Maria Liz Vera Benitez
Finance and Budget Officer
What brought you to a career in technology at the United Nations?
I joined UN 24 years ago as an NCE (former name for YPP) in Electronic Data Processing. After a couple of years in the library, I moved to the programme, project and finance area where I started my career as finance and budget officer, but I kept developing applications and producing dashboards and reports to facilitate decision making.
What has been your favorite technology project or initiative at the United Nations and why? What was your contribution?
Definitely Protrack and Mission reporting System, back in 2000's. Protrack was an app that linked programmatic and Project info to financial data (IMIS at that time) ... very similar to what IPMR does now... and the mission reporting system: each traveler had to do a mission report before claiming terminals... forms were prefilled with info extracted from their treqs in IMIS... I also loved working as Umoja Funds Management Expert and supporting migration, conversion and ramp up activites.
What advice would you give women interested in pursuing a field in technology?
If you are gifted with IT or math skills, use them to help other people to make their lives easier, regardless your gender!