BETF Board of Directors

Lydia Barron

Lydia Barron is a creative business leader with over twenty years of experience. She has consistently demonstrated innovative approaches to using Information Technology to drive business competitiveness by transforming, extending and integrating organization capabilities, processes and systems. Lydia is an energetic leader with extensive IT turnaround and transformation experience. She has led IT initiatives up to $60M, served as CTO and VP of major Wall Street financial services and insurance firms, and held seats on several non-profit boards.

In her corporate career, Ms. Barron had extensive experience partnering with executive teams and outside alliances to create, build, communicate and execute enterprise change agendas. Her leadership has helped corporations to use technology to manage complex financial services, insurance, communications and call center customer servicing environments. She is committed to the concept that technology is the key to efficiently and effectively providing companies with the performance indicators required for success. As such, her expertise in advising corporations about strategic technology solutions and implementations includes the ability to ensure executive alignment, integrate people and processes, effectively manage risks and drive measurable value from multi-million dollar investments.

Ms. Barron’s career has progressed by building on an initial 6 years of Telcordia information technology experience with a series of management and executive positions in major corporations including Goldman Sachs, Merrill Lynch, JPMorganChase, Wachovia, WellPoint and JNET Communications, LLC. She has managed budgets over $60M and teams over 200 people. Her accomplishments include defining the CRM Strategy and CRM Architecture for JPMorganChase and delivering Credit Card Cross-Sell capabilities across Chase bank branch offices, which generated $5M incremental revenue in the first 5 months. Ms. Barron also successfully implemented the new Voice Response platform for Wachovia and converted four call centers from Aspect ACD to Voice over internet protocol (VOIP). Both of the Wachovia implementations significantly reduced the enterprise telecommunication operating expense and infrastructure costs. Ms. Barron also served as a key leader in defining Wachovia’s enterprise outsourcing processes and governance model. She successfully outsourced 15 applications and reduced IT operating expenses, while effectively managing the experience for internal resources. Lastly, Ms. Barron restructured the call center production support processes and successfully reduced the number of production outages for WellPoint Call Centers by 35%.

Ms. Barron holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Computer Science from Kean University, New Jersey and she holds a Master of Science degree in Computer Science from Stevens Institute of Technology. She has made an active commitment throughout her career to be involved in the greater civic and corporate community, having served on several boards including Florence Crittenton (City of Charlotte), Black Data Processing Association Education and Technology Fund (BETF Active Chair, Investment Committee), Information Technology Senior Management Forum (Former Chair, Programs Committee) and Visionary Economic Business Solutions, Inc. (Active Board Chair)

Awards include Diversity Award (JPMorganChase). She was featured in a Diversity/Careers magazine article and Stevens Institute of Technology Newsletter. Ms. Barron has lectured and participated on forum panels in the U.S. and Europe sharing ideas on leadership, technology innovation and career development topics.