In the tech field, possibilities are plenty – not everything is coding! If we want to encourage more women to at least feel curious about this field, we definitely have to open up to them what the possibilities are.
I work for KONE IT as the Head of Digital Enabling Platforms. I have behind me a long career that started when I moved to Finland from China in 2002; that’s 21 years ago. I came to pursue my Master’s Degree in Information Systems Science at the University of Jyväskylä, and perhaps that already was very telling of my future, since two decades later, I am still here in IT.
Lulu Zhang, Head of Digital Enabling Platforms, KONE
Making the way into the IT field
Choosing a career in information technology was both planned and unplanned. At 17-18 years old, I did not have a clear career vision, yet at that age, it was very common in China to believe that computer science was always going to provide you with a good job – and I thought that as well, so I jumped into it; that part was very much unplanned. Yet, the part of going abroad -as I came to Finland- is something I have always wanted to do: I felt I needed to take a look at what’s happening outside, rather than only focusing on what’s happening within my 60-meter radius.
At the University of Jyväskylä, I had the chance to test many optional courses, including programming ones, and I remember thinking, ‘There is no way this is something I see myself doing’, while at the same time, I was really into information systems, which has to do more with management.
From Nokia to KONE IT
I started with what could be called a ‘typical’ job in tech, a SAP configuration management job, or a configuration technology job, at Nokia. I did that for nine years, and after that, I moved to a smaller company. This was ten years ago, so naturally, the difference between bigger and smaller workplaces was perhaps more palpable then: language, for instance, was a noticeable barrier back then; not everyone was willing to speak English in small companies.
Of course, nowadays this has changed a lot, but back then the experience made me realize how my true wish was to work for bigger international companies – and so I started at Outokumpu, my second big company here in Finland. There I also did SAP but I progressively shifted to a solution architect job, from the tech point of view.
After four years in Outokumpu, I changed to KONE IT eight years ago – and once again my focus was on SAP but soon I realized the potential for growth: the diversity and opportunities here at KONE IT are huge. Just to put an example, we have more than 151 nationalities; I have colleagues from Africa, Asia, America, and everywhere. And another important fact: there are other jobs than SAP in IT – I started wondering: do I have the possibility to grow beyond SAP?
Seizing new opportunities at KONE IT
Around 2018-2019 I started to proactively pursue the positions outside of the SAP team, and ultimately got a position in the newly formed Salesforce Platform team, looking after global change and release. This was a definite pivotal moment and my opportunity for growth, because I started to do something completely different, a little bit of a mix of process management rather than purely technical configuration. When you do something like this, it requires more than usual: you need to deal with people, and you need to manage the dependency management. So that is when I started to feel that my career started to flourish.
In 2019 I took on a new challenge: I was asked if I was interested in managing an integration team, so that moved me up to the so-called Head of Digital Enabling Platforms. From then on my work has been expanding – nowadays I have four teams under me: Data Movement & Integration, which was my very first team, Enterprise Automation, Business Intelligence Visual Analytics, and finally Microsoft 365 team as the latest addition. Altogether my scope is about 30+ team members, which do consume a lot of time!
The ‘challenge’ here is: all teams are different. Managing one team is easily doable, but four teams are indeed very different. I started contemplating: what if in the future I have to manage six, eight teams? How will I steer them up? The answer for me has been: I must find the common attributes between them. Technology-wise they are indeed very different, but their operating models and what they all are trying to do; that is pretty much the same. This realization helped me gain clarity in how I see my teams: we are all trying to utilize advanced digital technology to improve KONE’s productivity – and with this I mean all technology: whether it is about employee productivity, or internal information flow productivity, through automatization, data integration and so on. Once I found this common denominator, I actually felt that the scope of my work was well manageable.
Indeed, nowadays I am more confident, but I’ve had to step out of my comfort zone. I see it as stepping into cold water: the first time you feel all the coldness in your skin, then the next time it is a bit warmer, and then the next challenge feels almost like your body temperature!
And then of course when you get more comfortable, the reward comes: to me, the most fulfilling part of my job is to witness the scope of the content I need to manage: in terms of people, in terms of technology, in terms of deliverables expected from stakeholders; it’s quite a big scope, and to be able to manage it makes me quite satisfied.
Witnessing change as an inspiration to future tech female professionals
If I look back ten years ago, during my time at Nokia I was the only woman in my team. Two, or three years down the road, more women started coming to the company, and now the trend has changed and keeps changing since the number of women in IT is dramatically growing.
Thinking about it, I personally feel that there might have been a bit of a narrow perception of what tech is: people think that you’re either a mechanic, using literal tools, or you’re a coder. But the IT field is more complex and more open than that! In order to encourage more women to at least feel curious about the field, we have to open up about what the possibilities actually are: for example, in KONE IT we call ourselves a technology-driven organization, and that does not mean at all that everyone is doing coding, not at all! Someone is working on the solution creation, on design, on top of the technology, which is also IT! Somebody works on license management, and somebody works on the process design, creation, and deployment, which is also tech, so when we talk about technology management there are plenty of things to do.
And truly: after you get to know what this is all about, if you feel you’re not interested, then do not force it. There are plenty of possibilities out there!
A final word of encouragement
Even in 2023, it remains a fact that society might have higher expectations for women than for men, especially when they have a family. If you’re married and with children, it might be that you as a mother are expected to take care of the house: kids, food, and cleaning. And those things start to take up time from work, preventing you from doing more. Lots of families have those situations, and first, the question is, what about men who have kids? Are they struggling the same with time and resources?
And second, it might appear that in order to keep your performance high you need to do either more or work odd hours, when everyone goes to sleep – my personal view is: if you’re able to handle this pressure, great. Otherwise, time management is key here, you need to do certain prioritizing, find the balance, and look at things from an efficiency point of view.
