Michael Hegdes has more than 30 years of working experience in several multinational organizations, and throughout the past 25 years, he has been involved in the area of IT. He started his career in the British Army and studied communications, getting a Bachelor's degree in Computer Sciences. After leaving the Army Hedges took a job with Shell as a Computer Operator on IBM mainframes. He then moved into programming (Fortran) in the Engineering industry, as well as project management. He has spent several years in the Middle East and Far East in various IT project management roles. Hedges moved into IT management in the early nineties and worked for Eastman Kodak for several years. He was responsible for leading IT in Europe and Asia. During this period he took an M.B.A at Oxford University England.

Hedges started with Medtronic in 2000 and spent the first five years leading the IT function for OUS (Europe and Asia). He then took on the role of VP, Enterprise Applications for Medtronic responsible for implementing enterprise applications such as SAP. Recently, he became the CIO of Medtronic reporting to James Dallas. Hedges current position involves the strategic leadership IT leadership across Medtronic globally. His main areas of interest are the utilization of IT for competitive advantage by understanding customers, competitors and the corporation.