; By analyzing volumes of weather data and suggesting paths that avoid turbulence to provide smoother flights or shorter paths. With just-in-time data analytics, operators are given suggestions on how and where to fly planes, with the platform getting better since it is a machine learning and a dynamically updating ecosystem. Predictive analytics not only support weather, air traffic, and other aspects impacting the flight it could choose to delay a flight to help avoid a weather system or gridlock in the landing pattern thus ultimately reducing flight time, fuel burn, and emissions – ultimately reducing the carbon footprint.

Customer Experience – AI in the call center  

Customer service data management is key to driving a better customer experience.  Executive Orders 12862, 13571,13707,13985, dating back to 1993, set the foundation for improving customer experience and service delivery – putting people at the center of everything the Government does. The use of AI to unlock data that is kept in the millions of daily customer-service conversations between the government and the public will yield a treasure trove of information for predictive analytics. This “speech mining™” provides new CRM use cases with the application of AI tools and techniques

Lean Data Management™

Driven by remote work and learning, data, compute, and workloads will move to the edge where it is more efficient to consume and manipulate.  Some industry analysts predict that 2022 will be the year that 75% of enterprise-generated data is processed outside the traditional data center. Data management must therefore follow.  Current edge computing platforms were not designed to handle vast amounts of data cost-effectively. However, if the data is cleaned, and only the relevant blocks pertinent to analytics is retained then this “lean data management” concept can produce useful models for ML algorithms.

Enterprise Data Fabric (EDF)

model and integrate data at whatever level of granularity desired. It anticipates the need to connect data across the enterprise at speed and scale for dynamic decision-making. To this end, it uses multiple technologies that enable metadata-driven implementation and augmented orchestration design. EDF will help organizations make decisions faster and can create Cognitive Zones™ that also ultimately assist citizen data scientists.

Graph Data Bases 

A graph database is a data model that uses two basic building blocks: nodes, containing all the properties of the entity, and vertices. It utilizes the simple idea of using vertices to establish relationships between pairs of nodes.  It is, therefore, better suited for rapid decision making, and visualization of relationships.

When retrieving data is more important than storing it, the data is interconnected and there is a need for complex relationship analysis, graph databases will see much use. Examples of some use cases are fraud detection, anti-money laundering, population dynamics, virus spread during a pandemic, crime prevention, air traffic management etc.

The above discussion provides only a teaser post for my thoughts on Data Management in 2022, and some of the technologies that could impact this space.  If this has piqued your interest stay tuned for more articles in the future.

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