Quantum² : InfoStars : Carmen Pacho Gutierrez

Carmen Pacho Gutierrez

Repsol YPF's Carmen Pacho Gutierrez

“We give them the puzzle pieces and they build it,” said Carmen Pacho Gutierrez, referring to the 450 employees she serves at the Technological Watch and Information Center within the Technology Center of Repsol YPF in Madrid, Spain. Carmen and her two team members also service the organization’s Technology Center in La Plata, Buenos Aires, Argentina. For Carmen, the most satisfying part of her job is providing information that is ultimately used to facilitate decision making.

“At the Technology Center we have positioned ourselves as intermediaries or facilitators of information, because the end users are the real subject specialists — the ones who will define where the innovation lies,” she said.

Since there are only three information specialists serving the Technology Center, Carmen and her team are skilled at implementing tools that help users find professional, reliable and current information on their own. This way, users save time when searching for ‘simple’ results. The team also sets up bibliographic alerts which notify users when new information is available on their search topic. Carmen and her team, however, often step in when users are looking for more ‘sophisticated’ results.

“Even if users can do their own searches, a large number of them are done from the Documentation Center, since we are the experts and they are focused on researching — not searching for information,” said Carmen.

In addition to technical information, the team provides market, business and legal information, as well as state-of-the-art analysis, allowing users to focus on opening new research lines and processes, applying for patents, and ensuring that products will be successful in the marketplace.

Technology has come a long way since Carmen entered the information services field. She credits the evolvement of information providers for making her job easier, and allowing her to offer value-added services to her organization.

“When I started working, bibliographic searches had to be conducted with communications software and plain text,” she said. “Technological and product developments made in this field — especially the Internet explosion — have been extraordinary.”

Carmen Pacho Gutierrez works for Repsol YPF, an integrated oil and gas company operating in more than 30 countries. A leader in Spain and Argentina, Repsol is one of the top 10 major private oil companies in the world and the largest private energy company in Latin America.