BIOGRAPHIES
One of the unique features of Business Data Leadership is our ability to understand and enhance the collaboration between the Information Technology (IT) and the Business teams in the management of business data. Strong partnership with clear roles and responsibilities between IT and business is critical for the success of any data project yet this is one of the biggest inhibitors in a successful data program. Theresa and Maria have over 10 years of successfully working together on large data projects . They collaborated together to build customer and marketing databases while working for IBM and recently co-authored Managing your Business Data : From Chaos to Confidence .
Maria C. Villar, Managing Partner
Maria Villar is an IT professional with over 25 years of experience in IT, technology re-engineering and enterprise data management. She has held senior executive positions in both the technology and financial sector that included responsibilities for data quality, governance, architecture, and database technology solutions. She built the first, companywide, Enterprise Business Information Center of Excellence at IBM. The COE was recognized externally by TDWI (The Data Warehousing Institute) for best practices in Data Governance and Business Intelligence applications. Villar has been recognized in Hispanic Business Magazine as one of the Top 100 Influential Hispanics and received the Distinguished Hispanic IT Executive award from Hispanic Engineer National Achievement Awards Conference.
Theresa C. Kushner, Managing Partner
Theresa Kushner is a journalist-turned-marketer who has spent her entire career in high tech marketing with Texas Instruments, IBM and Cisco Systems. She is currently the director of Customer Intelligence within the Strategic Marketing organization of Cisco. There her team is responsible for data quality and business intelligence governance for worldwide marketing. Kushner has worked closely with IT throughout her career. That close relationship paid off in 2008 when Cisco Systems captured the TDWI Best Practice Award in 2008 for its new customer intelligence center (CIC) initiative that integrates customer data for sales, marketing and financial applications. This initiative assisted in correlating over $500 million in customer bookings, fully justifying the cost of the initiative.