Joe Dery joined Western Governors University’s College of IT as the VP & Dean of Data Analytics, Computer Science, and Software Engineering in 2023. At WGU, Joe is working to help more than 3,000 currently enrolled analytics students learn how to effect change in their professional roles – surgically balancing a combination of mathematics, data management, programming, and business influence skills. Prior to joining academia full-time, Joe spent much of his corporate career working for EMC – and later, Dell Technologies – where he joined as a "hands-on-keyboard" Data Scientist in 2011. Joe went on to hold leadership positions in Dell’s Sales, Finance, and Supply Chain organizations driving efforts in Data Science, Business Intelligence, Digital Strategy, and Digital Transformation. Across these domains, Joe’s efforts touched a wide variety of business problems, including ML-driven sales quota allocations, sales forecasting & opportunity prioritization, customer cross-sell/whitespace targeting, addressable marketing opportunity sizing, sales territory optimization, supply chain planning optimization, data/analytics literacy training, and self-service BI. Building from his experiences, Joe is often invited to speak on the crucial role of decision intelligence frameworks, change management, and “improv” in bringing analytics solutions to life. Joe holds a PhD in Business Analytics & an MS in Marketing Analytics, both from Bentley University.