Richard Ramirez on Leveraging Technology to Make an Impact

Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...

Working for Clear Channel Communications in the mid 2000s, Richard Ramirez led a team that developed the algorithm at the core of iHeart Radio, a product for which he holds a number of patents. Ramirez enjoys developing technologies that unlock potential within individuals and pulls together “a set of disparate people to solve a problem that previously seemed unattainable and send it off into a long-distant future,” he says. Bringing the art of the possible into the now gives him “extraordinary joy.”

Today, Ramirez is head of innovation and technology for corporate social responsibility (CSR) at DTE Energy in Detroit, where he creates opportunities for their technology and its technologists to interact with and create opportunities for DTE’s 450 communities. Force for Growth, as DTE calls their CSR agenda, is run by its public affairs group and requires each department to take responsibility and lean into community. “It’s really about doing work and impacting our community for community benefit,” says Ramirez. 

Ramirez feels at home at the intersection of technology and CSR, arriving there by way of his upbringing. At a young age his parents taught him to always “leave wherever you are a better place than you found it.” With that mindset he’s sat on numerous non-profit boards throughout his career. Identifying his unique skillset—one that allows him to “speak” technology, non-profit, and business—DTE’s leadership tasked him with heading up Force for Growth.

“It’s really about doing work and impacting our community for community benefit.”

Richard Ramirez

Each year DTE reevaluates its corporate priorities to determine how it can impact the community in the realms of education, economic development, workforce development, and environmental stewardship.

“How are we going to lean in to meet and make those impacts. Yes, there are financial ones, but how can we bring our talents externally? It’s great to volunteer, but it’s even that much more impactful if we bring our professional skillsets to bear in the community,” says Ramirez. In 2021 DTE’s IT volunteers alone impacted 177 non-profits. 

One of DTE’s most impressive initiatives occurred during the pandemic when it delivered fifty thousand laptops to economically disadvantaged students forced to study from home in Detroit. As Ramirez’s team was planning its internal response to the pandemic, working to keep its customer’s heat and lights on, Detroit Public Schools contacted Ramirez imploring him to help high school juniors and seniors connect to the internet from their homes. DTE’s response spiraled into a “moonshot,” as it provided laptops to all students in Detroit who needed them.

“Leave wherever you are a better place than you found it.”

Richard Ramirez

Ramirez gathered DTE volunteers to support various phases of the endeavor and employed its multimedia resources to create how-to instructional videos on connecting to the Internet. “Making sure that the logistical components are supported as this initiative goes on and that there is continual volunteer support from our IT staff, as well as from a broad DTE perspective,” says the department head.

In addition to the city-wide laptop initiative, DTE’s Force for Growth has a number of STEM initiatives in the broader community. It partners with TechTown, a nonprofit considered Detroit’s entrepreneurship hub that provides programs, education, and resources for early- to growth-stage small businesses and tech entrepreneurs. “We’ve done some strategic consulting . . . with nonprofits with how they make some of the digital transformation changes in support of growth in their own industries,” says Ramirez. For example, DTE helped a food bank transition from filing paper-based government reports to filing them electronically.

Ramirez’s background as a technologist and volunteer also gives him “a deep understanding of the disability community.” With this understanding Ramirez researches assistive technologies provided by companies like Microsoft, IBM, and SAP. “What’s out there today and what do we have opportunity to improve tomorrow and what can we begin actioning on,” says Ramirez. He has worked with DTE’s disability employee resource group, Abilities in Motion, over the past six years.

“It’s great to volunteer, but it’s even that much more impactful if we bring our professional skillsets to bear in the community.”

Richard Ramirez

As he looks back on the successes of his thirteen-member team, Ramirez says he is uniquely proud of the work they did during the pandemic, delivering new tools, technology, and solutions to DTE’s eleven thousand workers in the field and its community of consumers, helping to keep the lights on by “going one hundred miles-per-hour when the rest of the world stopped.”

The energy sector, Ramirez says, is an old industry that is “highly entrenched and regulated.” One of his team’s biggest challenges is managing and changing both DTE’s culture and external infrastructure. “You’re always trying to push the envelope so you can get to the goal faster, but you have to balance reliability and resiliency that is needed on a day-by-day basis,” he says.