Our Team

	Rex Stringham, President and CEO
	Bruce Balentine, EVP and Chief Scientist
	Greg Volkart, CFO and Director of Administration
	Ken Hamer Hodges, VP of Engineering
	David Attwater, Senior Scientist
	Andrew Shaw, Senior Consultant
	Kathy Von Hatten, Senior Consultant
	Tracy Smart, Senior Consultant
	Susanne Kronenberg , Senior Consultant
	Susan Austin, Senior Consultant
	Edwin Elrod, Senior Consultant
	Daniele Lea, Senior Consultant
	Paula Bernard, Senior Consultant

Rex Stringham, President and CEO

Rex has over 20 years of experience in the telecommunications and health care industries. He is President and co-founder of Enterprise Integration Group, a professional services firm that specializes in improvement of self-service solutions using interactive voice response (IVR) and speech recognition. Over the last ten years, EIG has done extensive research on telephone voice user interface design best practices, and has helped improve IVR and speech recognition systems for more than 100 of the Fortune 500. EIG has a number of patents pending, but they remain “vendor neutral” in that they do not sell IVR or speech recognition platforms. The company headquarters is in San Ramon, California, with other offices in Austin, Texas and Zurich, Switzerland.

Prior to forming EIG, Rex held key positions at a Regional Bell Operating Company and a major hardware and software original equipment manufacturer. He was also Director and Principal Analyst for Telecommunications at Dataquest, an international market research and consulting company. His background includes marketing, operations, network engineering, regulatory relations and finance. His expertise includes network switching, signaling, and operational support systems. He has been actively involved in EIG's voice response and speech recognition research and publications, training workshops, and consulting activities. He co-authored the landmark publication, “Improving Interactive Voice Response.” Rex has been featured on NBC's Today Show, and in leading publications including Investors Business Daily, Computer Telephony Magazine and Call Center Magazine, PC Week, and VARBusiness. He earned a Bachelors Degree in Economics and an MBA from Pepperdine University.

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Bruce Balentine, EVP and Chief Scientist

Bruce is a design consultant specializing in speech, audio, and multimodal user interfaces. During his 14 accumulated years working with speech recognition and related technologies, Mr. Balentine has designed more than a dozen user interfaces for telecommunications, desktop multimedia, entertainment, language training, medical, and home automation products. He received his undergraduate degree in 1971 and his Master's in 1975 from the University of North Texas with work in electronic music and intermedia. Bruce is also the author of the industry best-seller; "How to Build a Speech Recognition Application," which is considered the definitive style guide for human factors design in IVR.

Bruce Balentine Curriculum Vitae

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Gregory Henry Volkart, CFO and Director of Administration

Mr. Volkart has over 20 years of experience in the fields of General Management, Finance and Controlling. His background includes Coopers & Lybrand and the Credit Suisse Group, as well as senior management positions in the Swiss operations of ICL/Fujitsu and Nortel. He is founder and President of Volkart Management Consultants. Mr. Volkart is on EIG’s Board of Directors and is also an active board member for various companies in industries such as Food Products and Production, Management Consultancy and IT Services.

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Ken Hamer Hodges, VP of Engineering

Ken has 30 years of international experience at the forefront of the communications industry working among creative technology centered startups and multinational giants like Siemens, Alcatel and ITT on all aspects of Communications System Analysis, Software Design and Information Architectures. He holds a dozen patents in these fields and has been an invited speaker at conferences in Europe and North America on security, object based design, operating systems, communication architecture and distributed systems. Ken brings to EIG unique system analysis and program management expertise for large and small, public and private networked services. His specialist knowledge on the effective delivery of integrated voice and data application has enabled EIG to expand Best Practice services to include delivery and test. He has been a pioneer in EIG's use of automated test tools for voice services and plays a leadership role in developing integrated design and test methods for our customers.

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David Attwater, Senior Scientist

David Attwater has over 14 years experience researching and designing spoken user interfaces. He joined EIG in 2003 with responsibilities for user interface usability, design, research and development. David also manages the EIG UK Office. Before joining EIG he was head of the spoken dialog research team at the British Telecom Research Labs.

David has several international patents pending and numerous publications. He holds two engineering degrees from the University of York, UK.

Amongst David’s specific areas of expertise are applications using statistical language models, very large directory applications, and wizard of oz usability testing on live traffic. His current research interests include turn-taking and mixed-mode dialogue. He also has extensive experience in speech corpus collection and annotation management.

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Andrew Shaw , Senior Consultant

Andy Shaw has over 25 years experience designing and implementing IT solutions, with a proven track record of delivering successful ground breaking solutions. He has specialized in voice self service applications since 1994, designing innovative speech based IVR systems to solve challenging customer service problems.

Andrew's key areas of specialization include voice user interface design and human factors usability testing, but his experience includes project management, information systems strategy formulation, information and data analysis, business analysis, software engineering methodologies, structured systems analysis and design, object-oriented analysis and design, and CASE tools and methodologies.

Andrew's skills include business solution creation, project and program organization and planning, and team development, and he has domain knowledge of the financial, retail, and utility sectors. Andy was previously Senior Director of the Speech Solutions Group for Edify, and prior to that a Technical Leader for SRI Consulting.

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Kathy Von Hatten, Senior Consultant

Ms. Von Hatten has over 11 years of experience with speech recognition technology and user interface design for automated systems. Prior to joining EIG, she worked on a variety of projects involving speech recognition, natural language processing, and knowledge representation. She has user interface design experience in the utility, financial, and healthcare industries and has led usability testing for these industries as well. Ms. Von Hatten has a Bachelors degree in Mathematics and a Masters degree in Speech and Hearing Science, both from The University of Texas at Austin.

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Tracy Smart, Senior Consultant

Tracy is a senior consultant for Enterprise Integration Group with over 7 years of experience specializing in voice user interface research and design, speech application tuning, and usability testing. She has been involved in numerous IVR projects in the telecommunications, health care, utility services, retail, and financial industries. Before joining EIG, Tracy worked as a consultant in the speech technology group at a large telecommunications research lab. Tracy earned a Bachelor’s degree in German and a Master’s degree in Linguistics from the University of Texas at Austin.

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Susanne Kronenberg , Senior Consultant

Susanne has over 12 years of user interface design experience. She joined EIG in 2007 and is responsible for the development of the DACH market, the German language workshops and also provides consulting in user interface usability, design and development. Prior to joining EIG, Susanne worked with the Dialog Research group at Daimler AG. In this position, she designed and implemented multimodal human machine interfaces for Mercedes Car Group.

Susanne received her Ph.D. in Computer Science in 2001 from Bielefeld University. She also holds a Masters degree in Mathematics from the University of Paderborn (Germany) and a Masters degree in Computer Science from the University of Pennsylvania (USA).

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Susan Austin, Senior Consultant

Ms. Austin has over 18 years experience in the utility industry. Prior to joining EIG, she held key engineering and financial management positions at Pacific Bell. Ms. Austin has extensive interactive voice response user interface design experience in the utility, financial services and healthcare industries. Recent clients include Honda Finance, Vanguard, BlueCross BlueShield, Idaho Power, Utilicorp and NiSource. She has also managed usability and user acceptance testing for numerous large IVR projects. Ms. Austin has a Bachelors degree in Mathematics and Government from Smith College.

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Ed Elrod, Senior Consultant

Ed brings more than 20 years of telecommunications, interactive design, and management experience to EIG. He has developed telephony middleware and managed telephony application development for Unisys Corporation, and managed call center technology research for the Vanguard Group. For the last 5 years, he has worked as a consultant to the financial, power, healthcare, and transportation industries, focusing on interactive design and technology strategy. He holds a computer science degree from Georgia Tech, an MBA from Widener University, and is working toward a Ph.D. from Drexel University. He teaches as an adjunct professor at both Drexel University and St Joseph's University in Philadelphia, and doesn't get a whole lot of sleep.

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Daniele Lea, Director – Professional Services

Ms. Lea has over 12 years experience in the IVR, call center and CTI industries. Prior to joining EIG, she held consultant roles for US West, Genesys Telecommunications Labs, and Total Integration. As a professional services consultant, she spearheaded numerous implementation projects, specifically focusing on the customer-agent interaction. Ms. Lea has a breadth of experience with strategic planning facilitation and is knowledgeable in IVR user interface design in the utility and financial services industries. Recent clients include Duke Energy, Northern Trust, and Northeast Utilities. Ms. Lea has a Bachelors degree in Business Administration from the University of Colorado at Boulder.

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Paula Bernard, Senior Consultant

Paula has over 15 years experience in software engineering and product development, including ten years at InterVoice-Brite. Her background includes programming, software R&D, product engineering, training, sales support, and management of industry products. Upon leaving InterVoice-Brite, Paula started a successful software development firm where she manages projects, designs and develops software, and provides ongoing customer support. She holds a BA in computer science from East Texas State University.

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