I worked with IBM executive Sandy Carter back in the ‘SOA days’ of the last decade, when she was Vice President for SOA at IBM and I was a managing partner at ZapThink. And though we haven’t worked together since then, I’ve followed her on social media, and her social activity alone is reason enough for her to be my next Digital Influencer.
Carter is still working at IBM – in fact, she’s been there her entire career since it paid her way through Harvard Business School – but her role has transformed many times. In addition to driving IBM’s SOA efforts, she has been CMO of the WebSphere and Tivoli divisions, a vice president in the partner channel arena as well as driving social business evangelism and IBM’s relationships with independent software vendors (ISVs). Today she’s IBM’s general manager of the developer ecosystem and startups.
Carter, in fact, routinely negotiates a whirlwind of activity. She served in various capacities at the Girls in Tech Super Football Hackathon, TechCrunch’s Crunchies Awards, DeveloperWeek, CTOWorld Congress, the Women in Tech program at IBM InterConnect, TEDxAirlie, and LAUNCH Festival – and that was just the last three months.
This week she’s at SXSW, participating on a panel entitled Smart Women Using Smart Data to Rise to the Top – a topic of particular interest to her. But don’t try to pigeonhole her interests, as they are numerous and diverse, including cognitive computing, blockchain, Internet of Things, streaming analytics, cloud, virtual reality, DevOps, and basically any other topic of interest to developers today – especially in the cloud.
Given the dramatic and massive transformation that IBM itself is in the process of negotiating, it’s no wonder it relies upon executives like Carter. In fact, moving executives around so that they can experience different lines of business and contribute in multiple ways is part of IBM’s culture. “IBM delivered many different types of jobs: hardware, software, corporate, geo, marketing sales, every function, every type of business,” Carter explains. “We’re very agile. We try this, then try that. We do A/B tests and experimentation.”
Read the entire article at http://www.forbes.com/sites/jasonbloomberg/2016/03/11/digital-influencer-sandy-carter-driving-ibms-transformation-with-developers/.
Sandy Carter’s panel at SXSW is today, Friday, March 11, at 12:30PM – 1:30PM, at Austin City Limits Live at The Moody Theater, 310 Willie Nelson Blvd, Austin, Texas.
Intellyx advises companies on their digital transformation initiatives and helps vendors communicate their agility stories. As of the time of writing, none of the organizations mentioned in this article are Intellyx customers. Image credit: IBM.
