Recently honoured with the Leoni Warne Women in ICT Award, Tammy Ven Dange is committed to encouraging other women to enter and remain in the IT industry. She spoke to Freya Purnell about her experiences with SAP and why we need to start educating students earlier about the opportunities a career in IT can bring.
When it comes to attracting the next generation, IT has an image problem, according to Tammy Ven Dange, ACT regional manager for Plaut IT Australia. It’s a view borne out by the statistics, which show that the number of students taking ICT at university has more than halved in the last decade.
As president of Women in Information and Communication, a volunteer organisation based in Canberra which champions women in ICT, Ven Dange spends time talking to young people, particularly girls, about considering a career in IT.
What they want is two-fold: they want a meaningful career, and they want to make money. But they are under the impression that IT won’t necessarily provide either. “They are surprised when I explain to them what the IT system does in a situation like the Queensland floods where Centrelink sends these massive vans and trucks there so they can give people money on the spot. They didn’t recognise that the emergency evacuation systems in place for bushfires in Victoria are done by IT,” Ven Dange says. “When you start to go through the different scenarios and how IT helps people, especially in government, they can see it’s important.”
The opportunity to choose the type of lifestyle they want – and make the level of income they desire – is also attractive.
“As soon as you tell them that a graduate from IT makes more than a fully qualified nurse, their eyes suddenly start to open up. When you say you could do it from anywhere, their eyes widen further. When you say you could work six months of the year, and probably vacation the other six if that’s how you want to set up your lifestyle, then you’ve really got their attention.”
The winding road
Ven Dange’s own career is a great example of how IT can take you anywhere. She began her career as a procurement officer for the US Air Force, before joining the Peace Corps, volunteering in Africa.
“I was helping the governor of one of the islands in Cape Verde with their IT training, as well as bringing in more tourist, development and investment dollars,” Ven Dange says.
Her first exposure to SAP was working for NASA, on what was then one of the first US government implementations. It was a two-year finance and procurement project, made more challenging by public scrutiny and a difficult time for the organisation. “At the time, we had the space shuttle disaster, we had 9/11, we had the famous Sniper Attack, and we had a snowstorm that basically locked my team into the building for a couple of days. All that happened during this project, and we still hit our schedule,” she says. Ven Denge then moved with her husband from Washington DC to Los Angeles, where she ran her own online marketing company for several years, before moving to Australia six years ago. She worked with Capgemini in an account management role for the public sector, and then returned to an SAP-focused role when she joined Plaut last year.
Having come from a broader IT background, Ven Dange believes SAP is not as complicated as people believe. “From working in other IT areas where you are building custom-made solutions, I think the system itself actually simpler than people realise, and we make it complex because the business process and people side of things is complex,” she says.
Ven Dange also clearly has an appreciation for the importance of corporate services in the bigger picture. “It’s one of the places which a lot of people take for granted, and it’s the first thing to be cut. However, it’s also the one thing that makes everything else more efficient. So the ongoing investment in SAP to me is what every organisation needs to help it run better.”
Supporting other women
This year, Ven Dange was presented with the Leoni Warne Women in ICT Award by the AAIS, ACS and ACPHIS. Named in honour of Dr Leoni Warne, who was passionate about the information systems discipline and the promotion of the role of women in IT, this award recognises the contribution of women in the ICT industry and is awarded on merit, based on a 360-degree review by peers, advisors and people in the community.
On the award, ACS manager Adrian Armitage says, “The Award is a very personal award and is not given lightly. Tammy’s contribution to women in IT and the IT industry overall has been outstanding – she exemplifies who we seek to recognise and we congratulate her on the award.” Ven Dange has been involved with Women in Information and Communication for four years, spending the last two years as president. The aim of the organisation is to provide networking opportunities for women in Canberra, to champion women in IT and to encourage young women to consider careers in IT.
One of the challenges with increasing the proportion of women in IT is actually retention.
“We found through our research that they might go through an IT program at school, but we lose a lot of women when they start to hit the middle management level. They drop out for various reasons – lots of times because of family and other commitments, but they don’t go back into it,” Ven Dange says. “We also find we have a lot of women like myself that came in from other backgrounds and just land in IT. Those are the women we are trying to really support.”
Particularly in the face of skills shortage, the question of how to keep those women engaged in the IT sector should be a critical one, particular as male-female imbalances can become self-perpetuating.
“You go to some of these departments, and if you are the only woman in the room, there’s a good reason why women aren’t attracted to that. When you walk into an environment where you are obviously different to everybody else – regardless if it’s sex-based or minoritybased or anything else – it’s uncomfortable,” Ven Dange says.
“So we are trying to provide women with a network that they may not get in the organisations they are working in so they can have a peer group that they can relate to.” As for how we can increase the number of girls choosing IT, resolving some of those image problems, and starting earlier to try to recruit them, could be the way forward. “Movies like The Social Network don’t help. The only women you see in there are basically eye candy. That’s not actually helpful in dispelling IT stereotypes,” she says. Chatting with high school students who were chosen as science and technology leaders recently, Ven Dange found that by Year 10, many had already chosen a particular field of science to pursue, and IT was not on their radar. “We are starting too late – we need to start speaking with girls when they are younger. Let’s give them an alternative, something that they probably haven’t considered.”
Public sector under pressure
Having worked with the public sector for most of her career, Ven Dange says that further budget cuts are tightening the screws even more for government agencies which are already squeezed. Outsourcing – in many circles still a “dirty word” – is starting to be considered more seriously, but it requires agencies to mature beyond simply managing hundreds of contractors on a project. “It takes a very mature organisation to be able to say, ‘I want you to achieve this by this date, and I am not going to tell you how to do it. I am just going to measure you along the way to see how you are going.’ That’s hard to do, but I am starting to see that,” Ven Dange says, adding that there are signs organisations are becoming increasingly frustrated with the lack of skilled SAP resources in tight labour markets such as Canberra.
In other trends, Ven Dange is observing much more interest in non-core SAP solutions such as CRM, GRC and BPC, and mobility solutions.
“CIOs are tired of being stuck to their desktop. They want to be able to sign off on timesheets on their phones. It’s the same with any kind of workflow and dashboards – they want to have that information available to them immediately. Mobility is certainly coming up, but I think everybody has a different view on how to get there.”
This article was first published in Inside SAP Winter 2012.
