Her Story
About Debbie
I started my career in 1971 right out of high school as a data entry operator with Fleming Foods, and I went to college at night to get my IT degree. What I found out was that the college at that time was so far behind in technology that I was actually learning more at work than I was in college. When I left Fleming Foods, I went to work as an assistance analyst, which was my favorite job because I actually got to do flow charting of all the processes and steps. I was working for an international freight forwarding firm, helping them with how they completed a bill of lading. At that time, they were actually using typewriters and making copies - you had to have 35 copies for the bills of lading - so I helped them automate that. I was a programmer, I was a data entry teacher, an analyst. I was kind of the in-between person between the technology programmers that were actually programming in COBOL at that time and the forwarding people who knew nothing about computers. The guy I worked for was actually retired from Johnson Space Center, so I learned so much from him at that job. I was primarily in management through the entire 80s, running a VAR in Houston, a value-added reseller. Then I actually went into sales in the early 90s, and I wondered why I ever even considered management because sales was so much more fun and much more money. I went to work for a software company, and then for a company called Ampex out of Redwood City. When I left Ampex, I went to work for Peregrine, which was really where I moved into software sales. That's where I really started getting into solving problems for companies with solutions, being able to show them how they could use IT solutions to save money, time and money, and get to their goal faster. When I went to work for Peregrine, they were bought by HP, so I worked for HP Enterprise in their software division for a little while. Now I'm working for a VAR out of San Antonio, kind of back to where I was in the 80s, providing solutions to large enterprise data centers.
Her Interview
Ten minutes with Debbie
01What do you attribute your success to?
I think knowing people and being able to meet people and have an effect on their careers has probably been my biggest achievement. I had so much experience, even while I was really young, and when I worked for companies, you would meet these very aggressive guys and girls that wanted to make a ton of money in the computer industry. I was like, you know, it doesn't work that way. Your knowledge is what's going to make you successful, not who you know and how great a salesperson you are. So I think just mentoring the people and watching them grow has been probably one of my personal achievements.
02What are the biggest challenges or opportunities in your field right now?
AI is more a curiosity to me. I've seen this happen several times in the computer industry, where everybody gets all excited about technology, and then everybody's trying to jump on the train without really knowing what the train is. I've seen it many times in the computer industry. So I think it's going to change, but I think it'll bring a lot more opportunity from an IT perspective into our technology industry. It's just going to change the way we do IT. The internet did that, cell phones did that - there's a lot of things I can name over the last 50 years that have done that, and AI is just kind of the next stepping stone. It's not something you can install and it magically works, contrary to everybody's belief. It's not like Microsoft Word where you just load it up and start learning.
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