Featured in this week’s spotlight is Lisa A. Pratico, VP Enterprise Architecture and Enterprise Integration Services at HP, Inc.
Lisa brings over 20 plus years of experience driving profitable growth in challenging, competitive business verticals tied to software development and consulting services.
She has defined and owned strategic planning, enterprise architecture and engineering with an emphasis on business and IT alignment and enablement; architecture and software engineering consultation and governance; and functional management.
She has also successfully worked with business units and IT teams to identify new technology needs, collaborated with the business on digital strategies, and recommended strategic investments with a focus on future growth of products and services.
Question: How did you get your start in the industry?
Answer: I started my career post a dual BS and MS in Computer Science from Union College. My first job was more tied to the practice of Systems Engineering and Architecture at Bell Labs in NJ versus software development. It taught me to focus on business needs and sound systems engineering and architecture principals. I then had an amazing opportunity with McKesson to join them as a Technology Architect converting legacy hospital financial software to Smalltalk leveraging object-oriented programming and there was no looking back. Understanding how to decouple and architect loosely coupled solutions with a focus on reuse of business composible services helped me realize my passion for enterprise architecture.
Q: What is your current responsibility and what is your typical day like?
A: At HP, Inc. I am accountable for strategic architectural leadership across all IT functions ensuring the teams enable technology strategic roadmaps with a focus on business and technology innovation while ensuring continuous process improvement opportunities are identified. I assist the CIO, Chief Digital Officer, and Executive leadership to assess current state and future state digital transformation opportunities inclusive of people, process, and technology strategies. As part of the Digital and Technology organization I am responsible for working closely with other functions to guide and manage the business, application, information, security and technology architecture models and policies to ensure they are in line with IT strategy and business objectives.
In addition, I am an active member of HP Inc.’s Women Leadership Program. WLP enables improved business results for HP by increasing diversity and enhancing job satisfaction and productivity by creating an environment of accelerated growth and support for the women within HP’s Business Technology Solutions.
Q: What do you like most about your job?
A: I love working both with business and technology strategists to build roadmaps that identify organizational resources, processes, financial and technology needs. The role of a Chief Architect warrants you listen to the business and identify key deliverables needed to execute on strategic portfolio plans that maximize investment value, highlight inter-dependencies, and deliver key strategic and transformational programs. I play a key part in the execution of major transformational programs, M&A, and enterprise level technology changes, enabling business and IT innovation. This means having a keen focus on Organizational, Business and Technology architectures.
Q: What trends in architecture are you looking out for the rest of 2023 and 2024?
A: As a Fortune 100 tech company its critical to not only maintain a focus on customer satisfaction but look for opportunities to provide positive disruption in our industry. We are very focused on what IoT tied to our products can provide with respect to improving on quality and customer experiences. We are also keen to execute on our new business enablement strategy focused on 3D-Print. Finally, maturing AI analytics across net new products as well as automation of corporate systems to ensure optimal Supply Chain capabilities it critical to our success. Our focus on continuing to assess ChatGPT and opportunites to scale cloud scaffolding is critical to our growth.
Q: What is one thing we can do to support or increase the women in architecture?
A: Support for more Women in Technology programs is critical to provide females opportunities in high tech roles. I believe as an industry, we still don’t have a strength in numbers, so I continue to sponsor women mentorship programs and educational opportunities. I am proud to be part of an organization focused on an ambitious 2030 goal to become the first fortune 100 tech company to commit to gender parity in leadership. Some highlights include achieving 50/50 gender equality in HP leadership by 2030 and achieving greater than 30 percent technical women in engineering by 2030. For me this means devoting my time to teaching young girls how to be strong and have a sense of self that they can do and be anything. Supporting females in STEM programs and hiring female interns to ignite the power of the possible is key to bringing more women into IT and into an architecture career.