Ep 18: Deb Swink: Selling, Testifying, and Transforming the Industry

The Diva Tech Talk team is excited to share our interview with Deb Swink, Vice President for CSI Leasing, an equipment leasing corporation with 70 offices worldwide, and leasing operations in 36 countries. Deb has had a long and successful career in the male-dominated field of information technology leasing.

Deb’s career started in accounting as part of the accounting and marketing department at another technology leasing company. The  IT leasing field got its start with a 1950’s consent agreement from IBM and the Department of Justice. IBM had a monopoly on the market. But this ruling forced the tech giant to open up its technology to allow for buying, selling and leasing.

The market further opened up in the 1970’s, and companies like CMI and CSI were able to get their start. At that time, CMI was about 40 people and grew to 400 before Deb left for her next opportunity. Cash flow was very tight in their rapidly growing company. One day a manager called her up to thank her for handling the flow of requests well.

“You really handle the cash flow issue very elegantly. We have a situation where we’d like to do business with the federal government,” he said. “We’d like to tag someone to do that. We think you’d do a great job.”  At first, Deb hesitated, but her colleagues believed in her and inspired her to accept the role. She frequently traveled to Washington DC, and little by little she saw successes blossom.

Deb left, for a moment, to have a son in the late 1980’s. When she returned to work she asked if she could work a 4 day work week, but was denied that flexibility. So when an offer came that better fit her needs from National Computer, she took it. That company was later bought by CSI, where she still works today.

What helped this industry boom? Deb said it was pure economics. Leasing was very important. Customers couldn’t afford the cost of a mainframe system in the 80’s that might cost  upwards of $1.5 million dollars. The memory and capabilities of those systems are almost in a flash drive today.

“I feel fortunate to have seen the ebb and flow of technology,” she said.

By the mid 80’s, the market was established and Deb was making bids and closing sales for CSI with the federal government. However, she noticed bids started to get turned down asking for brand new technologies that weren’t necessarily needed. Many businesses, it turned out, were frustrated with this issue. When she filed a complaint, a protest started, and Deb found herself becoming the face of a movement.

At eight months pregnant with their second child, she had to go to Washington DC to testify.

“It was pretty nerve-wracking. But we won. It was a landslide victory that opened it up for more companies to participate in the marketplace,” she said.

Deb was offered a new opportunity in the 1990’s to offer sales and leasing to corporate accounts in Michigan. Technology leasing allows companies to save costs, stay ahead of the game with changing technology, and more. CSI now has 40 offices in the U.S. alone, and subsidiaries all over the world.

The top challenges Deb sees her customers face are developing a technology lifecycle for their business, managing suppliers, and managing assets that are in play. CSI also helps companies get rid of technologies they don’t need anymore.

The leasing industry has always been male dominated. Deb said that, for many years, she was only one of two saleswomen at CSI. “She and I broke the mold. We were successful individuals, so we showed that we could equally succeed in the industry,” she said.

Now, CSI has a number of women executives and sales team members. Deb says that being a woman brings a natural strength in nurturing skills. She truly cares about her customers and she pays attention to all of the details.

Deb Swink was one of the early leaders for the Michigan Council of Women In Technology, an organization now numbering over 700 members. She was one of the few people who have stayed consistently active since its inception and she says it’s really helped her to network and grow as a leader. Networking and giving back are two important practices that MCWT has helped her cultivate.

Deb’s leadership advice for women and being a sales leader include:

• Discipline, stay the course and have a strong work ethic.

• Integrity, and reputations are the single most important traits of a leader. You must have integrity to develop trust.

• Develop and hold to your beliefs;  you need to have passion and belief in yourself and your contributions.

Deb offered some great advice for us on this episode. She closed out by reminding us all to do the right thing, work in a place you believe in, and the money will follow. She can be reached at deb.swink@csileasing.com. She’s happy to meet and talk to any listeners anytime

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Ep 17: Carla Smith: Healthcare Champion and Technology Translator

In this episode we interviewed Carla Smith, the Executive Vice President of HIMSS, a global cause-based nonprofit organization focused on providing better health through information technology. She has nearly 25 years in policy development, 20 years of healthcare experience and a passion for translating “technospeak” for everyone.

Carla says she “fell” into healthcare technology. She was working in information technology in the manufacturing world for the State of Michigan. When Governor Engler came to office,  he shut down the work on which she was focused. So, Carla applied to an ad and took a position in communications for health IT.

Carla’s new communications focus was to help nurses and physicians understand what IT is all about, and this is now her niche. She studied English and Communications and now helps translate “techno speak” to the layperson, as well as translating policy issues.  

How does this work for policy? When there’s a piece of legislation, for example like one currently for cybersecurity, Carla visits Congress members to help them understand how cybersecurity threatens healthcare. There’s a lot of data available right now on security in information technology, but she’ll help to translate what this actually means for the health sector.

Carla’s role currently at HIMSS is Executive Vice President of North America. HIMSS is a global non-profit organization for better health through through the best use of information technology, providing thought leadership, networking, and education. She is the Executive responsible for HIMSS's focus in North America. 

What sort of impact does this make for the community? For those who consider information technology in the health sector, HIMSS helps them become better educated to make business decisions at their hospital, clinical practice, or agency. Carla says the end goal is safer care, more cost effective care, care that’s of higher quality, and increased access to care, through the best use of Information Technology.   “Technology is the tool, not the end,” she said.

Carla reflected back on her very first job, when ATM machines were first emerging. Her job was to educate consumers on why you’d want to use an ATM machine. She remembers, in the late 1980’s, hanging out with a friend who was the first to pull out her card for the ATM machine. It was mindblowing to see for the very first time!

She enjoyed teaching people how to use ATMs since it was all about helping the consumer understand how technology could be a valuable part of his or her life.

From banking, she went to the manufacturing sector. At the time, the “big three” auto companies were heavily focused quality assurance. There are many small and mid-sized manufacturers in Michigan, and they didn’t understand what information technology could do for them. Carla felt it was absolutely crucial for these small businesses to understand and get access to key technology like CAD CAM, as one example. “You can transform your entire way of thinking if the technology becomes available to you in a way that makes sense to you,” Carla said.

She subsequently moved to the healthcare field, and this is where she’s stayed. At the end of the day, we are all patients and the right care is so important to Carla. One of the ways to ensure people are receiving the right care is through opening up the pathways through policy and education to drive change. But this all boils down to having the right information to the right person at the right time.

Was it a challenge for Carla to study communications and jump into the world of IT? She thinks not. Instead, it helped her bring something unique to the field.  “I have never been sorry for the degrees I have,” she said. “I’ve met too many people who know so much, they are so smart, and they can’t get it out! They can’t express either in writing, or verbally, what they have to offer.”

Carla sees herself as a champion and a technology translator, but there are challenges she had to overcome. Being a wife, executive, and a mother, she found wonderful. But the challenge has been to juggle all her roles. As a mother and an executive, she found she’s more empathetic to others. There are ways to enable women on her team to be true to their professional needs and still fulfill their needs as mother.  She can empathize since it’s big challenge she’s had to face.

What advice does Carla offer for women in technology or women seeking leadership roles? Carla says it’s silly to have gender expectations.  We can simultaneously meet our need for a career balanced with our children, our significant others, and our personal needs! While that’s a lot to balance, her advice is to think of everything in seasons.

“Sometimes in a certain season, your job comes first. Sometimes your personal needs come first, sometimes you family,” she said. “You are going to cycle in and out of those and it’s okay.”

Other advice she offers:

• Stand up for yourself in a non-defensive manner. You’ll be able to receive constructive criticism and communicate clearly.

• Listen. Seek first to understand, before you try to be understood. You will learn so much about the other person. It will make you smarter and more effective.

• Take every opportunity to better yourself like listening to these podcasts!

Through Carla, you can find out more about HIMMS. You can email Carla any time at csmith@himss.org, and connect with her on twitter at @carlamsmith

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Ep 16: Susan Heichert: CIO Builds Her Career on Joy

We’re honored to chat with Senior Vice President, and CIO of Allina Health, Susan Heichert, in this episode. Susan first started in the health IT world by entering nursing school. She practiced nursing for several years, and suggests it as a great route towards health leadership positions.

Discovering an interest in her first employer’s nursing union, Susan went back to school for her master’s degree in industrial relations. This taught her finance, accounting, and coupled with learning computer languages in undergrad, she discovered her affinity for technology. She remembers buying an Apple II computer when they first came out and wondered how it could help the healthcare world.

In the 1980’s, her hospital was looking for someone to help install clinical applications. She thought she’d try it as an “experiment” but it was one important step that led her down the path to becoming a Chief Information Officer. She originally wanted a job negotiating for unions; and she expertly employs those negotiation skills now.

“I think that’s one of the lessons of your life journey. You pick up random skills and never know where they might lead you,” she comments.

Susan accepted the technology job, inventing her own role as an Informational Systems Nurse Coordinator. After moving to Iowa, she fell into another role with a startup technology vendor. She was an early employee who helped the startup develop clinical information systems products with early artificial intelligence. She learned sales, product development, and more aspects of the technology world.

“Those were great experiences,” she says. “You don’t know what you don’t know!”

Her husband’s job called for more geographic moves, and Susan took each of those as opportunities to try new positions wherever she went. She missed implementing technology, so she took on a role at St. John’s Hospital in Grosse Pointe, Michigan. Then, moving back to Minneapolis, she migrated into a managerial role at a children’s hospital, where she installed CERNER solutions. She remembers many people telling her not to go down the route, but, to her, it looked like fun! Susan often asks herself if a new position looks fun before diving in.

Subsequently, Susan and her husband moved to China, and she did not work for two years but traveled and learned the culture.

Then, her husband's work called them back to Minneapolis where Susan joined Allina as manager of hospital applications. In 2008, she became the CIO of the largest health system in the twin cities with 13 hospitals, and many pharmacies and clinics in the region. Allina’s mission is to serve communities and partner with patients. They want to enable their caregivers and their patients to collaborate in their healthcare together.

“It’s extremely mission-driven and it’s a mission I align with closely,” she says.” If you don’t have good information you can’t be a good partner.”

Susan manages over 550 people in Allina’s information services department, including medical records, and clinical engineering (often known as biomed) services.

The three characteristics of Susan’s character that strengthen her team leadership are: her background growing up in healthcare, adaptability, and optimism. She does say it’s hard to make change health IT, but it can happen.

Does being a women influence her career? Susan says that nursing is a female-dominated career, so she maybe didn’t have challenges breaking a “glass ceiling” in a world of women. She sees it as a positive circumstance, helping her to understand more points of view, practicing empathy and listening — , characteristics women often have.

Getting your first management or leadership role can be difficult, Susan warns.

Her top pieces of advice for women leaders are:

● Put yourself forward and try leadership positions. If it looks fun, just do it.

● It’s all about taking opportunities to learn. Project yourself into that position. Think about how you can start to manage / lead.

Listeners can email susan.heichert@allina.com, if they’d like to talk with her any time.

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Ep 15: Judy Murphy: Attitude Over Aptitude and her Journey to IBM Chief Nursing Officer

In this episode, we had the honor to chat with Judy Murphy, Chief Nursing Officer for IBM. Judy’s background is in nursing but she shares with us her journey from that career to information technology, and finally to leading IBM’s initiatives in healthcare innovation.

Judy started off in nursing. Computers first moved into nursing stations for simple things such as billing, communications, etc. But Judy started to learn what was and wasn’t happening on the technology development side, and some of it wasn’t always what was needed for nurses. 

“We were doing homegrown development of these applications,” she said. “We rolled things out and learned along the way. But that’s where I started getting interested in the power of what we could do.”

These were mainframe green screens. There was no simple windows interface at the time. How did she make the leap from the hospital world to IBM, one of the “grandfathers” of the computing world?  There was a lot of hospital consolidation during the 80’s and 90’s, and Aurora Healthcare was born. The hospital’s IT Department started growing, though at that time it wasn’t called IT just yet.  Judy joined as a liaison advocating for what technology could do for the clinical side, growing from Staff Analyst to Vice President over 25 years at Aurora Healthcare. 

“It was a pioneering time,” she says, describing the new role she took. There wasn’t much certification or training support, but there was a new and growing industry. One of the most important things she did was to follow the national conversation. She watched organizations like HIMMS to track what could be done with computers and healthcare, and Judy jumped in to engage in the industry. This was instrumental for her career as she grew in IT.

Judy then was put on a federal advisory committee that spoke up for the meaningful use program, part of the American Recovery Reinvestment Act. She served for three years in the federal government as the Deputy National Coordinator for the program, then migrated to the Chief Nursing Officer for the federal government (part of the Office of the National Coordinator of IT). It was a really rewarding role for her. But Judy noticed the money was shifting to support other areas. 

New emerging technologies started to intrigue Judy, and she felt called to do something bigger.  IBM recruited her and Judy was extremely excited about what the computer giant could do for healthcare. 

The biggest challenge Judy says for the growth of IBM’s healthcare practice is that the company is still known for their hardware. The computerization of the industry is becoming commonplace, but the industry needs expertise to learn how it can be used. 

IBM is delving into the following two areas: 

● Mobile applications for both patients managing health and healthcare, and enabling the workforce (the nurse). She stresses, in particular,  applications that facilitate workflow efficiency in the hospital and homecare

● Analytics and understanding data and the quality of services provided Judy believes that career success can be attributed to attitude even more than basic aptitude. 

When Judy’s hiring, she’s always looking at a person’s excitement for their work, versus what they know. Judy also values surrounding herself with a team for whom she can foster growth, as part of her own growth. Lastly, she says helping to really pay attention and engage in volunteer work, boards, committees, and other types of activities help to drive her forward. 

In discussing challenges she has faced, Judy observes that throughout her career, IT has been dominated by men. She had to work to demonstrate credibility, because of her gender and her nursing background. 

“That’s very different today. Now, industry expertise is valuable in IT,” she said. “I even created two sets of cards, one listing RN and one without.” 

The top three leadership lessons Judy has for others are: 

● Don’t feel constrained. We’re often our own worst enemies by not speaking up.
● Make sure you position other people to lead with you. Mentor and get together with them, and guarantee their success. 
● Readjust your attitudes and always be humble. 

She leaves us with one last piece of advice: to think about your organization and industry, not just your job. It helps to round out any leader in IT to think about a bigger picture. 

This interview took place at HIMSS 2015. Learn more about HIMMS, and IBM here.

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Ep 14: Kim Snipes: Balancing Many Hats

Diva Tech Talk recently had the pleasure of chatting with Kimberly Snipes, Vice President of Consumer Products and Operations Technology for Capital One Financial Corporation. Kim is the technology executive for the Core Deposit and Deposit Operations technology platforms for Capital One’s Retail and Direct Bank. Her team is responsible for all of the fraud, compliance, item processing, reporting and core processing platforms.  In her role, she manages approximately 700 colleagues across 5 locations. Kim is also on the advisory board of Women Who Code, a global non-profit 501(c) 3 organization, inspiring women to excel in careers in technology. 

“Wearing many hats” is how Kim describes her early and entrepreneurial career.  After receiving her undergraduate degree in Computer Business at Furman University (“I was one of only 3 women in the program!”), she immediately moved into a technology consulting business, founded by her father.  “It was really energizing” to Kim, since she had the chance to undertake many roles from technical training to production training to telephone support to quality. She says “I quickly saw that having these different perspectives gave me an appreciation for what it takes to innovate, come up with a product, develop it, and actually deploy and sustain it.” 

She credits both her parents for her success, saying “My Mom also always made my sister and I feel that nothing is impossible.”

Moving into a larger corporation, Kim also went back to school in the evening to get an MBA, at the University of North Carolina in Charlotte. Her belief is that being “a deep technologist who can actually speak to a business problem is ten-fold more valuable” to any industry.  In developing her career, Kim says “I was open to leading any type of technology team.”  She characterizes herself as both valuing deep competence in a role, and staying open to moving forward. “If I get too comfortable in a role, my mantra is ‘it’s time to change’.”

Speaking about her current leadership role at Capital One, Kim focuses on “hiring great people who can advance the technology strategy,” setting a vision, and inspiring her widely-dispersed team. “Motivate the team you have to want to come to work every day, to want to embrace the strategy, to push it forward,” she says.  To that end she tries to meet, frequently, with everyone on her team either in person or using the newest video-to-video technology to engage in discussions.

Now the recent mother of a 1 year old girl, Kim has been seeking additional balance in her life.  “Before I had my little girl, I was very career-focused,” she says. “The minute I released myself from trying to be who I was before I was a mom, my life got so much better. I’ve gotten comfortable in my own skin now.  I still work very hard, but at the same time, my child sees me every night, if possible.”   As women, Kim truly believes that “our biggest challenge is ourselves” when achieving balance.  “We have to give ourselves a break.”

A key piece of career trajectory advice that Kim shares with other women is that people need to know who you are. “Show what you can do in a very genuine and authentic way,” she counsels. “You also need to engage in other activities, or special projects” as part of your personal “brand-building.”  

Along those lines, Kim got involved first with the internal Capital One “Women In Tech” initiative and then Capital One became a founding sponsor of the international Women Who Code.  Kim became part of their advisory board, when she returned from her maternity leave.  “We wanted to find a great partner, who would be championing the cause” of gender disparity in the technology field, she says. “You can reinvent yourself with technology,” Kim states. “We wanted an organization who felt the same way we did…bringing women in, at any stage of their careers, but also supporting them, and championing them through promotion of their careers. Women Who Code is that.”  She is looking forward to her continuous participation with that nonprofit.  “Going forward, we’re really going to ‘amp it up’ next year,” Kim says.  To that end, she is looking for ways “where we really can engage in a very meaningful way,” to promote and support women in technology.

“Women need to support women more than we do,” Kim says. “What a powerful thing if we were really supporting each other, and paying it forward.” Her advice is “Make time to support people, either internally in your company or externally.”

“You learn how to be resilient,” in the course of your career, according to Kim, who advocates for learning to adjust to change. “You’re never going to have that perfect job in every situation,” she says. “That’s when having a support system will get your through hard times.  Never forget what gets you up in the morning, drives you every day to be here.  Don’t give up on the field just because one environment may not have been the best environment.”

Capital One can be viewed here: www.capitalone.com

Women Who Code can be reached here: https://www.womenwhocode.com/

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