State’s Top Tech Execs Pick Winners in Case Study Competition

A group of state technology leaders were the judges — and they’ve rendered their verdict — in a new annual case study competition for business graduate students in the Sacramento region.

The first annual Gartner Sacramento Case Study Competition for students in a Master of Business Administration program has a goal of “attracting the next generation of leadership talent in order to solve the most complex public sector technology challenges,” according to a LinkedIn post by Eugene Martinez, the Sacramento-based senior managing partner for Gartner Consulting.

The panel of judges for the contest included Liana Bailey-Crimmins, the state’s chief information officer and director of the California Department of Technology; George Okamoto, agency information officer for the California Labor and Workforce Development Agency; and George Akiyama, chief information officer for the California Department of Transportation.

“This case study competition provided a great opportunity for MBA students to understand some of the challenges that our public-sector IT community faces,” Martinez told Industry Insider — California on Monday. “The judges were fantastic and very generous with their time, and the students were very appreciative of receiving the chance to get direct feedback from some of the most senior leaders in our IT community.”

The six winners and their universities are: Cameron Snyder (University of San Francisco), Archana Das (University of California, Davis), Hang Le (USF), Kritika Singh (UC Davis), Yilei Ge (UC Davis), and Sadique Mohammad Abdullah (USF). Placing second were Rajeev R. Devarahalli and Shruthi Boggram Sathyamurthy, and Chi K. Tran and Kanhatai Budmuang placed third.