About the speaker

Our speaker today is Ms Wendy Bryant.

Wendy is the Chief Information Officer of the Australian Securities and Investments Commission. Prior to joining Australia's financial regulator, she was an Executive Director at IBM as well as a trustee director on the Board of IBM's corporate superannuation fund..

Additionally, Wendy has been involved in diversity in the workplace for many years, with a focus on women in technology and work/life balance and was a member of IBM's Diversity Council and Asia Pacific Women's Council.

Wendy has previously been a guest speaker at a UTS 'Women in Engineering' event and is currently involved with the UTS Bachelor of Information Technology Program.

Wendy began her career as a programmer analyst with the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation. She holds a Bachelor of Mathematics from the University of Wollongong and a Master of Economics from Macquarie University.

It gives me great pleasure to invite Ms Wendy Bryant to deliver the occasional address.

Speech

Presiding Chancellor, Mr Brian Wilson, Vice Chancellor, Professor Ross Milbourne, Dean of the Faculty of Engineering and Information Technology; Professor Hung Nguyen, members of UTS staff, distinguished guests, graduates, proud families and friends.

Before I begin, I too would like to acknowledge the traditional owners of the land where we meet today and pay my respects to their elders past and present.

Graduates, I‘m honoured to be here on such a significant day for you and your family and friends who have supported you through your time at University.

As occasional speaker, I am supposed to give you some worldly advice for your career ahead. However, as you know, there are plenty of inspirational and entertaining speakers who you can watch on YouTube; who can tell you how to reach for the stars, be a lifelong learner, look after your health, balance work and life, be true to yourself and take risks.

As I've come to accept that I'm nowhere near as entertaining as the likes of Tim Minchin - who after all did an Arts degree- I will instead give you a few simple tips I have used over the years. And since I am an IT person at heart and not into airy fairy arty things, my advice will be brief and I hope, practical.

My first tip: if something scares you, it means you should make yourself do it until it doesn’t scare you anymore. I don’t mean you have to apply this rule to life threatening situations such as bungy jumping or parachuting! But it is useful in pursuing your career. It can be something like getting up and speaking in front of people. Me being here today is an example of overcoming a fear of speaking in public and forcing myself to say “yes” when my heart says “no”.

My second tip is building on the first – don’t pass up an opportunity if it comes your way. Even if the timing is bad, take the opportunity in case it doesn’t come your way again – in your career, it is rare to get offered something a second time. It can mean saying yes to a job offer even if you don’t think you have all the skills to do it – women in the audience take note because, in my experience, we are notoriously bad at having the confidence to think you can do a job unless you have 120% of the skills required!

My third tip came from a course I did when I first started at IBM, where an American called Lou Tice talked about visualising what you want to happen – not thinking about what you are scared will happen. An example he gave was when hitting a golf ball over a water hazard, you had to imagine the ball sailing over the water and not think about it plopping into the water just in front of you. I suppose it's just another way of saying “think positively” and try to see the outcome you want.
It certainly hasn’t improved my golf game, but give it a go next time you're in a similar situation and see what happens… If it doesn't work for you, regardless, I recommend you take up golf – it can be very useful during your IT career.

So now that I have my words of wisdom out of the way, I can talk about some of the challenges that await you in your IT career.

With UTS celebrating 25 years as a university, it is probably appropriate, without sounding too old, to consider how much technology has changed over that period.

Everyone can see the impact that advances such as smartphones and the internet have had on everyday life and expectations are increasing.  We get frustrated when a website is not available 24 x 7, and outraged if a bank has a technical problem that means its services are unavailable. It is easy to take these things for granted and as IT people, we might be justified in getting annoyed when people don’t realise the innovation, creativity and hard work that has gone into the things we create or maintain.

But just because everyone expects their computers to never go down – don’t underestimate the impact your profession can make on the world. 

You are part of a profession that makes a difference. A profession that at its core is about building things – from Google glasses, iPads, 3D printers and software to run all those things and more.

Innovations such as the computers that enabled the moon landing and the worldwide web changed the world, even Facebook and Twitter have impacted how we communicate as a society - so what innovations will you see and participate in during your careers?

The US National Academy of Engineering has a list of 14 “grand challenges” which pose global challenges to be solved - such as providing energy from fusion and reverse-engineering the brain – things that will only be achieved with a lot of help from IT. And these are just challenges people can think of – there are some we haven't even thought of yet!

Science-fiction books are often a good indication of where technology can take us.  One of my favourites is a book by David Brin called Earth, published in 1990. Set in the year 2038, several predictions in the book came to pass within the decade; even though I recall thinking they seemed very far-fetched in the early 90’s.  The concept that everyone would have a personal tablet with immediate access to news and video seemed a generation away and already it’s a reality!

Famous sci-fi authors like Arthur C Clarke and Isaac Asimov predicted the iPad and Google.  Some people say that sci-fi doesn’t predict the future, it creates the future. Whichever it is, things that seem hard to believe in a sci-fi book can often become reality in our lifetimes.

When I started my computing course at University, I had never touched a computer before. I used punched cards on computers that filled a large room and had the processing power that we have in our current day laptops.

Today, the names of technology companies like Apple and IBM are known by everybody but when I started working at IBM in the 80’s- when out socialising and somebody asked me where I worked, I'd say “IBM” – and when they looked blankly at me I had to explain it was an American computer company because nobody had heard of it. That was normally the end of the conversation.

By the time we got to the 90’s and Noughties, when I said I worked at IBM, people would proceed to tell me about their latest problem with their home PC and ask whether I could fix it for them. These days everyone thinks they are a computer guru because they know how to use an iPad!

Unfortunately, something that hasn’t changed much since I first started working in IT is the number of women in the profession. When I first started working, about 10% of the IT workforce was female. Today, numbers can be up to 20% depending on the area of IT you look at – but the more technical the area, the less women.

If you consider that more than 50% of university graduates are now female, IT is not doing well – with only Engineering unfortunately having fewer female graduates. Indications are that girls lose interest in these technical careers in early high school and I doubt popular TV shows are helping – as they usually portray girls working with technology as very strange. There are a lot of organisations around the world who have recognised this trend and are trying to show girls that careers in IT are fun – not geeky.

An important part of the UTS character is its equity and diversity principles. These days, most people accept the advantages of diversity in the workplace – there are studies that show that diverse groups of people with average intelligence can solve problems better than a group of highly intelligent people; that companies with women on their Boards produce better financial results; that diverse teams contribute to product innovation; and that a racially diverse workforce is associated with more customers and sales revenue.

In Australia, we do have good cultural diversity in IT when you look across the profession as a whole; however, we need to ensure this gets reflected in management levels, especially senior management. At the moment, it isn't. If we want to make a difference, we need to make the most of all the people and skills at our disposal.

Diversity is certainly a big challenge for IT on a number of fronts and something I hope you will look back on in 25 years and won’t believe it could have been an issue.

As you embark on your new careers; remember you can make a difference, even in small ways. Consider the composition of the teams that you work in and challenge your bosses to do the same.

And finally, congratulations graduates– not just for showing that you are reasonably intelligent, but that you have the determination to see something through to its conclusion– a useful skill for the rest of your life.

Thank you for allowing me to be part of your celebration today and my best wishes for a Happy Graduation Day!