It’s never too late to fi nd a mentor. Socarras says that with her new position at Chesapeake, she has sought out a mentor in a similar position to help her learn what she needs to know to be successful.
When asked to give her best advice to young Hispanics embarking on their future careers, she suggests taking it one day at a time and to keep working toward your goal. She believes in working now as if you were in the position you want for yourself in the future.
“Just go for what you want. The world has many obstacles, so don’t try to set your own. Sometimes you just have to take the leap and build your wings on the way down.”
How Ivonne Valdes
Entered and Thrives in IT by Frank McCoy
As a teen, Ivonne Valdes developed a lifelong commitment to providing quality service while working in her father’s public accounting fi rm. She says that her dad told her, “The customer is king, and when a customer walks in the door, you stand for the business.”
As Vice President of the WW Technology Services Go-To-Market unit at Hewlett-Packard (HP), a $111 billion global information technology (IT) company, she practices what she learned while designing and implementing go-to-market strategies to exceed previous revenue growth. Valdes, who joined HP in 2010, says, “We have to build values because we want the customer for life.”
In the early 1970s, when Valdes was a teen, she says few people knew what information technology was, and few women were in IT. Her progressive parents, however, created a platform for success by telling their
Ivonne Valdes
three daughters—all excellent math students—that education would prepare them to do anything they wanted.
To Valdes, then and now, technology is a green fi eld of exciting innovation with a global impact. As a young person, “The burgeoning industry looked chaotic, but it just called to me,” she says.
To bring order to her calling, in college, Valdes acquired critical business attributes: problem-solving and communications skills that would attract employers. She majored in psychology and says her clinical training taught her logical thinking, how to listen, and how to read scenarios.
Upon joining HP, Valdes built a New Business Go-to-Market team that has multi-billion revenue and growth targets, and her group, she says, views everyone in company-wide cross- matrix teams or, externally, as valued customers.
How does that translate? Valdes has taught her group how to develop strategies, know when to triage, apply knowledge tactically, build infrastructures, and create roadmaps to the desired business result.
34 HISPANIC ENGINEER & Information Technology | SPRING 2018
Her team develops and implements a repeatable methodology to accelerate time-to-market by creating easy-to- access and easy-to-use go-to-market customer information packages available in digital form that can be read within three minutes. A new service will contain material that provides both external and internal media viewpoints and looks at assets on a quarterly basis. Customers want pertinent information in the immediate form, and Valdes says they “want to know the business impact right up front and how it either helps make money or saves money.”
The best way to motivate a team, says Valdes, is to try to recognize real- time results, even small things, with praise and appreciation. Teamwork is based on personal and professional accomplishments, and everyone should know their participation is vital. “Defi ne the strategy and intent of a project, educate your team, and rally it,” Valdes says.
Ubiquitous Technology and Women in STEM Valdes says technology’s transformative impact is its interoperability, defi ned as working with or using parts or equipment
www.hispanicengineer.com
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