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Like many other organizations across the globe diversity, equity, and inclusion is a priority for LoanLogics. In 2021, a committee was formed to discuss and execute on this important initiative in 2022 and beyond.
International Women’s Day, which has been celebrated worldwide for over a century, is a great day to raise the awareness of gender equity in the workplace. The organization’s mission for women in technology is to “celebrate digital advancement and champion the women forging innovation through technology.”
From our executive management team to business analysts and technical project managers, we have leading ladies across our entire organization doing just that.
This year in celebration of International Women’s Day on March 8th, we’re featuring some of the woman of LoanLogics on our blog. We asked each to share their proudest accomplishment in technology and/or what or who encouraged their career path in a STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) field.
We have so many female rockstars who are sharing their story, we are showcasing their responses in a 2-part blog series. Today we have Part 1. Enjoy getting to know some of them below:
Lauren Pilon, chief of staff
I would say my biggest technology accomplishment prior to coming over to LoanLogics in January of this year was the migration of all LendingTree employees over to the Betterworks platform to help drive alignment, transparency and accountability around priorities. When I started at LendingTree, we were just north of 100 employees. By the time I left, we were over 1000, some organic and many through acquisition.
Over the last 10 years, we had made a number of acquisitions and in doing so, prioritization across teams as well as a matrixed org presented challenges. As an organization, we realized the importance of alignment and implemented OKRs as part of our operating rhythm. In order to be successful at this, we needed a centralized platform to help us manage deliverables so that we were all working under a single system that provided us with the visibility of cross-functional projects and initiatives. The change management component of this was not easy; however, after multiple iterations of this, employees throughout the organization started to see the value and benefit of leveraging OKRs. The technology-component of this added significant value and visibility across the organization that previously did not exist. Without the technical implementation of this platform, this process would not have been adopted and embraced so quickly.
Charla McLeod-DeVoe, business analyst
Who encouraged my career path in a STEM field? Short and sweet, that would be my mom, Helen McLeod. As a child, she always advocated for me to have my technology class on my class schedule. As I grew old, I tried to veer away from technology and move more towards medicine. See, to me, I wanted to be a neurosurgeon. I wasn’t interested in technology and could not understand why it was so important to her for me to have some computer class to the point she would transfer me to different schools all around the city to ensure I had a class. It wasn’t until my 2nd year of college that I accepted that computers and technology were the way of the future, and I transitioned into information technology. If it wasn’t for my mom’s persistence, I don’t know what I would be doing today.
Mary Anne Ahmer, svp marketing
One of my proudest moments happened recently. In August of 2021, I was named a winner of the HousingWire Women of Influence Award. The reason I was recognized was for my role in helping educate the entire industry about the true value behind complex topics such as machine learning and digital labor. I really feel the more we educate the industry the faster we’ll get to solving some of the key issues that challenge quality and drain resources.
To that end, I also recently finalized a new white paper on this very topic, The Double Act of Human and Machine. The paper talks about the history making partnerships between humans and technology with current examples happening in the mortgage industry. It covers the importance and prioritization of data and the challenges faced when sourcing it from documents. It then leads into the use of that data in rules-driven automation that helps ensure you have the right data, it’s accurate and it can power a variety of use cases. And finally, the paper seeks to elevate the discussion around the use of technology to create a more effective exchange of mortgage loan assets over the life of the loan. I urge anyone interested to check it out.
Check back next week for more Q&A with some more tech forward ladies at LoanLogics!
