Biography

Florence Parodi is the Executive Director for Rapid Application Development (RAD) within University of Miami Information Technology’s Office of Digital Transformation and Data Solutions. With over 20 years of experience in higher education, Florence leverages technologies to enhance business processes and customer experiences to meet the University's mission of transforming lives through education, research, innovation, and service.  

In her current role, Florence and her teams work closely with technical teams, functional leaders, institutional units, and subject matter experts to architect and develop applications that translate business requirements into scalable solutions which improves the lives of students, faculty, and staff. Florence also leads the content services platforms team, which supports the foundational capability for the management, storage, and access of content, including documents and images. In addition, she oversees IT service management (ITSM) and the IT business management (ITBM) platform which help manage the consumption and delivery of IT services as well as the infrastructure that supports those services. 

Florence’s team uses an Agile framework which allows the team to implement enterprise-level, user-centric business application solutions focusing on efficiency, ease of use, reliability, security, and scalability. Her team has been instrumental in developing several student interns that upon graduation, have transitioned to excellent full-time employment opportunities in the Salesforce space. 

Prior to joining UMIT, Florence was the Associate Director of Marketing for the Division of Continuing and International Education, where she led the first implementation of Salesforce at the University of Miami in 2008. Florence is a Salesforce MVP and, as a co-founder of Higher Ed Dreamin’, hosted the first virtual community conference in 2022. She is currently an Emeriti member of the Salesforce.org Higher Education Advisory Council and has served on the council since 2015. Florence has presented at Dreamforce, Education Summit, and cohosted many regional events, as well as published articles about leveraging Salesforce in higher education. She was the liaison for the third annual Salesforce.org Higher Ed Summit hosted in 2015 at the University of Miami. In addition, Florence was the lead principal investigator for Interactions, a project funded by a Salesforce Technology Innovation grant to create an app that improves prospect, student, and employee interactions. It delivered open-source technology, comprehensive documentation, learning modules, and additional implementation resources to the higher education community. 

Florence earned her BBA from the Miami Herbert Business School and is a Salesforce.com certified system administrator and platform app builder.