Barbara Rico

“I have worked with Barb Rico over the span of 5 years at two different companies. I consulted as a solution architect at a large health insurance company when I first worked with her. As an enterprise architect, she was responsible for guiding the solution architects towards the overreaching architectural goals and solutions that had been defined for the corporation. As the shepherd of numerous project teams, she worked closely with the solution architects to ensure that their designs where understandable, complete, on target, and in compliance with the corporate enterprise architecture. Later, she moved to another large insurance company where she was charged with determining the means of capturing and describing the overall IT architecture for the company and working with key participants throughout the company to create the current and future state of the architecture. She asked me to help and I gladly accepted. Barb’s modus operandi was inclusionary. She developed solid relationships with all the key players and gained their enthusiastic buy-in to the process and artifacts that she and her team developed. She started with concepts from key industry architectural frameworks and modified them to fit the environment. She had the domain experts from the business, data, application, solution, technology, and security architectures contribute to the developing framework, so they would be comfortable with the methods to be used and deliverables to be created while modeling the enterprise. She worked with project management to incorporate agile project delivery into the future state of the architecture. The resulting architectural framework that she and her team developed was the most comprehensive yet lean framework I have seen in my years consulting with numerous companies with large IT departments. Perhaps, even more importantly, the enthusiasm for its use has continued over the past 2 years (as of my writing this). That enthusiasm and the resulting work has provided the corporate leaders a tool that helps them better understand what they have and what it will take to get what they want.”

“Barb is an extraordinary individual. She develops and maintains a clear vision and goals for what an organization must do to be effective, then drives to achieve those goals. Her contributions are highly concrete, furthermore -- she doesn't merely identify what works, but she is an extraordinarily productive worker herself as she follows and implements her proposals ("eats her own dog food"). The architectural and business analysis work she accomplished at Aetna was consistently top quality, and she always looked for ways to bring other people along and communicate how they could also improve their process and their deliverables. I considered it an honor to work with her at Aetna, and would consider any company highly fortunate to bring her on.”