Technical opportunities abound in communications, hospitality & entertainment

These “people” industries strive to match employee diversity with their rapidly changing customer bases

These six women and one man work in an exciting range of technology related jobs

By Dan Margherita
Contributing Editor

'No company is going to succeed that doesn’t match its employees to its changing customer base,” declares Joe McInerney, president and CEO of the American Hotel & Lodging Association (AH&LA, Washington, DC).

AH&LA developed its strategic plan for diversity in 2004 and 2005. It launched a series of initiatives, including Women in Lodging (WIL), an industry-wide forum for female hospitality professionals. WIL’s mission is to promote women into executive positions in the lodging industry and contribute to women-led business development efforts.

The organization is seeing slow but steady improvement at every level of the industry in the numbers of all minorities, including women, African Americans, Asians and Hispanics, McInerney notes.

Progress in cable
The cable industry is also seeing progress for women in technology, according to research conducted by Women in Cable Telecommunications (WICT, Chantilly, VA). WICT interim president Parthavi Das notes that
last year, “Our research found that though women represented only 15 percent of all cable technology employees, women IT engineers and project directors had more than doubled
in just one year, from 11.5 percent in 2007 to 27.9 percent in 2008.” She attributes the improvement to WICT’s PAR initiative: pay equity, advancement opportunities and resources for work/life support. “The increase was consistent for both cable operators and programmers, reflecting the industry’s response to fast-growing new media and distributed-content systems,” Das explains.

However, she also notes that “In 2007, women of color represented 15.7 percent of all new media roles, but by 2008 had declined to 8.3 percent.” She thinks this may be a temporary glitch, caused by rapidly rising numbers of new media staff.

Matching the customer base
WICT encourages its members to be mindful of their customer bases. “Women make an estimated 80 percent of consumer spending decisions,” explains Alex Dombronovich, WICT’s VP of business development and marketing. “Companies that strategically adjust to the economic influence of women will find themselves far ahead of those that don’t.”

She thinks it’s clear that “Women within the industries are best positioned to align cable and other technology businesses with the mind-set that drives women’s purchasing behavior.” Engaging women from the inception of a technology product through to production and marketing, she believes, “Will ensure an industry’s share of the estimated $12 to $40 trillion in purchasing power that women will control over the next decade.”

ESPN’s Marina Escobar mixes technology and creativity
“I tell people that creativity is like a dimmer switch: how far up or down you turn it depends on you,” says Marina Escobar, senior director of creative technology at ESPN, the cable sports channel (Bristol, CT). Escobar has been
at ESPN for about a year and a half, leading teams developing innovative ways to serve sports fans.

“When people see my title, they ask about mixing ‘creative’ and ‘technology,’” she explains. “We are trying to bring in creativity from a technological standpoint, involving technology right from the conception phase, which people usually associate with creativity.”

The ten people on her team are the concept developers. They work closely with other departments on new ideas and technologies. “Each one has different experience and expertise,” Escobar says.

Besides guiding her team of developers, Escobar also advises ESPN leadership on hardware and workflow. “I research new technologies and push our existing solutions to the fullest to provide compelling data display tools.”

Developing the prototype
With a good idea in hand, the next decision is whether to push forward and develop a prototype. Escobar points to the EA Sports virtual playbook, launched last fall by EA Sports and ESPN for the network’s NFL studio shows, and more recently used for the NBA playoffs. This app lets commentators describe and dissect plays while showing virtual players on a regulation field or court.

More than two years in the making, the app won the George Wensel technical achievement award at the Sports Emmys this spring. “It takes the video game out of the game and puts it on screen,” Escobar says happily.

Escobar’s mother is from Colombia and her father is Spanish. She grew up in Little Rock, AR and is a 1987 graduate of the University of Oklahoma, where she majored in broadcast journalism with additional work in graphic design and theatre arts.

Much of her early career was spent in TV. She was the creative director and art director at WBIS (New York, NY), a 1996 partnership between ITT Corp and Dow Jones & Co which provided business, sports and entertainment programming 24/7.

She also worked as interim creative director at CNBC and director of broadcast creative services for Discreet, a division of Autodesk, where she was a key contributor in securing the use of real-time graphics for major broadcast accounts.

“I developed a deep understanding of graphics and how to use technology to help drive both design depth and productivity, and I realized that my background could be a differentiator,” Escobar says.

In 2002 she shifted careers, taking time out to run a restaurant featuring her mother’s home recipes. Then she worked as director of creative services for Melting Icecube Consultants, a company owned by her husband. “I helped the in-house group manage realtime graphics for special events like elections,” she explains.

On to ESPN
When it came in 2007, ESPN’s offer was compelling. “The idea of creative technology really appealed to me,” Escobar explains. “It was described as a ‘paradigm shift’ at ESPN that would let me be a leader, bringing groups together as teams and teaching them how to think with the right side of their brains.”

Today Escobar and her husband live midway between her post at ESPN’s Bristol, CT HQ and his NYC office. They have three children, two, five and fourteen years old. ESPN promotes a good work/life balance, and “It’s miles ahead when it comes to diversity,” Escobar says. Right now she’s applying to be a mentee in order to improve her skill sets in certain areas; later on she hopes to be a mentor to women coming into the organization.

“ESPN isn’t geared toward men; it’s geared toward sports fans,” she says. Besides, “I don’t think of myself especially as a woman or a Hispanic woman. I never wonder if something
would or would not have happened if I had been a man. I don’t carry around that baggage!”

Laurie Sutherland heads up IT in Comcast’s NorthCentral division
Laurie Sutherland has been with Comcast Corp (Philadelphia, PA), the largest cable company in the U.S., for thirteen years. Today she’s VP of IT for Comcast’s NorthCentral division, leading a group of pros that support 22,000 employees and 6.5 million customers.

Based in Chelmsford, MA, she oversees network, desktop, telecom, billing, system integration and apps development, serving five New England states plus New York, Illinois, Indiana and Michigan. Her area of oversight also includes call center technologies, order entry, sales and provisioning.

“When I was twenty-one this is not where I saw myself,” Sutherland admits with a laugh. “I was hoping to go into publishing.”

After she got her BA in English lit from Drew University (Madison, NJ) in 1981 Sutherland interned at IEEE’s Spectrum magazine (New York, NY) for nine months before leaving for Colorado with some friends to be “a ski bum.”

Later she took a job with a long-distance reseller and got hooked on technology. “I loved the complexity of the systems and the way they integrated with the network and contributed to the productivity of the businesses,” she says.

She returned to Massachusetts and worked at Harvard University (Cambridge, MA) for eight years, supporting telecom initiatives, including the installation of a new telephone system for the entire university.

Before she joined Comcast, Sutherland worked at Continental Cable, Media One and AT&T Broadband. Just before she started her current job she was IT VP for Comcast in New England, where she led the effort to combine billing systems and IT platforms of Comcast and AT&T Broadband, resulting in a smooth transition for more than 2.2 million customers.

As Comcast’s NorthCentral IT VP, Sutherland’s day is a full one. She has four people reporting directly to her and three more with a dotted-line relationship. “I’d say that most of my day is spent with my direct team, working with our corporate office to set IT strategy for the division. Then the full IT organization executes on the strategy.”

The entire IT division is made up of more than 300 people, she adds.

Work doesn’t end when she leaves the office. “A lot of what happens gets done during nontraditional hours,” Sutherland admits. “I have to be available 24/7.”

She gets home between five and six, spends time with her husband and two children, “and
then I get back to work until around 10 pm. I value the flexibility that Comcast allows me,”
she says.

Sutherland is a strong advocate for the cable industry and a member of WICT. Last year she received the excellence in technical achievement award from the society’s New England chapter. “Results-oriented employers like Comcast,” she notes, “are interested in what I accomplish.”

Sutherland volunteers her time to speak to middle and high school girls about opportunities in the technical fields. “I focus the conversation around my own experience balancing my career with my family,” she says.

David L. Cohen, Comcast EVP, says that “Comcast is deeply committed to diversity; it is an important component of our success. Through a wide array of multicultural programming, volunteering, investing in communities, working with diverse suppliers and recruiting and career development, diversity and inclusion are embedded within the culture of our organization.”

Sherisse Hawkins is a VP at Time Warner Cable’s advanced tech group
At Time Warner Cable (TWC, New York, NY), Sherisse Hawkins is VP of software engineering for one division of the advanced technology group. The group engineers all TWC customer-facing products related to TV, Internet and telephone. “When people order a movie through their TV set they’re using one of our products,” Hawkins notes.

“Our most popular feature lets our customers start a program over again if they missed the beginning. Another useful product offers on-screen notification of who the caller is when the telephone rings, if TWC is both their telephone and TV provider.

Hawkins’ typical day involves “meetings, meetings, meetings,” focusing on responsibilities like roadmap planning. There are also speaking engagements, and reaching out to universities to discuss new engineering projects.

Both Hawkins’ parents were in education, but she credits her high school calculus teacher with making math interesting and engaging. She went on to a 1986 BS in engineering from the University of Arizona; in 2000 she received an MS in engineering management from the University of Colorado.

She has worked for an impressive list of multinational companies, starting with a college internship with IBM and continuing through increasingly senior positions at Procter & Gamble; Walt Disney Imagineering, where she recalls she was involved “from blueprint and dirt to opening day” of Euro Disney; US West, and Divicom (now part of Harmonic, Inc) where she was a system architect.

Hawkins shares her time and talent with several professional organizations outside TWC. “I try to volunteer with one nonprofit organization each year,” she says. She’s deeply involved with WICT; its Rocky Mountain chapter named her its 2008 woman of technology. She served on the board of the Rocky Mountain chapter of the Society of Cable Telecommunications Engineers (SCTE) in 2007 and 2008. CableFAX named her a top-fifty woman in cable technology for 2007 and 2008. She was also membership chair of NSBE’s national alumni group and served on the board of the YWCA, speaking to community organizations and students.

Audiences, she says, tell her “You don’t look like an engineer,” whether because she’s a young black woman or because she’s physically very fit. “I do triathlons and I love yoga. I see value in doing healthy things; it keeps me sane,” Hawkins insists.

Also keeping her sane: her marriage and her daughter. “I think being a parent helps you to be a better manager and to treat people as individuals,” she concludes.

Rhonda Holt: SVP in technology at Turner Broadcasting
“Growing up in Gainesville, FL, all the kids were heavy duty into the aerospace program,” recalls Rhonda Holt. Holt has morphed that early interest in technology into her current job, SVP of digital media technologies for Turner Broadcasting System, Inc (Atlanta, GA).

Her group oversees technical ops and support for all Turner online properties in the U.S. and some abroad: all its websites related to news, entertainment and sports including CNN, TBS, Cartoon Network, Turner Classic Movies and more. “Our expertise is in the technical area,” Holt explains. “Our front-end developers work with the creative and editorial staff of each network to design, deliver and deploy all the sites.”

Holt has a 1986 BSCS from the University of Florida. A summer job at the college after her junior year set the seal on her career in computer technology.

“I was doing a large data entry project for the agriculture department,” she explains. “There were reams of data to sort, and it was then I realized what you could do with computers to turn data into useful information. I thought, ‘This is pretty cool. I like this!’”

When she graduated Holt found a job with IBM. In ten years she progressed from associate programmer to senior programmer manager. She went on to Sun Microsystems, where she was VP of storage systems engineering, then VP of grid computing operations, and Dell Computers, Inc, where she was VP of systems management software development. She joined Turner in 2006.

Working with minorities
Holt is committed to working with minorities in the field of communications technology. In 2007 she received the president’s award at the twelfth annual National Women of Color science, technology, engineering and math conference. Last year Black Herald magazine named her one of the most important African Americans in technology.

At Turner, Holt is the founder of the multicultural advisory council (MAC) for Turner Technology, Strategy & Operations. MAC works with employees from diverse ethnic and racial backgrounds and a variety of technology areas.

Loretta Young Walker, Turner SVP and chief HR officer, notes that “Diversity is one of the core operating principles that our CEO Phil Kent has identified for our company to help measure our collective progress and success.”

Balancing work and home life, Holt says, “is harder to do since we are always connected. I try to turn it into an advantage by integrating my work life with my personal time. Technology enables you to work from a myriad of places. You have to be more disciplined.”

Back at U Florida, she reflects, most of her fellow students were men. “Engineering is still heavily male dominated, so being a woman can make it harder to establish credibility. You have to prove yourself a lot more,” she thinks.

“On the other hand, the fact that there aren’t as many women in the field can lead to greater opportunities and some interesting jobs. I’ve enjoyed that aspect of it!”

EE/computer engineer Enrique Bastante is a PM at Nielsen
Enrique Bastante is a project manager for the Nielsen Co (New York, NY), the marketing and media information firm. Bastante came to the U.S. from Lima, Peru when he was seventeen years old. “My father was an environmental engineer and my brother is a mechanical engineer, so I grew up around technology,” he says. “For a while I thought I would buck the trend and become an economics major, but I went back to engineering. It was a good fit.”

Bastante graduated from the University of Florida in 2000 with dual degrees in EE and computer engineering. For three college semesters he worked in the integrated product and process design program with faculty coaches and IEs: definitely a career-building experience.

His first job out of school was with Nielsen, and he’s still there. He started as a software development engineer, acting as a liaison between management and engineers, and is now
a fulltime manager. “I manage projects from inception through proof of capabilities to production,” he explains.

One exciting project involves the active/passive (AP) meters Nielsen uses to detect the channels its members’ TV sets are tuned to, which lets it calculate its well-known “Nielsen ratings.” In addition to responsibility for the hardware aspects of the devices, it’s up to Bastante to manage project initiatives like designing new features and updating current ones. He even schedules release dates.

Bastante is a member of the Hispanic Organization of Leaders in Action (HOLA), one of several employee resource groups at Nielsen. “It’s been a huge success,” he says. The group, which has more than 200 members, focuses on mentorship and leadership within the company, and members also help out in the community, visiting schools and such. “We’re only a couple of years old and still growing,” says Bastante. “That’s part of the fun.”

Bastante’s wife is a school psychologist; he and she both believe that family comes first, he says. He thinks diversity has had a positive effect on his life. “Knowing people from different backgrounds has definitely helped my career.”

Kristine Kenez: PM at Wyndham’s Group RCI
Senior business project manager Kristine Kenez is an IT employee at Group RCI, one of the companies that makes up Wyndham Worldwide (Parsippany, NJ). RCI specializes in vacation exchange; its 3.8 million members have access to more than 4,000 affiliated resorts around the world.

Kenez works with her IT colleagues to manage the triple constraints of scope, time and costs. “I’m not simply an IT pro acting as a business advocate,” she stresses. “I am a liaison between project stakeholders in IT and across Group RCI’s functional business departments. My job is to make sure everyone on the project team and around the table understands each other’s perspectives. This ensures we reach expeditious solutions.”

RCI’s members depend on online support for account information, current vacation search status, available inventory and access to marketing campaigns. “My focus is leading RCI business representatives on the project team in the planning and management of a successful RCI product enhancement involving technology systems,” Kenez explains.

The business representatives are varied, including e-commerce, marketing, product development and more. The business activities relate to website content, the call center guide portal, internal training and internal/ external communication.

Kenez grew up near New York, NY and got her BA in economics and organizational behavior from Brown University (Providence, RI) in 1988. She’s a member of the Project Management Institute and holds her Project Management Professional (PMP) certification; she is also a member of the American Management Association (AMA) and completed an AMA certificate in leadership excellence this June.

After college Kenez worked for a boutique pension management firm and then sold small telephone systems for the former Nynex. “I liked the analytical piece of the sales work, evaluating customer needs in order to sell them a product they could really use,” she says.

Her “official” IT career started in 1990, as a computer business analyst with US Trust (New York, NY). From there she went to General Electric in Connecticut and three years later to CUC International (Stamford, CT). CUC was acquired by Cendant Corp, RCI’s previous owner, and in 2006 RCI became part of Wyndham Worldwide. “The theme in all this,” Kenez explains, “is my role as a liaison between IT and business stakeholders.”

At home, “Balance is my number one priority,” Kenez says firmly. “I am always present for
my family.” She also works hard to stay fit, having been a competitive swimmer from middle school through her first year in college. She’s now a national woman’s volleyball player.

At work, Kenez is always looking to grow. “I seek out professional development opportunities,” she says. “I look for leadership training and am always eager to receive feedback from others. I’ve had mentors throughout my career.”

She plans to set up a mentoring relationship with a female IT leader: “I would benefit from the perspective of a successful woman in my field.

“There are things I do right and things I could improve,” she concludes. “But I am always looking to enhance my ‘brand:’ approachable, reliable, consistent and always smiling.”

Dr Katrina Lane is SVP and CTO at Harrah’s
After a little more than five years in marketing at Harrah’s Entertainment (Las Vegas, NV), Katrina Lane, PhD was named SVP and CTO this February. “When they come to you and ask how you would like to report to the CEO and work with all our gaming operations as well as innovations, core IT applications and all our websites, it’s hard to say ‘no’,” she says.

Harrah’s operates fifty-two casinos worldwide, and Lane is responsible for any new technology projects and new tools that help the company communicate with players, like the marketing messages seen at slot machines. Harrah’s is also partnering with Microsoft on interactive gaming tables, so players can order drinks or talk with friends without leaving the table.

Lane has a 1987 BS in physics from Stanford University (Stanford, CA) and an MS and 1994 PhD in experimental physics from Cornell University (Ithaca, NY).

“Even in junior high I liked technical courses,” Lane recalls, “but I also liked creative courses like drama.” Physics was the best choice for her, she thinks, because “It is very broad.”

But when she completed her PhD, Lane decided that a career in physics would not give her the flexibility she wanted. Instead, she found a job at international management consulting firm McKinsey & Co where she was directly involved in customer relationship marketing (CRM), learning how to leverage information about customers to improve their experience and grow business.

She left McKinsey as an associate principal and put her experience to use as SVP of marketing at After Hours Formalwear before joining Harrah’s in 2004.

When Harrah’s merged with Caesars Palace in 2005, Lane oversaw the integration of the two websites and the building of next-generation CRM systems. Today Harrah’s is recognized as a leader in CRM, including its “total rewards” customer loyalty program that offers increasingly attractive benefits and discounts.

Outside of work, Lane enjoys time with “a husband and four cats.” She’s actively involved with the Southern Nevada Musical Arts Society, helping to preserve quality musical works. She also supports a number of animal and environmental groups.

Being a woman in the technical field probably “has neither helped nor hindered me,” Lane believes. “My approach is to make it less relevant,” she adds.

Harrah’s believes that Lane’s talent has moved her career ahead. “We provide an inclusive environment where people’s background and experiences are welcomed and the power of the individual is harnessed. The more diverse our workforce, the better decisions we make,” says Fred Keeton, VP and chief diversity officer.

D/C

Dan Margherita is a freelance business writer based in Philadelphia, PA.

Back to Top