E-commerce projects demanding co-operation between company
departments are creating a new need and new opportunities for
women, according to one of the most senior executives in IBM,
writes
John Kavanagh.
But employers need to help all their staff get a better balance
between work and home life to keep them, says Linda Sanford,
worldwide head of the industry leader's data storage systems
division.
"Today we look for a solutions approach in IT, which means much
more teamwork," she said during a day's visit to the UK last week
as part of a tour to meet European customers.
"These days a solution combines hardware, software, services,
industry knowledge. You need to bring people together from
different parts of the organisation so they can do what needs to be
done with their piece of it.
"Women bring a different perspective to teaming, and have good
skills here.
"The industry desperately needs more skills, and women, now in a
minority, can be a source of these skills, especially as the need
for teamwork grows across all industry sectors."
Surveys have shown that women are better than men at managing
people and time in particular, and generally have better personal
skills.
Sanford has certainly needed all these skills since joining IBM
from university as an electronic typewriter engineer 25 years
ago.
She was running the S/390 mainframe hardware laboratory when the
company switched from bipolar to Cmos technology.
Later, as head of the entire S/390 division, she proposed and
saw through the opening of IBM's MVS operating system to run Unix
software. This marked IBM's move from dominating the central
computing market with its own hardware and operating systems to
going with the flow of Unix.
"The biggest, and with hindsight, the most rewarding challenge
here was dealing with the internal culture change," Sanford says.
"We'd all been trained for a very different world. We had a
terrific team which rose to the challenge and reinvented themselves
to deal with the new dynamics."
Sanford's work has won her awards from US magazines Fortune,
Money and Working Woman, and brought her membership of the Women in
Technology international hall of fame.
She praises IBM as an example of an employer with the policies
needed to keep staff: "IBM has programmes to help balance home and
work. These include working at home where appropriate, flexible
start times, so you can get children to school, and, in the US,
help with finding child care.
"This all creates an environment for women to have careers and a
family - and these days such programmes are used increasingly by
men too, because they also want balance in their lives."
Sanford and her husband, Jim - who works in display technology
research at IBM - have benefited from these programmes, having
brought up two children.
"IBM has always been very encouraging as an employer, and it's a
very comfortable environment for women to work in - that's why I've
been here 25 years," Sanford says.