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Letina Connelly

Vice President, Chief Strategy Officer and CTO, IBM Asia-Pacific

Letina Connelly is a Global Strategist and Business Development Executive and Chief Technology Officer with an established Australian and International career. She has lived overseas for the past eighteen years where her career has taken her to the United States, Latin America, Asia, Japan, Europe and Africa. From 2006 she has focused specifically on emerging markets and emerging technology and trends. She was a founding member of IBM’s Growth Markets unit developing strategic business plans for Brazil, China, India, Middle East, ASEAN, Africa, Central & Eastern Europe and Russia/CIS. Letina pioneered a multi-year strategic deep dive approach, assessing the intersection of the markets near to long term attractiveness with IBM’s ability to execute. Resulting in endorsed strategic plans from IBM’s CEO & Chairman and senior management. Simultaneously, Letina created the Economic Prioritization model ranking promising emerging markets/countries beyond BRICS.

Located in New York from 2000 to 2006, Letina worked across three units over a six-year period. In IBM’s Corporate Strategy unit she was lead business development executive and link to the Corporate Technology & Research division here she was tasked with finding net new growth businesses for IBM. Having identified key forward thinkers across IBM globally from research to sales, Letina created a candidate list and gained support for launching three businesses. All three startup businesses are still growth engines today 10+ years later.

Letina joined IBM in 1986 as a Systems Engineer and has acquired a diverse network and skills set through technical, sales, services, marketing, strategy, product management, digital and emerging technologies such as pervasive computing (equivalent to mobility and IoT today).

Currently, as the IBM AP Chief Strategy Officer and CTO, Letina delves deeply into the identification of attractive market segments, whilst defining specific executable steps towards greater market share including innovative approaches to market supporting the transformation towards the Digital IBM. While in Japan, she created a startup business to focused on the mobile game industry a highly advanced disruptive industry which led to early understanding of the innovation, speed and digital-first operating models in play. Then designed a digital business model for IBM to bring to this market some of the innovations being developed in IBM. Leading to the early implementations of Digital IBM Japan as the first Chief Digital Officer role.

Today in her CTO capacity she has direct accountability for the technical vitality of the key technical talent across AP and creating a dynamic engaging buyer experience centre facilities for clients, partners, developers to see the application of IBM technology and experience an open high-speed facility to help buyers test the technology, establish experiments, try new approaches using modern design thinking methodologies as well as define roadmaps for thoughtful scale out programs. She draws on a vast network across the IBM to support these responsibilities.

During her career, Letina has lived or spent extended time in cities such as Sydney, New York, Bangalore, Sao Paulo, Dubai, Johannesburg, Beijing, Shanghai, Hong Kong, Prague and Tokyo. Letina holds a B.Sc degree majoring in Mathematics and Statistics from the Australian National University. Outside work her interests are broad – hiking, bike riding, photography, travel, music and family.

My Sessions

Session 5: How will we turbocharge natural resources value?

Level 6

Global transformations will put pressure on natural resources, but also create enormous opportunities to maximize efficiency. New technology solutions will be essential in driving improvements in efficiency and creating alternatives in energy and materials. We are at the cusp of an era of abundance when the tradeoffs between economic output and natural resources inputs can […]

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