Who's the Boss?

Piehler is not the first accountant to move into the technology field, and shes certainly not the first woman to head an IT operation, but she is a good example of how the industry is developing a new image for itself.

Todays CIO doesnt have to move up the ranks through the IT department, according to Piehler. In the older days, it was about technology, but that isnt true anymore, she says. Now its about how we leverage technology to solve business problems. You have to understand the business and the business problemswhat theyre trying to solveand really be part of the strategy. What is the strategy, and how can [IT] help you get there?

Having Skills

As IT and business converge, Liz Ryan, founder and CEO of WorldWIT, an online network for women in business and technology, believes women cant move up in the IT world without strong business skills. We see a lot more women with business backgrounds going back and getting a certificatea one-year degree programin MIS or whatever, to go and lead an IT group, and theyve never set foot in an IT department before, she says.

I think the awareness is creeping into the hiring process. [CIOs] dont have to be a wonderful C++ coder. Thats not what you want in your CIO, Ryan adds. You need to get past that. You need a really wonderful manager and strategist.

Prudential Financial CIO Barbara Koster believes being a young woman in a primarily male field just meant she received a lot of good training and experience. I got the tough projects because essentially you had to prove yourself, she remarks. You had to prove you belonged in this field and you knew your function. I probably worked harder than most, and in the end, that served me very well. The ability to be structured, be organized, and get things done are the same skills that today allow me to be in the position Im in. It was a hard challenge, but it was great because it made me succeed.

Piehler also is getting her staff to understand the needs of the business side first. We do a lot of things in setting standards and guidelines, she says. Every time that happens, [staff members] first have to explain the business value of what they are doing and then explain how the technology can help us get there. I learn something every day I never thought in my life I would ever know a little about or even care about.

Roughly 65 percent of the home-office staff at Northwestern Mutual is female. The numbers in the executive offices are in the 30 percent range It always has been heavily female oriented, observes Piehler about the company. But I can say whats happened over my 21-year tenure is there are more and more women moving up the ladder.

The demographics in the IT operations at Lifetime Healthcare Companies tend to skew a little older, according to Dave McDowell, senior vice president and CIO of the upstate New York health insurer and healthcare provider. I have slightly more people over age 40 than under 40, he says. The breakdown along gender lines is almost equal, adds McDowell. Its close to 50-50, he says. We have a lot of women in our IT shop in all roles and at all levels.

Nice Atmosphere

The business world has developed a more progressive atmosphere for women and minorities in technical leadership roles, Ryan believes. You see more CIO and CTO searches where they say, Diversity candidates strongly encouraged, she points out. WorldWIT posts job openings on its Web site, and Ryan sees more of them asking for women to apply for jobs such as CIO, CTO, or director of IT. Companies specifically are hoping if they get that person, they kill two birds with one stone, but [women] still have a long way to go, she notes. We still have lesser representation of women in computer science and technology degree programs.

Piehler joined Northwestern in the controllers department, managing budgets and cost accounting. She describes this as a great way to learn the company because all the companys employees had to come to her when they needed something. She then ran the corporate services department. It was my first real challenge to manage peoplethere were 450 people in that department, recalls Piehler.

I decided, since we were an insurance company, to get into that side of the business, she continues. I ran policy owners services for five years, and in the meantime, we put in our first instance of Siebel and also started putting information out on the Internet, which got me over to information systems and into the offices of many of our architects.

Piehler learned by asking questions such as, Why do I need all this money to build infrastructure? It was my foray into this department, Piehler explains. I came here for a year and did development before my predecessor retired. Ive been doing this [CIO] job for a little more than two years now. It was a winding route. I bring a lot of business knowledge and actually know a lot of people in the company because of all the different places Ive been [within Northwestern].

Soft or Hard?

Melissa Maffettone, a branch manager, consulting services, for the IT placement firm Robert Half Technology, is seeing a steady shift to soft skills among IT leaders. When you think back to technology several years ago, they were saying, Give me great programmers, and well put them in a room and let them code away, she says. Today theres a lot more interaction. People who can translate the business requirements into the deliverables are just absolutely huge.

Koster assesses the number of women entering the technology field as slipping. We find a lot of women going into it on the sales sideselling of technology servicesbut not on the actual analysis, design, programming, testing, and hardware management side of it, she says. Its still pretty much a male field.

Koster has spoken with young students about the advantages of the technology environment. Too often, girls think of IT as mathematics related, and its really not at all. Its really about understanding business concepts and then applying the technology to deliver those concepts, she contends. The engineering side clearly is mathematical, but the business side is about automation, she adds. Today, the younger women are coming out of college, and the technology has been available to them in their day-to-day lives, comments Koster. Teaching them how easy it is to become involved in the field and actually being able to bring that technology to people is very valuable.
Like most good leaders, Piehler relies on her staff to answer the majority of her questions. We have some very smart people who understand [technology], and I spend a lot of time with them, she says. I know a lot about the business and what the business needs, so from an application-development and support level, I can understand pretty well. I have a chief architect who is really good. There are a thousand full-time people in my department, and at any point, I have between 400 and 600 contracted staff. There are a lot of very good people, and I spend time with them. They are very good at drawing me pictures. One of the things weve worked out is theyre learning how to speak English [rather than technology]not only to talk to me but to be able to talk to the business. And Im learning to speak technology.

Looking for Help

Piehler sits on an advisory board for the Milwaukee School of Engineering, and she believes one reason the school brought this advisory group together was to talk about what businesses are looking for when engineers and MIS-degree people come out of college. One of the things we told them is you need to understand business, she says. You need to have communication skills. Yes, we want you to have all the technical background because we need you to come and help us develop what we need to develop. But for those people who want to get into management and advance, we need some of those other skills. You can come in here with lots of technical expertise, but you have to be able to communicate it.

Education is important for IT leaders, particularly when companies compare two candidates for whom everything else is equal in terms of years of experience and the projects they have experience in.

One change McDowell has seen in his 26 years with Lifetime is the companys emphasizing business training and communications more today than in the past. The best [job] candidate is someone who is very personable, who is a good communicator, and who is a marvelous technician across a pretty broad breadth of technology, he says. Those are obviously the hardest people to find.

Women still face a lot of old boyism once they get on the job, according to Ryan. [Womens] tech skills can be second guessed, and very often early in their career, they get steered into project manager roles, technical marketing roles, or the girlie ghettos of PR and HR. For every woman CIO, certainly in the insurance and financial services industries, there are so many who have fallen by the wayside somewhere along their career. Its not that they havent had a fabulous career, but they didnt stay in the technical or technical leadership role because there are a lot of influences that drive women out of that arena, she asserts.

Share the Wealth

Women have populated the technology field for quite a while, and Piehler states many of her contemporaries were eager to share the wealth of information they had garnered. But with her nontechnology background, she doesnt feel alone. Youre seeing people come out of the business side [to serve as CIOs] as opposed to people who came out of technology, she says. There are a lot of people who rotate from my information systems department out into the business. I view that as a good thing because they can help translate on that side, plus they learn the business even better. What I try to do at some point is rotate some of those people back into the [IS] department because they bring back even better business skills when they come back. There are pluses to both.

As for the future, Ryan believes the tenure of all CIOs has dropped continually over the years. I think things are going to get better for women, but I think its a slow climb, she maintains. Were still in a cultural transition period. A large number of older white men are going to retire over the next 10 years, and its going to [dispel] the mentality that says women cant lead IT. A lot of mid-career women are looking at options and dont want to do the traditional women jobs and would love to run IT. As IT becomes more integrated with finance and operations and its not so visibly its own separate silo, I think more women will be attracted to it because it wont be viewed as just running the PCs, the telephony systems, and the networks.

No Major Gains In Diversity

The number of women working in IT positions in the U.S. continues to decline, according to Maria Schafer, program director for META Group and author of an annual report on diversity. Its an odd thing, she says. On the one hand, you have a lot of ethnic diversity, and clearly a huge piece of the ethnic diversity is managing the outsourcing of a lot of jobs that are going elsewhere for IT. But with the two basic barometers we tend to think of in this country in terms of diversitygender and racethere really are no major gains at all in those numbers.
The number of college graduates earning degrees for some type of IT profession has been in the 26,000-per-year range for going on 20 years, Schafer claims. Only five percent or less of those college graduates are women, though, she notes. There hasnt been a lot of hiring in general in IT over the last three to four years, she says. Its kind of been status quo in terms of investments made in IT. And along with a lack of investment comes a lack of hiring.

The diversity levels in IT are going to get only worse, Schafer asserts. For the moment, where gender is concerned, the women who exist within IT are more numerous in numbers at the higher end of the age scale, she says. There are not a lot of young women going into IT. As these older womenin their late 40s and 50sleave the work force, you will have this dearth of women in IT. Right now, I think women constitute less than 20 percent of the IT work force. Within the next 10 years, thats probably going to drop to about eight to 10 percent of the IT work force.

There is ethnic diversity in IT shops in this country, she points out. There is an Asian population and certainly an Indian population that are very well established, she says. If anything, if you see women coming into IT, they are either Indian or Asian. There is an under-representation of minorities that is extreme in IT despite the solid presence of some of these ethnic minorities.