Enterprise AI Advisory

What he does at ISG

As the leader of ISG’s business in EMEA and an Executive Board Member, Steve provides strategic insight and advice to help ISG’s clients solve their most critical business challenges, helping them adopt and optimize the technology and operating models they need to compete successfully. In particular, he uses his long experience and broad expertise to challenge and inspire them to think about their risks and opportunities in new and unexpected ways.

Past achievements for clients

Steve leads his team’s engagement with clients with an industry-recognized and highly valued perspective on the most important trends in business and technology. He asks and answers the big questions: Why do you need to transform? What’s your best way forward? What do you need to accelerate? And where should you invest your technology dollars to make it all happen?

Among his many client success stories, his ability to take in the big picture, define the problem and connect the dots to the right solutions helped one legacy postal and shipping giant transform itself into a modern logistics powerhouse. He also guided a global energy industry leader through a complex operating model and IT provider transition, helping them see past the obvious cost cutting measures to identify the root causes of their challenges—and delivering savings far beyond what they had imagined.

Loren Absher leads the ISG AI Advisory practice in the Americas, focusing on guiding enterprises through the rapidly evolving AI landscape. He excels in translating complex AI concepts into strategic, actionable plans, ensuring that artificial intelligence is not only understood but also effectively implemented to drive tangible business outcomes. His extensive experience across various sectors enhances his capability to address novel challenges, making him a pivotal figure in empowering businesses towards an AI-integrated future. 

Shafqat Azim is a Partner in ISG’s Digital practice and leads ISG’s Technology Modernization, M&A and Global Security practices. He brings more than 30 years of business and IT experience to the firm, including international business management experience in Southeast Asia and Europe. He leverages his personal expertise, experiences and successes, enabled by and ISG’s competencies and solutions to help Fortune 1000 global service providers and end client enterprises adopt and scale digital strategies and innovative business/technology models.

Dorotea Baljević is a Principal Consultant in the ISG solution of Cognitive and Analytics, enabling clients in their data transformations while delivering value across the entire ecosystem.

Dorotea provides the support and counsel to customers in their current and future digital journeys. Dorotea focuses on improving and enhancing the data and decision-making ecosystem to ensure healthy organisational longevity and relevance. Her spectrum of experience includes innovation, green-field environments, existing transformations (incl. building high performing teams) and decommissioning.

Adrian Cruz is an ISG Senior Consultant within the Digital Practice focused primarily on the Cloud Strategy Team, Project Estimation-as-a-Service Team and Data & Analytics Team with a specialization in Computational Data Analytics. With a driven and motivated mindset, he strives to achieve operational excellence for all his clients by seeking innovative and creative solutions to enhance business models for the digital future.
While at ISG, Adrian has produced impactful solutions for both internal and external facing projects. From a client perspective, Adrian has provided Data & Analytics Benchmarking services for over 10 clients within a span of a year, Project Estimation-as-a-Service expertise for over 30 projects at a leading energy and utilities organization, and Cloud Strategy solution development for a public sector client with a reach of over 8 local counties and a nationwide network for other services looking to be migrated into the cloud. Internally, Adrian has developed automation tools to increase efficiency in processes such as reporting, decision models, and matching algorithms using Python. He also currently leads the ISG Cloud+ Certification Program which provides advisors the opportunity to obtain Cloud related training.

Dr. Daniel Gerster is a Partner at ISG and offers clients more than 22 years of experience in strategic information management, thereof nine years as global CIO in a professional services company and more than 13 years in management consulting. Daniel helps CIOs and leading IT executives to successfully master digital transformation and to increase core capabilities such as organizational agility or resilience. He has a highly successful track record in CIO advisory. He is a well-known specialist for IT sourcing and contracting and covers commercial, legal and data protection aspects. He is a recognized speaker at conferences for IT executives, on IT events such as Sapphire, DSAG, VOICE, and BME IT Sourcing, VOICE Entscheiderforum.

Diwahar is a Principal Consultant at ISG’s Cognitive & Analytics advisory practice in EMEA. He helps clients leverage data, analytics, and AI to become data-driven enterprises. His advisory experience includes data-to-value realization, shaping data analytics & AI adoption strategies, building enterprise analytics capabilities, and sourcing implementation partners or technology vendors.

Prashant Kelker is Chief Strategy Officer of ISG, Partner of ISG Americas Consulting and a member of the ISG Executive Board (IEB). He was named to the IEB in January 2023. Prashant was appointed Chief Strategy Officer in 2018, responsible for developing the firm’s three-year strategic blueprint, and he was instrumental in the development of our highly successful ISG NEXT operating model in 2020.

In January 2023, he was named to the expanded role of Partner, Americas Consulting, bringing together all our advisory capabilities in the region to support our commercial and public sector clients in response to the growing convergence of digital technology and enterprise operating models, business processes and revenue-generating connected products and services.

Prashant joined ISG in 2012 from Accenture, initially working for our DACH business and based in Germany. He moved with his family to the United States in 2018. Prashant earned his MBA from the Indian Institute of Management in Bangalore and a BE in electronics from Bangalore University in India.

In ISG, Olga supports our advisory capability in developing digital solutions with special focus on data and analytics. Olga’s extensive knowledge of analytics and data engineering framework combined with hands on experience in complex transformational projects results in unique insights invaluable for effectively assessing the data analytics solutions for ISG’s clients.

David manages the software research and advisory for IT and leads the expertise in AI.  He oversees the team and expertise areas for software used by IT and for what is used by business. David leads the software research efforts in AI for IT and AI-infused software building on over three decades of experience in data and analytics. For decades, he has brought to market leading-edge analytics and data products in marketing and product leadership positions at Pivotal (a division of EMC), Vertica Systems, Oracle, Applix, InforSense, and IRI Software. David earned his MS in Business from Bentley University and a BS in Economics from the University of Pennsylvania.

Melissa Miears leverages 25 years of experience in strategic solution design and technology enablement to both ensure enterprises are gaining maximum value out of AI investments and providers are positioning solutions in the market correctly. She also drives innovative client transformation by utilizing AI and strategic insights to enhance business operations and competitive positioning. Her approach combines empathy with a deep understanding of industry-specific challenges, establishing trust and delivering outcomes that align closely with client objectives.