What challenges face women executives in IT? Three successful CIOs talk about their career development, offer advice to aspiring women CIOs, and describe some of the obstacles they encountered in their climb up the professional ladder.
I have known many successful women in the IT profession, so it was hard to chose three from this terrific group of friends and business associates. The individuals I selected represent three industries: aerospace, biomedical, and high tech. All of these women have had successful careers and have been active in supporting diversity in their respective companies. All three ââ,¬" Pat Anderson, CIO of Lockheed Martin's Space Systems Company; Polly Moore, former CIO of Genentech and currently attending a seminary; and Tama Olver, formerly CIO at Amdahl, Informix, and Quantum and currently CIO of Applera ââ,¬" have been recognised as being among the top 100 women in the IT profession. All continue to represent the best that women bring to the business. I asked each of these women to answer six questions regarding their experiences as CIOs.
Pat Anderson, CIO of Lockheed Martin's Space Systems
How long have you been a CIO?
I have been a CIO for about a year but was also one for three years several years ago.
What was your educational background and career path?
I have a bachelor's degree in psychology. I began my career as a human factors engineer working on the Trident I missile system. For the next 20 years, I worked on that program in supervision and management in a variety of disciplines ââ,¬" product assurance, reliability engineering, field operations and support, factory operations, and program management. I spent the next three years as a CIO/executive vice president to the CIO (of a 4,000-person organisation), then three years as the program manager of a very large corporate project, and now CIO again.
What are the three most important factors contributing to your success?
A real desire to learn, the willingness to take risks, and the ability to work very, very hard. I also think having an easy personality with strong interpersonal skills in a culture that is hard on people helped a lot.
What was your biggest success and your most memorable failure? What was the impact of each?
My biggest success was the large, complex corporate project I managed. The complexities and diversity of the corporation, the magnitude of the change, the complexities of the organisations that matrix personnel to work the project, and the mix of functions working the project all led to an enormous amount of risk. Yet the project has been phenomenally successful ââ,¬" nearly flawless in its implementations and enthusiastically received by the companies in the corporation, which has enabled the seeding of a corporate culture for the first time and a software product that has reduced cost and improved service.
My biggest failure was a CIO position that was deputy to the corporate CIO. The organisation was virtual and just coming into place, I worked remotely from the CIO and rarely saw him, and I did not have distinct responsibility and authority. All these ingredients, coupled with a trauma in my personal life, left me somewhat less than effective. The impact was a truncation of my career.
What advice do you have for young women considering entering the IT field and women aspiring to become CIOs?
The IT field is extremely interesting and challenging and very hospitable to women (unlike some of the more engineering-centric disciplines). That means it is possible to have a career of constant growth and opportunity, and one where the emerging technologies mean you will never need to be bored.
Being an effective CIO means adopting a strong sense of the business. Therefore, to be a CIO, I think
incumbents should also have direct experience in the business itself. The job is exceptionally challenging and requires extraordinary interpersonal skills, with a heavy dose of diplomacy, as well as strong management and leadership skills. It is a wonderful career objective for someone with those interests and attributes.
What were the most serious glass-ceiling barriers you encountered in making your way up the corporate ladder?
In the early and middle parts of the corporate ladder climb, I didn't have a perception of a glass ceiling. I was rising quickly, there were other women at my level, and everyone was working so hard there wasn't much time to complain. But then I reached the level where there were no women ahead of me, and things all of a sudden looked different. When I was promoted to VP, and especially when I was made a member of the Operations Committee (the company's senior management team), it began to feel as if my gender had been part of the reason I had made it that far. While I was happy to be at the table (and boy, did they need a fresh voice, even if they didn't listen very often!), in retrospect I had been promoted beyond what they were comfortable with, and it turned out to be the beginning of the end of my CIO career. The good news is that once the company had made
the leap and promoted a woman to VP, the next such promotion was much easier. Within a few years, the senior management team was well balanced and has remained so.
