ANA SIERRA

I've been in my field for about five to six years now, with this year marking my sixth year. I currently work as a data advocate at CDW, a role I've held for about 3-4 years. In this position, I clean up all of our internal data and provide insights and guidelines for all our internal teams. I'm in the data governance world, and this effort is being brought forward due to the AI boom. What we're trying to do is give guidance, provide structure to all the data within our company, and make sure that it's complete, accurate, and valid. I got my start in this field by chance, actually. We saw the need to create a team that provided these guidelines and oversaw the governance of the entire company. It started with us checking our partner data with all the partners we work for, and then it expanded to internal data as well. I didn't start in this role originally, but my previous role kind of related to it - it was data partner performance data management, where I checked my partner's data performance and provided insights on that. Before CDW, my first corporate job right out of college was at a company called Bright Star, where we distributed cell phones to different companies like Verizon and AT&T. That's where I learned a lot about EDI processing and data errors, which definitely helped me get an idea of how to manage data quality when I moved to CDW. One of my most notable professional achievements has been supporting the launch of our dashboard to all of our partners that we work with, where they can gather all the information that they're sending back to us, see if there's any gaps, and then work to improve those gaps so that we can have the best, latest information available to them.