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Lee Ann Adams Mikeman

Vice President, Conference Planning & Special Events
Science Applications International Corp. 
McLean, Va.

PAST Lee Ann Adams Mikeman began her career as an administrative assistant supporting meetings and conferences at SAIC 25 years ago. About 10 years later she moved to the corporate level to begin consolidating meetings companywide. She now oversees a team of eight that coordinates meetings, conferences, and events. Earlier this year, she was promoted to vice president of conference planning and special events for the company.

CRED She began the process of rolling out a centralized meetings management program at SAIC back in 1994, long before the term “strategic meetings management” had been coined. Now, with the program firmly established, she and her team are saving between 10 percent and 20 percent of total meeting spend annually.

A-HA MOMENT Early in her career, she managed the meetings team that supported NASA under SAIC’s contract with the space agency. Yet, despite her successes in that role, she recognized that her department could do more for the company: “I had a strategic vision, and I knew that there was a place for the meetings department to be a centralized organization.” She transferred into the travel organization to begin developing an SMMP enterprise-wide. “We didn’t have a name for it at the time,” she recalls. “We were just calling the process ‘centralization’ or ‘consolidation.’”

SUCCESS STORY Among her greatest accomplishments are co-chairing the Groups & Meetings Committee of the National Business Travel Association and working on the task force that is developing a Strategic Meetings Management Certification (SMMC) program.

FORWARD THINKING She and her team are embarking on an initiative to streamline the payment process for meetings in order to track payments and reconciliations through the meetings technology system. In addition, she hopes to have the company’s online booking tool for air ticketing integrated with the meetings technology platform by early next year.

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