The 1991 Award was presented at the 3rd DAMA International Symposium held in Seattle, Washington

Jo Meador - 1991 Recipient

In 1991, DAMA International was in its early stages. Jo was very involved with the development and stabilization of the international organization. She was instrumental in developing the Seattle organization and served on that board for its first 5 years.

Jo was on the board that founded the University of Washington program on Data Resource Management and has been on that board for 11 years. She was instrumental in getting internationally recognized individuals like John Zachman and Keri Healy involved in the program. Her work at the UW continues to this year (2001). She helped plan and coordinate the distance learning course for DRM. Jo has worked diligently on the curriculum for that program and its follow-on course in information management, as well as having have taught several of the courses in that program.

Jo served for 7 years as deputy project manager of the IRM project in the SHARE users group and represented that group for 2 years on an international task force for IBM on ADMP (application development management). Three times a year for 7 years she conducted workshops and sessions on all aspects of IRM and data architecture.

In 1991 Jo was a speaker at the Zachman Framework seminars in both the April and October. She has contributed many practitioner's articles for professional publication, and several of her articles have been reused in handbooks and other references, including Steve Spewak’s work on Enterprise Architecture. In 1988, Jo proposed a quarterly practitioner's journal in the field of DRM to the Auerbach Publishing Co. She called it the DRM Journal. It was published for 5 years during which Jo shared editorial responsibility with Steve Spewak. She wrote editorials, book reviews, articles and interviewed many of the leaders in the field including William G Smith, John Zachman and Vaughn Merlyn.

Jo has been in information management for 25 years, since joining Bank of America as a systems analyst in 1975. Her degrees were in English, Music and Education, all of which contributed toward her success in data and information management. She spent four years teaching in public and private schools before entering the computing field.

Jo has held positions in all aspects of data resource management from data base administration, on-line transaction processing analyst, data adminstrator and data resource manager. She worked for 3 banks, a telecommunications company, and an aerospace company. She also owned her own  consulting firm for several years where She did contract work for wood manufacturing, retail, health and wholesale food services.