About Katy Dickinson

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Contact:

• Email: katy.dickinson at-sign gmail.com
• Other Webpage: WP668 Caboose Story

Career Overview

Katy Dickinson is a Director at Huawei Technologies in Santa Clara, California. She was the Mentoring Process Architect for the TechWomen 2011 mentoring program. TechWomen paired women in Silicon Valley with their counterparts in the Middle East and North Africa for a professional mentorship and exchange program at leading technology companies.

Before that, she was Sun Microsystems’ CTO’s Director of Business Process Architecture. She creates then communicates measurably effective long-lasting corporate infrastructure and processes. Her specialty is acting as an effective change agent who resolves persistent and complex organizational problems.

Katy worked for Sun Microsystems 1984-2010 in Engineering, Legal, Marketing, Operations, Quality, Standards, Strategy, and Sun Labs. She worked as a Six Sigma Master Black Belt for the Chief Technologist’s Organization and Sun Labs 2002-2010.

During 1992-2004, Katy Dickinson was a lecturer and reviewer for the University of California at Berkeley’s Engineering-110 class called “Venture Design: The Start-up Company”.

Past projects include:

• Lead the team which developed Famous Women in Computer Science web resource, published in March 2012 (developed 2009-2012)
• TechWomen, Mentoring Process Architect (2010-2011), a mentoring program for technical women in the Middle East and North Africa, an initiative of the U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs (ECA), managed by the Institute of International Education (IIE), and implemented in partnership with the Anita Borg Institute for Women and Technology (ABI). Trained Mentors and Mentees in three all-day sessions in May-June 2011, and gave lectures to community and academic groups as part of TechWomen delegation to Morocco, October 2011
• Lead the team which developed and published the Award-Winning Career Timelines in Computer Science and Engineering, a community web resource (developed 2008-2010)
• SEED – Sun Engineering Enrichment & Development – Sun’s Engineering world-wide mentoring program (2001-2010).
  See: Sun Laboratories Technical Report “Sun Mentoring: 1996-2009″ by Katy Dickinson, Tanya Jankot and Helen Gracon, TR-2009-185, August 2009
• MAGIC mentoring program for middle and high school girls, (2007-2008 volunteer project), About MAGIC
• TAB – Sun’s Technology Advisory Board (2005-2009).
• Sun’s participation in the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing and the Anita Borg Institute for Women and Technology (1997-2010).
• The Global Product Engineering Cost Tool (patent applied for), 2004-2008.
• TAC – CTO’s Technology Advisory Board, 1999-2002.
• The Archivist – Sun Labs’ document archiving and clearance system (patent applied for), 2000-2002.
• Sun Standards – “Submitting Contributions to an SSO” Process, 1999-2000.
• Electronic Commerce – Software Downloads (U.S. Patent 6167568, 26 December 2000), 1996-1999.
  See: “Keeping an Electronic Commerce Shop” by Katy Dickinson, published in ACM StandardView, Volume 6, Issue 3 (September 1998).
• SunSoft Corporate Strategy (for SunSoft President), 1994-1996.
• SAC/ARC – System Architecture Council and Architecture Review Committees, 1988-1996.
• The SDF – Software Development Framework (life cycle process which was used 1990-2005 for about 4,000 versioned product releases, including 50 for Solaris OS, with about 1,500 changes/features added between releases), 1985-1996.
  See: “Software Process Framework at Sun” by Katy Dickinson, published in ACM StandardView, Volume 4, Issue 3 (September 1996)

Conference Presentations include:

• “Children and STEM” presesentation to visiting delegation of U.S. Industrial College of the Armed Forces (ICAF), National Defense University
• “Advancing Your Career Through Awards” at the 10th Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing 2010 (Atlanta, Georgia)
• “Evaluating What We Do: Challenges and Solutions” at the National Center for Women & Information Technology’s Summit on Women and IT, 20 May 2010 (Portland, Oregon)
• “The Value of Awards and How to Get Them” and “Solving the Two Body Problem”, Conference Program includes information on both panels, 1-2 October 2009, Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing (Tucson, Arizona)
• “Mentoring Lessons Shared” panel, Computing Alliance of Hispanic Serving Institutions (CAHSI), 16 January 2009 (Mountain View, California)
• Taking the Long View – Many Careers in One Company, 2 October 2008, Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing (Keystone, Colorado)
• Girl Geeks in High School – Technical Experiences of Future Inventors, and Mentoring Makes MAGIC for Middle and High School Girls, 18 October 2007, Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing (Orlando, Florida)
• Mentoring by the Numbers: Research and results drive mentoring programs that last, 5 October 2006, Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing (San Diego, California)
• “Mentoring Panel” National Center for Women & Information Technology – Leadership Team and Alliance Meetings, November 2005 (Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania)
• Bit by Bit: Mentoring & Practical Approaches to Advancing Women in High Tech, 7 October 2004, Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing (Chicago, Illinois)
• “People, Process, and Organization” ProjectWorld, 9-13 December 1996 (Santa Clara, California)

For more, see Katy Dickinson’s LinkedIn Profile

Experience

• 2010-now Huawei Technologies (Santa Clara, California)
• 1984-2010 Sun Microsystems (Menlo Park, California)
• 1982-1984 Atari Sunnyvale Research Lab (Sunnyvale, California)
• 1979-1982 The Katherine Company (self-employed, San Francisco, California)

Personal

Katy Dickinson and her husband John Plocher live in San Jose (in the South of the San Francisco Bay Area). Their daughter Jessica married Matthew Holmes in 2011. She graduated in May 2012 as a 5th Year Scholar, Phi Beta Kappa, at Carnegie Mellon University (Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and Doha, Qatar).  Their son Paul attends Foothill College (Los Altos Hills, California). Katy spends her free time gardening and restoring WP668, a 1916 Western Pacific steel framed wooden caboose in her backyard. She and her family have been U.C. Berkeley Lair of the Golden Bear family campers since 1993 (Camp Blue, of course!).