Tony Byrne oversees all Real Story Group's technology streams.

In 2001, Tony founded CMS Watch as a vendor-independent analyst firm that evaluates digital markting and workplace technologies and publishes research comparing different solutions head-to-head. Today Real Story Group covers ten different marketplaces, with a focus on customer experience technologies. 

Unique in the analyst industry, Real Story Group only works for technology buyers and never vendors.  RSG's vendor evaluations are considered the toughest in the industry, and research and advisory services for DX/CX stack owners offers unique candor and depth.

 

Jarrod Gingras is Real Story Group’s Managing Director and an analyst covering Digital Workplace and Marketing technologies. He is the author of The Right Way to Select Technology, published by Rosenfeld Media.

As a conference speaker and consultant, he regularly advises some of the world’s largest and most complicated enterprises on their enterprise information challenges.

Prior to joining Real Story Group, Jarrod worked as a web developer, information architect and user interface designer at a systems integration firm, where he developed user-focused content management strategies and solutions for clients in a multitude of industries.

Jarrod’s passions include following Boston’s sports teams, relaxing in Costa Rica with his wife Lindsey, and helping enterprises select the right technology for their unique needs.

Susan Hanley is an information architect and business analyst specializing in intranets and collaboration solutions. She is a recognized expert in the field of intranets, knowledge management, collaboration, and information architecture and has helped organizations of all sizes to optimize their use of the Microsoft 365 platform. Susan's expertise has earned her the coveted Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) award for M365 Apps and Services, which recognizes exceptional contributions to the Microsoft community. She is a frequent speaker at conferences and events, where she shares her insights and best practices on how organizations can build and manage intranets and knowledge management solutions.

Follow Sue on X @susanhanley.

 

 

Jill Hannemann is the Western regional lead for Avanade Advisory Modern Workplace. She is a recognized expert and frequent speaker in the topics of Microsoft 365 adoption, migration, governance, and information architecture. She brings over 15 years’ experience with information architecture design, taxonomy and metadata design, information governance, search, and enterprise content management system design to drive user adoption and return on investment. As a seasoned IT business consultant, Jill brings real life experience in the full development cycle for deployments and migration to cloud collaborative technology.

A proven leader in Content and Information Management, Laurence has two decades of experience solving the challenges organizations face as they implement and deploy information solutions. The author of Word of Pie, Laurence is a respected voice in the industry, contributing to multiple publications and speaking regularly on Content and Information Management and how technology can address the challenges people face today and tomorrow.

Laurence helps organizations develop and implement their Content Management and Information Governance strategies. He has led a wide range of projects including content digitization, Records Management, BPM, and Collaboration for both the commercial and public sectors. These projects have spanned multiple technologies from proprietary systems, such as Documentum and SharePoint, to open source solutions including Alfresco and Nuxeo.

 

Kamran Khan has experience spanning over 25 years in the enterprise search industry.  In 2005, after serving as worldwide sales and marketing executive for an enterprise search product company, he co-founded and served as President and CEO of Search Technologies, a technology services company dedicated to helping organizations build effective and scalable search-based applications.

He successfully grew Search Technologies to 200 people throughout six countries, serving 800 enterprise and government clients globally.  It was acquired by Accenture in 2017, forming the Search & Content Analytics practice of the Applied Intelligence business. Kamran currently serves as the Managing Director, providing his expertise in business management and technology sales and services.

Rob serves content and collaboration professionals with research in the areas of information workplace and collaboration strategy. Rob delivers strategic guidance, helping enterprises define enterprise that drive efficiency and competitive differentiation. His current research focuses on core elements of collaboration strategy including collaboration platforms, workspaces and enterprise social strategy.

Rob comes to Forrester with many years of experience in enterprise software consulting, product marketing, product management, and strategy. Most recently, he was director of product management with Microsoft where he played a strategic role with Duet, a joint initiative brought to market with SAP. Prior to Microsoft, Rob was a senior director of product marketing with Oracle Corporation where he focused on Oracle's content, collaboration, portal and business intelligence offerings. He also spent fifteen years in consulting working for Lotus/ IBM and other global software services firms with a focus on corporate collaboration.

Rob holds a BA in Economics from The University of California, Davis.

Stephanie is the president of Dovecot Studio -- a boutique firm specializing in information architecture -- where she helps a wide variety of clients such as Nickelodeon and the United Nations find happiness and good user experience through taxonomy. Stephanie has been working in the information management industry for nearly a decade, helping create strategies and content structures to support faceted search, digital asset management and website navigation, to name a few. Prior to focusing her energies on Dovecot, she was a senior consultant and taxonomy practice lead with Earley & Associates. Most recently, Stephanie was Director of Search & Content at the Yellow Pages. Stephanie has a Masters degree in Library and Information Studies (MLIS) from McGill University with a specialization in knowledge management.

A former technical editor and writer for the Boeing Company, Hugh McKellar has more than 30 years of experience with the technical and business press in a variety of management roles. Prior to joining KMWorld as Executive Editor in 1999, Hugh developed business plans and content strategies for a number of B2B Web sites. He is a member of the founding board of governors for The George Washington University Institute for Knowledge and Innovation.

Lee Rainie is the Director of Elon University's Imagining the Digital Future Center, an initiative that works to discover and broadly share a diverse range of opinions, ideas and original research about the impact of digital change, informing important conversations and policy formation.

He assumed that role in early 2024 after serving 24 years as the founding director of Internet and Technology research at the Pew Research Center, a non-profit, non-partisan "fact tank."

At the Pew Internet Project, his team produced more than 850 reports about the social, political and economic impact of four technology revolutions: the internet/broadband revolution, the mobile connectivity revolution, the social media revolution, and the artificial intelligence revolution.

His Project was described by the American Sociological Association as the “most authoritative source of reliable data on the use and impact of the internet and mobile connectivity,” and the ASA awarded him its prize for “excellence in the reporting on social issues award.” His work has been covered by network and cable news and every major global news publication.

Lee is co-author of “Networked: The New Social Operating System” and five books about the future of the internet, based on Project surveys.

Prior to his work at Pew, Rainie was managing editor of the newsweekly magazine U.S. News & World Report and he previously covered American politics for several publications.

 

Shawn Shell is the Executive responsible for Avanade’s Advisory Services practice in the mid-West. Shawn has spent nearly 30 years in the information technology field. For more than a decade, Shawn has concentrated on assisting his clients chart their journey to improved operations and employee productivity through various portal & collaboration solutions, as well as enabling operational technologies. He is an expert on SharePoint, Office 365, cloud-based application development, and IoT solutions. Shawn is also a Contributing Analyst for the Real Story Group and a frequent conference speaker.

Prior to Avanade, Shawn was a Vice President in Hitachi Consulting’s Digital Practice. He was also Founder & Principal Consultant at Consejo, Inc, held various leadership roles at Dell, was an adjunct professor in Rutgers University’s Department of Computer Science, and started his career at Warner-Lambert Company, now Pfizer.

You can follow Shawn on Twitter (@shawnshell)

Dave Snowden is Director of the Cynefin Centre and founder and chief scientific officer of The Cynefin Co.  His work is in the area of naturalising sense-making, seeking to base social science research and practice in the natural science.  He is generally considered to be a pioneer in the application of complex adaptive systems theory to a range of social issues, and in the development of narrative as a method for research, knowledge discovery and distribution.  His work extends across government and industry in a variety of fields including knowledge management, strategic planning, conflict resolution, weak signal detection, decision support and organisational development.

He is the principle author of the recently published EU Field Guide to managaging in complexity (and crisis).  His paper 'Complex Acts of Knowing" is one of the top 50 cited papers in the field as is his cover article (with Boone) on Leadership and COmplexity in the HBR.

Snowden holds a variety of academic positions currently a visiting Professor at the Univrsity of Hull.  He has previously held positions at the Universities of Bangor, Stellenbosh, Pretoria, Canberra, Hong Kong Polytechnic University and Pretoria and is a visiting fellow at Warwick University, Nanyang University, the Universita' Cattolica in Italy and the Singapore Management College.  He was Director of the EPSRC (UK) research programme on emergence in 2006 and was appointed to the NSF (US) review panel on complexity science research in 2007.  He is also on the editorial boards of several Knowledge Management journals and is an Editor in Chief for Emergence, Complexity and Organisation.

He previously worked for IBM where he was a Director of the Institution for Knowledge Management and founded the Cynefin Centre for Organisational Complexity.  He was selected by IBM as one of six “on-demand” thinkers for a world wide advertising campaign.  Prior to that he worked in a range of strategic and management roles in the service sector.  He has extensive international experience and has been engaged in a range of DARAP and other government funded research programmes in the field of counter terrorism.  He lives in the UK where he pursues the co-evolutionary passions of Welsh Rugby and Wagnerian Opera.

Craig St. Clair is a principal consultant at Enterprise Knowledge LLC, an information and knowledge management consultancy with clients worldwide. Craig has over 15 years experience working in knowledge and information management, both as a consultant and as a practitioner for such firms as HOK, Dolby, and Genzyme. He is particularly interested in "information ecosystems" and specifically how knowledge can be effectively created, maintained and selectively redeployed throughout the enterprise.

MaryGael leads the Findability team within the EY Knowledge organization. The Findability team is responsible for enterprise search, metadata and taxonomy development and management, and knowledge resource curation (including cataloging). The team also advises stakeholders across EY on best practices to leverage the foundational SharePoint services and capabilities that drive findability (e.g., search, metadata management, site lifecycle management, and content management) within their business applications.