The ALITP folks: from left, Jaime Viteri, president; Juan Soto, advisory board; Freddie Torres, VP; Xochitl Flores, secretary; Caroline Crozier-Sanchez and Diego Ferrer, advisory board.

‘Hay mucha oportunidad.... There’s a lot of opportunity in the IT area, but Latinos are disorganized. We don’t know each other, we don’t know where to look for other Hispanics to work with us,” says Jose Garcia, group VP for Oracle Corp’s Chicago operation.

Maybe so a year ago, but today things are very different. It’s thanks in part to Garcia himself, who has teamed with other high-ranking Chicago-area Hispanics to form an advisory board for Jaime Viteri, founder and president of the Association of Latino Information Technology Professionals (www.ALITP.org).

Planning the launch
Viteri had been thinking about ALITP for years as he moved up the IT ladder. When he finally articulated his ideas, things got going fast.

“I reached out to people who were greatly involved in the IT industry in Chicago,” Viteri says. “I targeted eight people and asked them to be on the advisory board, and they all agreed to join me as founding members.

“The first few months were mostly conference calls and them guiding me on the best way to get this organization going – considerations like marketing and logistics,” Viteri recalls.

The public launch was last June. They held it at a Chicago restaurant and invited the press, people in the industry and people involved with the local Hispanic community.

“We had the launch without any officers,” Viteri says with a smile, as he remembers his own audacity of a year ago. “We just introduced the advisory board and told everybody that we were going to be having elections.”

Running with the idea
To the founders’ delight, the assembled Latino IT pros jumped at the idea. They were excited, eager to sign on, even willing to be put up for office. The election meeting drew forty-five members and confirmed Jaime Viteri as president, with Freddie Torres as VP, Xochitl Flores as secretary, Melissa Ballate as treasurer, and Edgar Gonzalez and Jose Velasquez as committee chairs.

“The founders are here in Chicago so ALITP is relatively local at this point,” Viteri notes. “However the intent is to quickly start expanding. One of our officers, Edgar Gonzalez, recently moved out to Miami, FL as an IT consultant for AC Advisory, so that may be the second city we’ll be targeting. We also have connections in the Dallas and Houston areas in Texas.”

Professional development
Viteri expects ALITP to concentrate on three goals, “at least while we are evolving into a larger organization.” The first is to provide professional development opportunities for members. Viteri expects to recruit IT bigwigs as speakers: “We might have a CIO of a major company or the CEO of an IT organization.”

He also intends to partner with organizations that offer certifications in IT areas. “Our members may be able to get a discount, or we may be able to set up some sort of scholarship.”

The ALITP board is already working on this concept with organizations like El Valor, which typically does “cohort” programs in partnership with local universities. “They can obtain education at a lower cost for a group of students they bring together,” Viteri explains. “They’re starting pilot Microsoft certification programs, which we’d like to get involved with.”

Volunteer people power
Viteri expects many ALITP members to volunteer at schools and organizations that already have community IT programs in the works. “We don’t want to start programs ourselves, but we can add volunteer people power to get networks installed and classes going.”

Advice for entrepreneurs
IT is, of course, an “absolutely wonderful field for entrepreneurs,” Viteri notes. So the third leg of his ALITP program is “partnering with organizations that cater to entrepreneurs. They could help our members who have the entrepreneurial spirit. Once again, we hope to leverage what other organizations have put in place that would help our people.”

Learning with SHPE
The first foundation stones have been placed, but ALITP is “still in the process of being shaped,” Viteri agrees. It has certainly been a lot of hard work for him, but “The good news is it’s not as challenging as it would have been if I had not learned so much in my association and experience with SHPE.”

Viteri has been involved with SHPE for years. He was executive VP and president of SHPE’s Chicago chapter. And, since SHPE was founded in Chicago less than thirty years ago, he actually knows some of the people who started it up. Some, in fact, are his mentors and advisors; Gabriel Najera, on the ALITP advisory board, is a co-founder of SHPE.

Until recently, Viteri points out, people didn’t think that a separate Latino IT group was needed. “I think the assumption was that SHPE sort of covered it as an umbrella,” he explains.

Viteri himself is a computer engineer, and he agrees that SHPE has been a helpful umbrella. But now, he thinks, “The IT industry really calls for its separate organization. Increasing numbers of IT professionals are Latinos. There’s more of a specific need for this sort of organization.”

Moving up in IT
Jaime Viteri’s life is definitely oriented to the Midwest. He was born in Chicago and got his BS at the University of Illinois-Chicago.

When not guiding the youthful ALITP, Jaime Viteri is working at starting up his own IT firm. Before that he served as VP and managing principal of ihispano.com, an Hispanic-oriented career site which is a division of Chicago executive search firm David Gomez & Associates.

In other posts, Viteri directed the product management division at Information Resources (Chicago, IL), a market research and analysis firm for consumer packaged goods, and did software development and product management at the wireless business unit of Lucent Technologies (Naperville, IL). His career started at SEI Consulting as a software consultant, mainly for the IS group at McDonald’s Oakbrook, IL HQ.

Off the ground
As of the January 2003 meeting, ALITP had close to 100 paid members. “That’s good news because there was nothing solid in place when we started less than a year ago. The reception we’re getting is very positive,” says Viteri.

The elections meeting last year was held at a nice Chicago restaurant. It was sponsored by Aztec Financial Services Corp, “an Hispanic-focused bank that’s just starting up with Carlos Montoya as CEO,” Viteri explains. Hewitt Associates, an HR-focused IT firm, has signed on as an annual sponsor this year.

Latinos have been successful in IT for years, marching under the banner of SHPE. But now there are a lot more of them and they’re striking out on their own, to the beat of a different drum.

“We’re looking to get this off the ground as soon as possible, get programs in place and partnerships solidified,” reports Jaime Viteri.

D/C

– Pru Peterson is a freelance industrial writer and D/C’s copy editor. She lives in Millington, NJ.