What does being an IBM Fellow mean to you?
It’s a humbling experience to be recognized among such an elite group. In the IBM Services organization, it means a lot to be an IBM Fellow and it comes with a wealth of responsibility. We’re not only ensuring our clients get the right level of support and innovation from us as a technical leadership group, but also at IBM internally, we’re helping move the company’s agenda forward by developing offerings, capabilities and new talent. Being an IBM Fellow gives us a platform to reach into all these areas that need to come together across the company to make IBM successful and in turn make our clients successful.
What is the project you are most proud of?
I am most proud of work we did with a U.S. federal agency designing and implementing an analytics program that helped shift the organization from analyzing data using spreadsheets to applying data science for speed and accuracy. The challenges were not only technology related, but also touched the culture of the organization and the change in doing business. The biggest impact to the agency was working at a fast pace in an agile manner to support the effort holistically from many points of view: people, business value, data, analytics, architecture, technology and infrastructure. In the end, we helped modernize the agency, helped educate the teams and shifted their mindset away from the standard “this is the way we’ve always done it.”
“Understand the problem from all angles to simplify the challenge and appreciate other’s perspectives, their cultures and their feelings.”
What did you want to be growing up?
I wanted to be in NASA, either as an astronaut or an engineer designing the next space shuttle or the systems monitoring the shuttle. I got into programming at an early age. My teachers and the people around me noticed that, beyond a natural ability, I was also having fun coding and playing with technology. Fast-forward 20 years: I am a Distinguished Engineer at IBM, Chief Technology Officer, Academy of Technology member and now an IBM Fellow using cognitive computing to solve some of the world’s toughest problems for our clients across different industries.
What’s a dinner table conversation like in your house?
My husband is also a Distinguished Engineer and my three boys are very interested in tech and how it works in our everyday lives. They bring a fresh and different perspective to what we do by asking the most simple questions. They often ask the question we sometimes forget to ask ourselves: Why?
Given our love for tech, we also have an “in-house research lab” set up with different types of computers where we explore and play with Raspberry Pi, circuit boards and coding. Sometimes we need to reel my oldest son back in!