Formula for Success with Maria Villar

Date: Friday January 27th, 2006
Time: 2:00 pm
Where: ECS 243

Abstract:

Women in technical leadership positions are scarce. There are various ways to become a leader and achieve success. Successful people know the importance of mentors and role models. Successful people also know how to increase their visibility but there are many other needed skills. It is in this spirit we invited Maria Villar to discuss her personal background and experiences that has shaped her career path, the key roles she has held at IBM over her 24 year career, and things she has learned as an IT professional leader in a historically male dominated field.

Bio:

Maria Villar is Vice President, Enterprise Business Information Center of Excellence, reporting into the office of the CIO. In her role, Maria is responsible for providing worldwide data warehousing, business intelligence solutions and enterprise wide information management/architecture services to IBM. Maria has been with IBM since 1982 and has held various leadership positions in IBM in both Software Development and Information Technology/Transformation. Maria has led development projects in advanced technology fields for IBM such as voice recognition, multimedia, advanced human computer interaction and machine translation. Her technical leadership in IBM was recognized in 2000 with a New Media Leadership award from US Hispanic Engineers and Information Technology Magazine. In 2001 and 2002 , Maria was recognized by Hispanic Business Magazine as one of the top 50 Hispanic Women in Business and also the 100 Most Influential Hispanics. Most recently in 2005, Maria was again recognized by Hispanic Business as one of 25 Elite Hispanic women. Maria is a leader in IBM’s diversity programs. She is co-chair at the Hispanic Executive Taskforce and the Multicultural Women Subcommittee. She also represents IBM externally at Hispanic and Multicultural industry events and with customers. Maria holds a Masters of Science in Information Systems and a Masters in Business Administration from the University of Miami , and a Bachelors in Computer Science from Florida International University . She is a member of the National Organization of Hispanic MBAs, Women in Technology (WITI) and the National Association for Female Executives.