Northeastern University Spring 2012 : Page 17P O V A CULTURE of AHA! Three Northeastern innovators on what makes a good idea great and how to stay ahead of the curve. PROGRAMMING A WINNING TEAM Shirley Singleton, BB’75 Shirley Singleton knows the key to success is embracing change. The CEO of Edgewater Technology—thirteenth in the Boston Business Journal ’s 2011 list of the top 100 women-led businesses—speaks from experience. That’s because the Bouvé grad began her career miles away from the digital realm, as an award-winning high-school track-and-fi eld coach in Needham, Massa-chusetts. Then a new tax law left her—and thousands of other educators in the state—jobless. A classifi ed ad led her to pursue training in an unfamiliar, but emerging fi eld: computer programming. Singleton hit her stride on the new career path by drawing on her teaching skills as a coach. As “tech trans-lator,” Singleton would explain software capabilities to a client and scope out additional needs the client had. She’d relay these needs to the programmers, who would design a custom solution. She excelled, which led her to launch her own computer-programming consulting company, Edge-water, in 1992. What began as fi ve people in a rented space relying on word-of-mouth connections developed into a major success—450 employees in a publicly traded company, a surplus of $88 million in revenues last year, and partnerships with such industry heavy hitters as Microsoft and Oracle. Twenty years in, Singleton’s passion for Edgewater remains as strong as ever. She’s led her team through the evolution of computing platforms, from PCs to laptops to web and mobile. And she continues to revel in the unexpected challenges that come with helping a variety of companies become more prosperous and effi cient: com-panies like the wildly popular Chobani Yogurt, for which Edgewater recently designed a specialized inventory sys-tem to keep shipping supply up with customer demand. After all, she says, “We’re ultimately in a people busi-ness. The underlying theme is technology, but it’s people who are building it, and people who are buying and using the technology. That’s what’s kept us in the game.” Spring 2012 Northeastern Magazine 17 Publication List Using a screen reader? Click Here |
