Author: Guillermo Ortiz de Zarate

assistant director at NCARB

Born and raised in Buenos Aires, Guillermo, has been leading the development and implementation of technology for companies in industries such as engineering, urban development, healthcare, banking, international commerce, marketing, and government for over 25 years.

In 1998 Guillermo was hired to lead the technology department for an Argentinean branch in Buenos Aires for an American company headquartered in Washington, DC. In August of 1999, Guillermo was promoted and relocated to the headquarters in DC to lead the corporate software team. The company sponsored his US permanent residency that led to his naturalization.

Guillermo joined NCARB in April 2007 as the assistant director, information systems and in August 2009, Guillermo was promoted to director, information systems to lead the modernization of the Council’s technology. In February of 2017, Guillermo was promoted again to Chief Information & Innovation Officer, leading not only the Information Systems department, but also the development of new sources of revenue through the commercialization of NCARB’s technology and the implementation of an innovation framework.

Guillermo holds BS in Information Technology and an MBA from Carey School of Business at the Johns Hopkins University.

Jun
25

Building the Best Team: Curation not Creation

“Choose your best team, not your best individuals” – Mark de Rond, Forbes Assembling a volunteer team is, I believe, about more than the sum of its individual parts. A strong and successful team should be curated rather than created – and this means thinking carefully about each member as a specific piece of the puzzle, […]

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Feb
27

Demystifying AI: Q&A with Guillermo Ortiz de Zarate

Editor’s note: Associations everywhere are using AI to make their processes more efficient. We’ve all heard by now of the radical potential of AI, but it can be hard to connect the dots from these big ideas to small practical steps. We want to demystify AI to make it accessible to techies and Luddites alike! Recently, we […]

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Dec
21

Why We Are Creating an Innovation Center

Humans are not very good at imagining the future. Indeed, TIME magazine mused in 1951 that “By the 21st Century our people doubtless will be squint-eyed, hunchbacked and fond of the dark” – a vision which has happily not (yet) been substantiated. When it comes to creating initiatives, making plans, and envisioning projects, we cannot assume that we […]

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Nov
23

Lean Methodology: Before and After

I first read The Lean Startup by Eric Ries in 2013. It was a lightbulb moment to see thoughts that had been percolating in my head over the years be articulated in such a way. Since then, I’ve been implementing the methodology with my team at the National Council of Architectural Registration Boards (NCARB) where I work […]

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