Interview with Clare Hickie, CTO EMEA Workday

I wanted to start by getting the background on your career and how you made the decision to work in the technology industry?

I predominantly worked for large blue chip organisations before joining Workday over four years ago. I did my degree in Business Studies and Computer Studies and although I thought I would end up in business, I ultimately found myself being drawn towards the world of technology. At the time, tech was changing rapidly, the .com era was starting and I quickly found myself with opportunities to progress into a changing world. From .com came digital transformation – and with it cloud technologies. From there, the rest as they say is history. I certainly couldn’t have mapped out my career the way it turned out when I left university but curiosity, taking opportunities (and risks) and my hunger for continuous learning provided me with a great career. I would never have wanted to be in any profession other than technology.       

Shifting to today, there’s obviously a lot of uncertainty in business. How are the leaders you speak to thinking about technology investment?

They’re being very focused and looking at how they can take advantage of digital to drive efficiency and change. The forward-thinking leaders I speak to are making strategic bets. What used to be called calculated risks, but as we’ve seen, the last few years have proven that some risks are worth taking. Just as in the fallout from the last major downturn, the businesses that have invested in tech will steal a march on their competitors and emerge from the downturn ahead of the game. No one is immune to economic uncertainty, but investing in innovation can deliver cost and efficiency benefits that outweigh the risks considerably.

You’ve worked with some progressive organisations in the past, both from a technology and cultural perspective. Can you talk to us about the importance of both elements and also the role of diversity in building effective IT teams?

I think all parts of the equation are absolutely key. You can’t really achieve effective technology transformation unless you have the right culture – and that means having a leadership team that is open, transparent and encourages an innovative mindset. It’s about ensuring your teams come to work as their best selves and have the development and tools available to them to do things differently. It’s about fostering collaboration right across the business. You can deploy the most cutting-edge technology available, but if you don’t drive a cultural change – one that embraces new technology – your employees are never going to get the most from it.

Within that, I’d say having diverse teams is an absolute must to unlock new ways to solve problems and decision making. Innovation means doing things better and that requires different approaches to old problems. There’s a great book from Matthew Syed called ‘Rebel Ideas: The Power of Diverse Thinking’ that says ‘collective intelligence emerges not just from the knowledge of individuals, but also from the differences between them’. I think that encapsulates why diversity is so important to building great teams.

How are the emergence of machine learning, blockchain and generally greater levels of automation changing the skills you look for when building teams and what impact does that have on the barriers to women working in technology?

Due to the shift towards cloud computing and advancements in ML, IT skills are naturally going to become less about infrastructure maintenance and more about adding strategic value to the business and innovating. When you think about Workday, for example, the architecture already provides elasticity for unplanned loads and can respond to process changes without costly development projects, upgrades or functional regression. Those are the benefits of the cloud and by design they impact the skills an IT function actually needs.

To the broader question of its impact on women working in tech, I think if you look at the general uptake of roles by women in STEM, there has clearly been a shortage. There are certainly some great examples of how SaaS has merged technology and business skills which I think has had a positive effect in pushing more women into technology. I’ve seen a lot of colleagues shift from business-focused roles into more pure technology roles and that has to be a positive. I also know many amazing women in technology, both at Workday and other organisations, who started their careers as developers and engineers and are now technology leaders and CIOs in large, global organisations. A career in technology is for everyone. 

As we look towards 2023, which technologies do you think will burst into the mainstream and how do you think they will impact businesses?

I think we’re going to see high adoption of machine learning as businesses understand its value and see use cases in action from their peers and competitors. At Workday, those customers who were early adopters are gaining huge benefit from using it and that will continue to grow. Machine learning will continue to facilitate a more engaging user experience and assist with key decision making. Automation more broadly will become commonplace across sectors with significant manual-intensive processes, such as the financial services sector.

As companies and their employees shift between remote and office-based work, we’ll see more of a push towards blockchain adoption, as trust and verification become issues that organisations want to get a better handle on. It’s promising to see the work of those early adopters paying off and at Workday we’re lucky to call some of those businesses our customers.

Finally, we’ve been asking all our guests in this issue, what advice would you give yourself if you were starting out today and what would you have done differently?

In all honesty, there’s not much I would change about my career, even though I could not have written my story when starting out. I may have taken some zig-zags along the way but I never ended up turning right when I wished I had turned left. There are probably times when I should have listened more to my mentors or sponsors and leaders who went before me, but equally there were occasions when I wished I had gone with my gut instinct – yes there are times when the data in front of you is just not enough and human judgement counts for more! For anyone starting on their career, I would leave them with where I started this interview – be curious, take calculated risks, do not shy away from opportunities that may seem ambitious and continue to have a learning mindset. 

Read more about diversity and equity, overcoming prejudice and building inclusive organisational cultures as well as inspirational stories from women in IT in Vol. 7 of SmarterCIO.