How would you describe your journey? Brief us on the inception story of your career.
I started my career as a Cobol programmer for The Bank of England, but I quickly realised that fixing the millennium bug issue was not that exciting so then I moved into consulting my first assignment was for a media company, and I loved the variety and excitement around this industry. I stayed in media for a while I even worked directly for the BBC for a number of years.
After this I moved to Accenture and was in the communications and media part of the business, and this is where I accidentally ‘fell’ into telcos. I worked for all the big ones, BT, Virgin Media, Three, Vodafone, Orange, O2 (or BT Cellnet as they were at the time) and I absolutely loved it fast paced, at the forefront of technology and doing good things connecting people. Things have moved on quickly its now not just about people it’s about ‘things’ too where we put sims in cows to check their location, video calling whenever we want and with 5G the possibilities are endless. it’s an industry that keeps you on your toes, there is always something new, its fast paced and exciting.
I am a huge advocate of business led IT, this started when I first joined KPMG and got the opportunity to be involved in how the code that I was programming actually helped the commercial business. From there I was adamant that you could not have technology and business in isolation. I think it’s taken until the last few years for this to become a reality where we are now seeing CIOs as business leaders and central to a company’s executive board rather than a ‘service’ to the business. My job today is all about transformation and building products and services that are aligned with Three’s objectives and company goals and I am central to that. When I joined, Three was very much a technology ‘in isolation’ business, but over the last 3 years I have worked very closely with the rest of the organisation to change not only our technology stack to make it more accessible to the business but to make us, the CIO team central to the organisation, We are now a joined up team, which help me provide the business with the right tools and technologies to actually make changes themselves rather than come to IT for everything. This in turn has made us a much more agile and adaptive business.
Enlighten us about your role in the organisation you are leading / associated with?
I am currently Chief Information Officer for 3UK. I am responsible for all things IT related, whether that be delivering new technology required for our new products or propositions across all channels, managing changes to our Call center technology, the digital estate and retail systems, Billing and CRM – so basically all things IT that make a connectivity company like Three operate. I work very closely with the commercial and customer experience teams to ensure that I can react very quickly when we see an issue that could impact customer experience, or new technology that could help us advance in certain areas. As well as this Business-as-usual role, I am also responsible for transforming not only our IT stack to enable us to give a better customer and agent experience, but also transforming our ways of working to enable us to work hand in hand with the rest of the organization. I am a firm believer in Business Led IT change and this is what I am advocating at Three.
Where do you find inspiration? What motivates you to work harder?
My motivation comes from a need I must be the best that I can be. If I find I have a subject or area that I am not very good at, e.g., biology at school, I get bored and I don’t strive to achieve the best I can be, but where I have an area that inspires me, and I am really interested in, e.g., computer science at school, and Design, which I love and excelled at. So, the way in which I am wired comes from an early age, so I chose my career choices carefully, I must be in an area that interested me and motivates me daily.
My motivation also comes from others, I thrive on seeing other people in my team succeed, so I dedicate a large percentage of my working day to leading, motivating, and helping other succeed. Getting, my leadership team promoted and recognised as being brilliant makes me incredibly motivated to job my role, my team inspire my every single day to work harder to get my team recognised as a truly high performing team but also an honest trustworthy team who do what they say they will do. Authenticity and trust is so important to being in a great team, if my team are happy hen so am I.
I also like to campaign in areas that I see and believe are wrong, and example earlier in my career when I was told I could not promote some because she was on maternity leave – this was company policy and clearly not right – so I went on a mission to get this changed. There was also a time when someone joined my team and I found out had been offered a lower salary than her peers due to just coming off maternity leave and therefore wouldn’t be as productive as the others’ – this obviously made me furious, and I fixed this. There are many many other examples where I have seen something that is not right, and I have made it right.
I regularly talk about the importance of women in Tech and my views on Business led IT, I have been featured in the Sunday Times newspaper 3 times and recognised as the top 10 leader in telcos in 2022 by Raconteur, the most innovative CIO’s to follow in 2022 by Analytics Insight, the most influential women in tech by Bizclick media, CIO Top 100 by HotTopics.ht’s and UKTech50, and some other most influential leaders by various other forums. I have also made it to the ‘Top leaders in Tech List 2022 for the UK’ by computer weekly. I also regularly feature in various interviews, panels and talk at a lot of telco specific and IT specific events in the UK and also abroad. (Lisa to update on 2023 accolades not embargoed)
I am also the chair of the women’s network at Three and is also part of the CIO institute schools initiative where we talk to students about getting into technology. I am also a member of the TechM cloud advisory board, the Tibco advisory board and also the Bain/Russel Reynolds advisory board.
Kindly mention some of the notable recognitions and accreditations received by your person.
- Women in Tech Excellence awards 2022 – Finalist CIO of the year
- 2023 Finalist (still voting) – MVNO World Congress Woman of the year 2023
- 2022 Technology Magazine top 100 Leaders
- Women to watch winner for 2022 by Cranfield school of Management
- CIO 100 Winner 2022
- Finalist for Network X Telco Women of the year Mobile Magazine 2022 – InformaTech
- Recognised as UKTech50 2022 UK’s most influential Tech leaders – Top 50 List
- 2022 Mobile Magazine Top 10 Women to Watch in Telco
- 2022 Hotopics Winner – Global CIO 100 (HP)
- Hottopics 2021 Global CIO 100 Winner
- 2021 Harvey Nash mention in Womens History Month Recognised in UKTop50 movers and Shakers list
- 2022 Tech Girl Mentor
- 2023 National technology award finalists – winners yet to be announced (Digital Transformation of the Year and tech team of the year awards)
- HotTopics’ Global CIO 100 2023 award, in partnership with Hewlett Packard Enterprise.
What is the one thing you wish you had known about women in your line of work before you started working?
In my experience, it’s relatively easy to find experienced men who can give advice about personal growth or career choices. However, a woman mentor can give a different perspective, like experiences as a woman in tech, advice about running into sexism, mental health, work-life balance, and other resources.
A good woman mentor will make you believe that you belong to the tech industry, encourage confidence, and inspire you. Women in tech like to support other women in tech.
The biggest thing I wish I had known when I started out in my career was that it was ok to be me, I am introverted by nature, and this is totally fine, when I started on my career journey I lacked so much confidence because I was continually being told, mostly by men, that I need to speak up more in meeting and comment on things all the way through the meeting, not just when I was sure of the answer. I realised much later on in my career that talking all the time in a meeting is just another insecurity and a way, mostly men, but some women, like to think this will get them to succeed – what I know now is being authentically you will help you success, do not pretend you are something else, not only is it very stressful, but nobody will thank you for it or use it as a reason to promote you.
The other thing I wished I had known when I started my career and is one of the biggest pieces of advice I give my mentees and my team and that’s ‘know what you don’t know’ – it ok not to be an expert in everything, understand what you don’t know and be comfortable with that, don’t try and force your way through a meeting pretending you know everything about clou computing when actually you haven’t a clue and are having to google your way through a session. Again, this is really stressful, and you will get found out. You get so much more respect laying out what you are not familiar with than pretending otherwise.
Do you believe it is compulsory for a woman to manage a household alongside her work?
I do not think this is a relevant question in today’s day and age and therefore I will not comment.
As a woman, what has been the highlight of you career? What are the changes you wish to make for the better in your professional life post-pandemic?
My favourite moment of my career was not actually delivery specific, but it was when I fought really hard to get someone promoted when they were off on maternity leave. This was quite a number of years ago now but there was a policy in place that said if you were on maternity leave you couldn’t be promoted not until you came back to work and proved yourself again, well this was clearly utterly ridiculous, so I worked really hard to get this policy changed and to get her promotion secured whilst she was off . A very proud moment for me that was.
Another favourite moment for me was in my early career when I got promoted ahead of 2 bolshy individuals because I was willing to be ‘Me’, authentically me rather than pretend I was something I wasn’t – this got my promoted as people liked me, used me as a mentor, or ‘aunty Belinda’ is how I described myself at the time – the point is, I wasn’t pretending to be someone other than myself, an introverted shy individual with a huge desire to succeed.
Brief us on the changes the pandemic brought to your sector and your market. Has the work-culture altered?
What we found was of course people’s desire for communications was even greater during the pandemic but of course you could not go into the store to ‘try out’ a phone before you made the purchase because the thought process for a mobile purchase phone is more ‘considered’. However, we saw a huge shift from retail and call centres to web chat. Pre Covid the split between Voice and chat was around 75% 25%, but this flipped over during Covid so we had to rapidly expand licenses expand our capacity and also implement new functionality and of course train voice agents into chat agents.
The other thing we did was put our store online. I am not talking about our traditional online store here this is Three Store Now where you can have a retail experience online chat to an advisor and ask as many questions as you would like to as you would in a retail store, chatting to a real retail store agent, having a real retail store experience but actually online. This was a huge success for us.
As for work culture this created a big change in how we work. We have as an organisation implemented our new hybrid working model from October 2021 with enormous success working from our offices in Reading & Glasgow and from home. Our employees are based in the office on average 2-3 days per week. We also reinvigorated our flexible working policy so our core hours 10.00-16.00 with the flexibility to start or finish earlier to suit our employees.
We are still learning however we have implemented a remote first strategy for meetings by default – to ensure everyone has the same experience of the meeting if team members are in various locations. We encourage employees to think about the purpose of being in the office and how this might work best for the team (think about the 5’C’s – collaboration, connection, creativity, culture, communication)
Whilst not one way of working fits all teams, we agree team principles around methods of communication including frequency and content of meetings and how often the team will physically get together for collaboration. MS Teams is a recognised business tool for online collaboration, however, consider as a team what information is shared where, ensuring adherence to Data Protection and retention guidelines.
We are ensuring regular collaboration sessions are planned in to focus on face-to-face collaboration and support employee engagement, team building etc,
This has only widened our attraction for talent as in my team now have employees based all over the UK rather than local to one of our offices as it had been previously.
Within my own department we have introduced a number of initiatives over the last year to help development and empowerment. In order to empower teams and individuals more, we reorganised the entire CIO department to ensure that accountability sat in the right teams and the organisations and team structures allowed to empowerment of every single individual within the teams. Every single person within the organisation now knows what they are accountable and responsible for and more importantly feel they are empowered to make decisions to keep the flow of work flowing smoothly. The purpose of this move was not only to speed up decision making processes, but also to ensure it was documented and communicated that you did not need to be a ‘certain grade level’ to make key decisions. The outcome of this has been a tangible speed up of decision making, especially in financial and project decisioning. We no longer wait for the monthly steerco to make decisions; we make key important decisions every single day at every single level.
In addition to this we have created the WLT, this is the wider leadership team, this is a group of individuals who do not sit at the top table but report into the ‘top table’ and are empowered to lead and change the CIO departments.
What words of wisdom/ inspiration/ advice would you offer to the next generation of female leaders?
IT leadership is different today than it was only a few years ago. More and more, CIOs are being held accountable for: Designing and implementing digital initiatives, Managing cross-functional teams and Spearheading innovation.
In other words, CIOs must become strategists as well as operational managers. There are several implications of this for the modern CIO. CIOs must, for instance: Learn leadership and management skills, understand business and strategy, and be able to identify growth opportunities in the marketplace.
The most successful CIOs will be those who are comfortable in both the world of business and technology.
Investing in leadership and development, therefore, should become a top priority for the modern CIO.
One of the resources that were vital to me and encourage any female leaders to participate in, is mentorship. For me not only having a mentor or someone you can talk to is important, I think it’s imperative. As women we are very critical of ourselves and tend to over think things, worry, try and do too much, take too on much etc, we all know the juggles. I am not saying this is specific to women either, this could well be for men too. But having that outlet to talk to someone about what is going on and bouncing ideas off is vital.
I did not have a mentor until I was very far into my career, but I’ve always had someone that I could bounce those ideas off and let off steam. I think early in my career I suffered very badly with confidence issues. I am an introvert by nature and being in a male dominated extroverted profession was certainly very challenging for me and time and time again my confidence would get knocked and I could go into my shell. I would get feedback from my bosses and peers that I should speak up more in meetings, have confidence in my voice and that I knew what I was doing, but for whatever reason I kept hiding in my shell, until one day when I had moved roles to work for Vodafone, I met my ‘boss’ and he had exactly the same personality type as me, and only by talking through what was going on in my head when I was quiet in meetings then sent emails after explaining what I should have done there and then it was confidence and it was my personality type. So, by learning some techniques to build confidence, have the downtime I needed to ‘refresh’ prepares for meetings in such a way that I was confident in what I was saying – and importantly drowning out the ‘noise’ of extroverted individuals who would talk for the sake of it, I found I was actually being listened to, my confidence grew and it went from there.
So, whilst a mentor is important, it doesn’t have to be an official one, it just needs to be someone who understands you and how you operate.
