Where Are They Now? Dr. Stephanie Parson

One of the great friends of BDPA over the years is Dr. Stephanie Parson. She was a charter member of the BDPA Rocky Mountain chapter when it was founded in April 1989. It is also worth noting that today is Stephanie's birthday!

I met Stephanie when she was an executive at Walt Disney World. She was a key player in the successful 2002 national BDPA conference held in Orlando. Stephanie helped us land Roger Berry, WDW Chief Information Officer as the keynote speaker for the Awards Gala that year.

Stephanie served in national leadership positions with BDPA from 2002 through 2005 as both one of our Outside Directors and as VP-Strategy & Planning. Her place in the BDPA Hall of Fame is based on the intense passion that she brings to vision and strategic planning for our organization. She taught us how to create a shared 3-year stategic direction and base on current year budgets on a detailed 1-year business plan. We still use that methodology in our strategic planning today.

On a professional level, she left WDW and started her own company ... Crowned Grace. She is very active with an organization of chief executive officers known as CEO Space. In fact, her involvement in CEO Space resulted in recent opportunity for her to become part of an investment opportunity in Costa Rica. Here is what she had to say about her visit to South America:

"Wow!

• 4 hour drive from the airport to our cabins!
• 1 hour drive each day to the plantations
• 3 hour walk on 1 plantation (only able to see ~1/4th of this plantation)
• 3 hour horseback ride on another plantation (able to see ~1/8th of this plantation) My horse knew that it had been years since I had been on a horse
• 2 hours down (and up again) 500 steps to get to the waterfall
• 2 hour hike in the rain forest (rained for about 1.5 hours --- HEAVY RAIN!)
• Saw an active volcano Saw monkey's, creatures with long tails, beautiful birds, dogs, flowers and so much more Met wonderful people!
• Created LONG TERM Strategic Alliances
• Wet...Covered in Mud...Covered with Ant Bites...Broken fingernails...Broken toenails...don't even get me started on my hair :->
• WOULDN'T TRADE THE EXPERIENCE FOR THE WORLD!!!

Who knew that wood was a profitable venture??? Who knew that replanting the rain forest would be such a profitable experience???"

You can see Stephanie and her partners in this 4-minute video from Costa Rica. Hmmm, I need to get that sista a BDPA Foundation T-Shirt that she can be wearing for her next YouTube video (smile).




Do any of our BETF-Blog Readers remember working with Stephanie? Care to share your rememberances with us?

America's Techiest Cities

Hat-Tip to BDPA Philadelphia for pointing us to this ComputerWorld article. I imagine that it is easy to guess that the highest concentration of IT professionals in the U.S. is in Silicon Valley. But naming the No 2 spot isn't as easy, and the answer might surprise you.

The runner-up isn't a well-known tech center like Boston or Seattle; it's the Washington DC metro area.

"It kind of belies some of the perceptions of where the hiring is, where people work in this field," said John Challenger, president of Chicago-based outsourcing firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas Inc. "[Many typically] think that most people in IT work in Silicon Valley, and they might add in Washington state, Seattle and maybe Austin," he said.

Data for 2006 from the U.S. Census Bureau's annual American Community Survey (ACS), released just last month, reveal what could be called a metropolitan area's "TQ" (technology quotient) -- how "techie" a region's overall workforce is, based on the number of self-reported computer professionals. And some of the results turn stereotypes upside down. (See the interactive national map, or query the database for a specific metro area.)

Roughly 6% of the D.C. metro area workforce is made up of "computer specialists," compared with 8.3% in Silicon Valley. The third-highest concentration of IT workers is in Raleigh/Cary, N.C., at 5.3% of the workforce, followed closely by Boulder, Colo., and Huntsville, Ala., each at 5.2%. The remainder of the top 10 technology worker areas is rounded out, in order, by Bloomington/Normal, Ill.; Trenton-Ewing, N.J.; Austin-Round Rock, Texas; Manchester-Nashua, N.H.; and Seattle-Tacoma-Bellevue, Wash.

The Census Bureau data also shows that IT worker pay tends to reflect the percentage of techies in the workforce. The annual average salary for computer and information systems managers in Silicon Valley as of May 2006 was $139,460, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. In the D.C. metro area, that figure was $122,950. Around Raleigh, N.C., it was $102,880.



Click here for the full article

Did you see where your city ranks? You can use these figures to determine a membership goal in your chapter city. For example, there are 22, 000 IT workers in Cincinnati. Doesn't that mean that Cincinnati should have at least 2,200 African American IT workers to approach about membership?