Stephanie Gonzales: Paving the way for CIS graduates

Stephanie Gonzales thought the Computer Information Systems program would be boring and didn’t give it a second thought when she first heard about it in about 2003. But a year later, when she was preparing to switch to the Tempe campus and researching business majors, she concluded that CIS was ideal because it offered a variety of job specialties, rapid job growth and the highest entry pay of the business school majors.

Stephanie Gonzales thought the Computer Information Systems program would be boring and didn’t give it a second thought when she first heard about it in about 2003. At that time she was pursuing a Business Administration degree from the W. P. Carey School at the Polytechnic campus in Mesa, and another student had mentioned that he had been accepted into CIS. “I was like — what is that? It sounds terrible. Why would you want to work on a computer all day long?” she said.

But a year later, when she was preparing to switch to the Tempe campus and researching business majors, she concluded that CIS was ideal because it offered a variety of job specialties, rapid job growth and the highest entry pay of the business school majors. She went on to get a double major in CIS and marketing and graduated magna cum laude when she received her Bachelor of Science in 2006. Since then, she has worked in the Phoenix office of Protiviti Inc., a global business consulting and internal auditing firm that employs some 3,000 people in over 20 countries. Gonzales is a senior manager in the information technology consulting practice.

She also remains involved with DISC (Department of Information Systems Club) and student recruiting at ASU and the University of Arizona. “I try my best to help these students grasp and understand the power they have by having this type of degree, and what it can do,” she said. “One of the main things that attracted me to the information systems program was the many options I’d have after graduation. A CIS major could become a database administrator and do that for five or 15 years, and when they get tired of it, they can say ‘Oh, now I want to work in IT security such as fraud prevention or PCI, which is the payment card industry.’” As for her initial assessment of CIS, she said “I was terribly wrong about it, and for me it has been fascinating.”

Variety on the job

Gonzales was drawn to CIS for the variety of jobs it could lead to, but she now finds variety among her clients as well. Some of the current and past clients she has worked with at Protiviti include a home-building firm, real-estate investment trusts, two airlines, hospitals, energy firms, oil refineries, higher education and water treatment facilities, among others. Each one of those industries has different technological needs and regulatory issues. Protiviti is a subsidiary of Menlo Park, Calif.-based Robert Half International, a recruiting firm. Robert Half launched Protiviti in 2002 with the hiring of more than 700 professionals from Arthur Andersen LLP’s internal audit and business risk consulting section.

Gonzales is a business consultant specializing in business and information technology risk who finds that it is not always easy to explain her duties. “It’s really hard to explain what I do to someone outside the technology consulting field without having an hour-long conversation,” she said. Her team of 10 IT professionals helps companies deal with regulatory compliance, risk and internal audit and provides general IT consulting. She is the only woman on a five-member IT management team.

To strengthen her credentials, Gonzales has obtained two certifications, the CISA (Certified Information Systems Auditor) and PMP (Project Management Professional). “Essentially what we do is solve business problems. We work with clients on whatever problems they have. Typically it involves risk,” she said. Because she is a project management professional, Gonzales performs project health assessments to make sure that a company’s technology is delivering what the company needs. When airlines, for example, began charging fees for bags or special seats, their technology had to accurately assess those fees.

Her team checks to see that the technology is doing what it is supposed to; that appropriate people are quickly alerted if there is an issue, that all IT access is terminated when an employee is fired and that interfaces within and among companies work seamlessly. Businesses received a stark reminder of the risks technology can pose when hackers compromised systems at Target and other retailers during the holiday season and stole financial data. Gonzales doesn’t work in Protiviti’s security practice and has no inside knowledge of those companies, but she understands how companies can have so many demands on their resources and budgets, including marketing to keep up with competitors, that spending on computer security might get a lower priority.

“Companies have to divide and conquer and say ‘where do we invest our money?’ But you only have finite resources. Every company struggles with it,” she said. In doing technology health assessments, Gonzales helps a firm rank its risks and decide which ones are more or less likely and which ones are more or less catastrophic, such as destruction of a data center. As more companies move into cloud computing and outsourced data centers, new risks surface. “It’s our job to help our clients understand what those risks are before they leap into them,” she said. “What if there was a disaster and your data center went down? Do you have the processes in place to make sure you can get back up and running? Do you have a current backup of your data, or are you going to lose a week’s worth of data? A week’s worth of data may seem insignificant, but it can be catastrophic to a business” she said.

During the recession, many companies were so careful with money that they didn’t consider disasters high enough of a risk to prepare for, Gonzales said. But now that the economy is improving, more companies are investing in disaster recovery sites. And data centers in the Phoenix area are getting a lot of that backup business because it is a relatively disaster-free region.

A mom, too

Gonzales, 29, grew up in Mesa and Gilbert as Stephanie Daniel, and as one of seven children. After graduating from Gilbert High School, she went straight to ASU and became the first one in her family to get a bachelor’s degree. She worked as a bank teller for about a year and a half while studying at ASU. While at ASU, she was active in DISC and credits the networking she did through the club with helping her get an almost two-year technology internship at Inter-Tel, Inc. while still a student, as well as her job at Protiviti.

“I am a big proponent of DISC,” she said. In fact, it was at her very first DISC meeting that she met Peruvian native Julio Gonzales, who was also in the CIS program. They graduated the same year and married. He is now studying to become a physician’s assistant, and hopes to one day combine his passion for technology with the medical field. They have two daughters, ages 3 and 2, and Stephanie enjoys spending time with them, as well as playing the violin and preparing scrapbooks. She began studying the violin in fifth grade. When she became pregnant, she expected she would have to quit working.

But Protiviti allowed a flex schedule and she worked part time for three years, finally returning full time in 2013. Gonzales does not anticipate getting higher degrees and for now believes the two certificates are enough. “I am very happy with the career I have chosen. It’s not one that requires a lot more formal education. It’s one where we are constantly learning and changing on the job, and Protiviti has provided me with robust training opportunities throughout my career,” she said.

Recruiting and mentoring

She continues to have a keen interest in urging students to consider CIS, especially women, and enjoys recruiting and mentoring. She aims to visit the ASU and UA campuses every semester. She said mentors have been important to her and that she in turn likes to mentor others. She finds it rewarding to see someone she might have first met as a scared student at a recruiting event progress to an interview, internship, employment and promotion.

Last year about 18 Arizona university students received job offers from Protiviti for positions in the Phoenix office, other locations and internships. But getting hired there requires an unusual and lengthy process because the company seeks top talent. By the time a graduate begins work, he or she will have met about 40 Protiviti professionals, or about 90 percent of the Phoenix staff. There would have been eight to 10 different types of recruiting events.

Finally Protiviti employees meet, put the names on a board, discuss and unanimously select the ones who will get job offers. “So in the future, if there is a conflict, you can’t say ‘I don’t know why we hired this person because you hired them,” she said. “You were part of that decision. We all really have a vested interest in our people.”