Finding a 'Home' in Tech as a Non-Technical Problem Solver

In a team meeting a few weeks ago, I had the opportunity to talk about my role and stakeholder with my greater Communications and Engagement team. In explaining what EY’s Enterprise Technology (IT) group does, I reflected on having found a ‘home’ in technology. The reason? Technologists are intrinsically innovative, open-minded, and willing to try and fail. This kind of environment is exactly where I thrive. And like technologists, I’ve been passionate about designing and building tools and processes that solve complex problems, always with the end user in mind.

Coming up on my 11th anniversary with EY, I’ve been thinking a lot about the passion projects I’ve worked on throughout my tenure and the impact these have had on my teams and stakeholders.

Automated travel security risk compliance process/workflow

In my time in Risk Management, leaders in charge of security for our traveling employees would gather and process travel plans to provide security assessments and advice over email!

My solution automated this process by creating an interactive list of all destinations, with travel security ratings and the appropriate instructions for approval of travel plans for high-risk destinations. This not only sped up the approval process for the end user and promoted compliance of EY policies, but also simplified the workflow for my leaders.

Communications planning and reporting dashboard

Having developed a smaller version of a dashboard to report the success of my team’s communications, I was tasked with scaling and improving on the idea of a communications planning and measurement tool to not only help our teams plan consistently, but also allow us to report our communications’ impact with our stakeholders at any moment.

My solution brought together common requirements from several stakeholders, from technology to risk and finance, to create a common reporting dashboard with key metrics and a back-end communications plan data source to help us maintain our communications plan easily. Minds more data-savvy than mine have helped develop this first-of-its-kind custom solution, positioning the communications team as innovative, data-driven, and strategic advisors.

Questions and upvote portal

Taking inspiration from the FAANG/MAMAA, I pitched the idea of a space where our employees can pose – and upvote - questions ahead of our internal town halls or ask me anything sessions which would help leaders and my communications team create anticipation for the upcoming event, gather ‘hot topics’ around what employees want to hear about most, as well as promote transparency between teams and their leaders.

Not only did my leaders support the idea, but they lent their team’s time and resources to create our custom/in-house questions portal. Our post-event surveys indicate that this tool is an important part of our employee engagement strategy.

Have questions for me about anything above? Message me!