Ricardo Pedraza Barrios

Mr. Pedraza is a strategist on the digital and organizational transformation of companies from regulated industries. He is the IT Director of the Pontifical Catholic University of Peru, a private higher education company with 6,000 employees, 20+ sites interconnected to the main campus, and sales of over USD$250M.

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Mr. Pedraza led the digital transformation of a “brick and mortar” university to an organization fully “online”. In close co-creation with cross-functional units of marketing & corporate communications, he sets a plan for introducing innovative solutions to raise brand awareness, develop new agile customer-oriented processes, and deploy cloud-based IT platforms.

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He also conducted the fusion of five IT-related units into a team of over 200 people with a dual mission: service excellence and increased revenue. He set up a Business Intelligence and Data Science team focused on delivering performance metrics for customer success and international excellence accreditation. By 2019, he reached the goal of USD$1M in sales. As part of a continuous improvement initiative, he achieved a saving of USD$ 450K on Internet and telecommunications contracts renegotiations over a three-year period; additionally, he got savings of USD$ 150 K annually on AWS cloud-based services. Finally, he reduced the IT headcount by 15% generating savings of USD$700K annually.

Mr. Pedraza has four times been awarded as one of the Top 25 IT Managers of the Year in Colombia during his eleven years of work as IT Director at one of the Top 10 best private universities in Latin America. Prior to that, he worked in Canada at Gaz Metropolitain, as a Project Manager for the development of a Sales force automation system and a Marketing information system in conjunction with the Sales & Marketing units and IT corporate Unit.

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Mr. Pedraza holds graduate studies in International Business from McGill University, a Masters in Management Information Systems from HEC Montreal, an Executive M.B.A., and a Bachelor of Engineering in Computer Science from Universidad de los Andes, Colombia. He holds Colombian and Canadian citizenship and is fluent in French, English, and Spanish.

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