My story into IT is a little bit different than probably what most of you are used to. I started out as an investigative news reporter in the late 90s. I was moving into a space within Houston where we were building the very first media website ever. I know most of you probably can't imagine the world without the Internet, but we really did have it. We're building a media website here in Houston for a major market. I was a volunteer. Maybe volunteer is the right word to be on the project. I had the great opportunity to sit between a sales team and a technology team and try to translate what each person was trying to say. And at that point in time, the technology folks really did have purple hair and they really did wear flip flops. And the business guys all had three-piece suits. It's a bit of a culture shock, I think, for both sides. I was a translator, also known as a business analyst. I went through that, and I absolutely fell in love with it, so I left my reporting gig and went on to be a consultant for a Web development firm. They said whatever job that you did on that, just do that job. This was at the beginning of the consulting world where folks really didn't understand how Web worked and what information architecture looked like or how to deal with customers and clients. It was a pretty eye-opening experience, and from there I worked my way up to program management, application development, infrastructure for a while. At that time, I learned how to code. I literally dragged cables around to learn about networking and servers and all of that. Then I learned how to put together databases and what information looked like. It was truly on the job training. It went from there. From consulting to J. P. Morgan Chase turned into the Bank of New York. I was started out as a business unit relationship manager and went from there to manage application development to local delivery. And then I was a business unit's CIO for them for a while, and then left from there to go to waste management, learn about logistics and from there, I came to McKesson. I've done a variety of roles all across IT, be it in security which is where I am now, or the program portfolio side. Or like I said, infrastructure or networking. So it's quite the gamut, and I'm truly blessed to have all those different experiences just because I kept asking questions like, why is that or how does that work or who uses that so that my curiosity served me well.

I'm in IT. I kind of work sometimes a lot and sometimes not. Last week I was in Scottsdale, Arizona from Monday to Friday. I have a team out there. Next week I'll be in London and Oslo, Norway because we have a team out there. If you like variety, this is definitely the field for you. For me, my current responsibilities, I run all of the product management for Global Identity Services. What that means is, every time you log in or touch something, you have an identity. Everyone is used to our phones. Knowing pins and whatnot. So if you think about a company the size of McKesson, who has 80,000 employees and literally millions of customers. All of them have an identity. Our team actually manages that. It's the strategies put together. So from a product standpoint, I do run the strategy side, portfolio side and then a little bit of the architecture side if I need to.

I typically work with CIOs internally to McKesson. I also work with business unit presidents within McKesson, and then externally, I'll usually work with vendor partners. A partner of the firm or even the CEO of a firm. They're doing some work for us or have a product that we're looking at. It's mainly VP and above that, I work with. I have a great staff that works with anyone but below that. But no, normally, I'm working with the executive. It's a really great question around what is most effective, and the thing that I can tell you is most effective is you have to listen. People will tell you what they're after if you listen. I had said I like to ask a lot of questions. I do. But you have to actually listen to their answers and also really study what they're trying to do, not just what they tell you they're trying to do, but what they actually need to enable their business or enable a product to move things faster. You have to listen. You have to be able to make an actual plan out of something.