Guest · Experiential and events
Elizabeth Kiehner
Chief Strategy Officer, Nortal
Elizabeth Kiehner is Chief Strategy Officer at Nortal, the digital transformation company that led the digitalisation of Estonia and now operates across 26 countries with 2,300 people. She joined as Chief Growth Officer in 2022 and was appointed Chief Strategy Officer in November 2025. Her thesis is simple: in transformation work, trust is the primary marketing asset.
About
Elizabeth Kiehner is Chief Strategy Officer at Nortal, the Estonia-headquartered digital transformation company known for leading the digitalisation of the Estonian state. She leads growth, strategy, and commercial development for Nortal Americas, including M&A, market expansion, and partner ecosystem development.
Elizabeth’s career spans advertising, design, digital transformation, and data and AI. She started at Havas in Chicago, moved into UX and digital production in New York, co-founded Thornberg & Forester which she ran for eight years, then joined IBM where she spent five years as Global Design Practice Director and then Global Leader and Design Principal. From IBM she went to Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center to build its Digital Transformation Office during the pandemic, then to Capgemini to lead the Reinventing Work practice.
At Nortal, the marketing challenge is fundamentally about trust. Forty percent of Nortal’s clients are government or public sector. Critical infrastructure has a zero error rate. In that context, the credibility signals that matter are not brand campaigns but a prime minister’s endorsement, a client referral from a trusted peer, and the ability to get a subject matter expert on stage at an event rather than behind a booth. Elizabeth’s Creative Service Desk, built in her first year, follows the sun from the US to Europe so that proposals can be designed overnight.
Career19 years
- 2025 to now Nortal Chief Strategy Officer
- 2022 to 2025 Nortal Chief Growth Officer
- 2021 to 2022 Capgemini VP, Enterprise Transformation
- 2020 to 2021 Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center Digital Transformation Office
Show earlier roles: IBM, Thornberg & Forester
- 2015 to 2020 IBM Global Leader and Design Principal; Global Design Practice Director
- 2007 to 2015 Thornberg & Forester CEO and Founding Partner
How Elizabeth thinks3 convictions
-
Trust is the primary marketing asset in transformation work
Nortal’s marketing challenge is not attention or awareness. It is credibility. When a government is considering entrusting its national financial management system to a technology partner, no brand campaign closes that gap. What closes it is a prime minister’s endorsement, a peer referral, a published outcome that shows exactly what was delivered and to what standard. Elizabeth’s marketing strategy is built around accumulating those credibility signals and making them available at the moment of evaluation.
-
Field marketing with subject matter expertise beats branded booths
Elizabeth’s field marketing philosophy is built around two conditions: Nortal’s experts must be on stage, not behind a stand, and meetings must be scheduled and matched rather than left to conference serendipity. Events are selected only if Nortal has a speaking slot. Keynotes create a halo effect that booth presence cannot. The Creative Service Desk follows the sun model with European staff designing proposals while the US team sleeps.
-
Make complex things sound effortless
Elizabeth’s most consistent hiring criterion is the ability to strip engineering complexity down to the value it creates and tell that story clearly. She connects it to her own journalism background: you interview subject matter experts to find the golden thread, and then construct the narrative from the value endpoint backwards. The skill is rare. Companies that have it in their marketing team can compete against Accenture, Deloitte, and IBM with a fraction of the brand spend.
