娇色导航

Welcome to 娇色导航Leadership Live. I'm Lee Rennick, VP Tech Evangelist for IDC, and I'm very excited to introduce and welcome Kristy Mason, 娇色导航of Bentley Motors. Kirsty, welcome to the show today. I really appreciate you joining us.

Could you please introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about your current role. Hello everyone. Thank you, Lee. I'm Kirsty Mason. I have to keep checking myself because I'm recently married, and I do keep forgetting my name, which isunfortunate.

I'm the 娇色导航at Bentley. I've been at Bentley motors since January 2022 so three years,

three months and quite a few days. 23 days, I'd say so not, but I'm counting. I've been working in IT for around 34 years, lots of different industries over that time, travel, telecoms, cruise lines, airlines, insurance companies, outsourced service providers.

So I do think there's not many things that I haven't seen over those years at least twice as well.

Well, you've had an amazing career, and just having the opportunity to work in those different sectors, especially in technology, and seeing right now how we're really at the precipice of a new age of technology, potentially with AI and agentic AI.

So I'm really thrilled to have you on the show today. Thanks so much for joining us. No, I'm happy to be here. Thank you. Well, so I really wanted to talk about that actually, in segway, when we first met, we really talked a lot about women in technology.

I'm a big supporter of an organization here in Canada called hacker gal. They work with young girls, ensuring they have a safe, safe space to learn about technology and to play with technology.

You know, we've been seeing some not so great rates around the share women in tech roles in Europe, it's heading towards a decline to 21% by 2027

you know, 43% of women in tech, the tech sector, think about leaving the role at least once a week, which is staggering to hear.

And girls like I said, going to stem they, you know, age 11, are really interested by 15, maybe they switch, because there's a lack of role models. So the stats aren't really great.

So I'd love to learn more just about your viewpoint around that, and maybe some actions you believe tech leaders and businesses can do to support women in tech?

Okay, so I think there's, I mean, there's so so much we can do, and there's, there's things I do try to do myself. I think the most important thing is, is getting out there and sharing, sharing stories.

Because when, when you hear a story, and it's someone's personal story and their journey, that's something that you can kind of gravitate to a little bit more. So that's why it's important to do things like this.

I've done other podcasts at universities to try and get in at universities as well, to sort of say to people, and you can actually be a normal human being as well.

A lot of people seem put off by moving into leadership roles, because they see you have to be a certain way or very corporate. And I'm not a very corporate person at all. So I'm quite down to earth and normal.

And I think people see more real people as well. Bringing them true selves to work helps people to feel more comfortable to go into those roles and progress through the ranks as well. Well, I appreciate that, and I actually apologize I skipped questions.

So maybe we can go back to question one and just talk a little bit about your only like your own journey in in the business space and in technology.

And you know, many, maybe any lessons learned, any maybe interaction you had with people that really helped you want to be in the tech space. So maybe you could talk a little bit about that too.

So, so years and years ago, and people probably in the UK would know this more than others, there was a program called Tomorrow's World, and it was all about the future and what that could look like.

And I was fascinated by by this show, because in one particular episode, and it was, there was a woman presenter on it called Maggie Philbin. I once got a mention on her from LinkedIn. It made my career.

At that point in my career as well, they were talking about homes of the future, where you'd have mobile devices, and this is before we knew anything about mobile phones, and you'd have surfaces where you could charge things, and, you know, self charging device all way before it's time.

It was all a bit space age. And I think, Oh, this is so exciting. So they were the sort of things that inspired me then, and the female presenters of those shows that it was, you know, you could associate yourself being being with them.

And then, as I went into sort of a my first role was working in a software development division, and it was.

In the sort of mid 90s where everyone was frantically recoding all of their systems because year 2000 was coming.

Yeah, and everyone thought the planes were going to fall out of the sky, that the banking systems were going to crash, that submarines were going to explode, because everybody had not thought of the fact that at some point in the future, we'd click in to the next millennium.

So they were my very early days in technology. By the time the year 2000 came, I was a service delivery manager and and I was on call, and I worked for Royal Mail. And so there was a massive panic. You know, people weren't going to get paid.

People weren't going to get the letters, blah, blah, nothing happened. It was the biggest non event, I think, that we've had in technology as well over the years. And the head of that development division was actually a female and so.

So for me, I had some role models who made it almost seem accessible. I was, I was not very academic at school, so I left school without having any formal qualification. So I felt lucky to even get a job and to get a job in technology.

And it wasn't because I was, I was wasn't bright. I was, I was

just, I think, more curious of the wider world than than an academic, and I like to do things rather than study things.

So for me, being able to do coding and learn coding was was much more interesting, and I sort of found my routine, and then just continued to sort of grow and move through the ranks over the last 34 or so years,

but it's been tough because there weren't a lot of female role models in that and and I

so So now, when I have apprentices who are Joining it, I still see the world through their eyes when I was joining an IT organization or coming into business, and we speak whole different languages, so different to when you're at college or school or university.

So knowing how it felt for me and I can still remember it like it was yesterday, even though it feels like 100 years ago, some days, I feel that sense of responsibility to help them feel as comfortable as I did when when I first joined that development division, all those hundreds of years ago, not that many years ago.

But that's really interesting. So it sounds, sounds for me like for you, representation. First of all, seeing that TV presenter, I feel the same way. I had those kind of role models. I was talking to my husband about it a few weeks ago.

There were certain role models I looked to that were in the media. And I'd be like, Wow, this woman looks like completely like, how did they get there? And so there were those things.

But it sounds like now you've been very intentional in making sure that younger people coming up around you also that you exude and the ability to represent women in the space, but also sounds like you're taking it further and really looking at mentorship, or I like to call it woman tourship,

with those people around you that are starting in their careers. Yeah. And another thing that I do, I don't have an office, and this is something that I consciously done. Most of the people who are my peers still have offices, and I don't.

I book a desk the same as everyone else. So people are really unlucky. They're sat next to the CIO. But I say it's just a role. It isn't me as a person. That's the role I perform when I come to work. We just have different responsibilities.

We're all part of a team all with the same common objectives. So I need to be part of that team as well. That's truly inspiring.

I mean, for anyone listening in, that's the opportunity to interact with individuals within your organization without creating that sort of space that seems more sacred than others.

So I really love that, and maybe that ties in really well to the next question, which is around business, and IT roadmap.

So the last time we spoke, you chatted about building a joint business, and IT roadmap that really leveraged enterprise systems and also linked closely to Bentley's value streams.

So maybe, could you talk about building the IT strategy, the digital transformation to support the business value that you developed and led?

Okay, so when I came into automotive, I was new to automotive, and again, it was like learning a whole different language and and in some senses, you have to learn another language, because many of the abbreviations are actually tied to German words as well.

So even when you know them, you don't understand what what they mean, either. So for me, it was about taking that big step back looking at our business and saying.

Well, we're all about either creating, designing and creating an amazing product, which is the car we are. We then have customers that we service through the web or the app or the we have the enterprise that we support that deliver those things.

So they essentially broke it down to those three, three value streams within those value streams. And then said, okay, so what? What are the processes that we're doing? So we're either designing a car, building a car, marketing a car, selling a car.

So these became our ecosystems that we then started saying, Okay, well, what are all of the systems that we use to do those things, and what end to end processes do they support?

So for me, I like logic, and so I was trying to put all the logic around this when we then looked at that and we could see, actually, let's take away the system name and look at the capability that it gives us.

So an example of capability is, I need to have data visualization, and we might be using

Tableau, we might be using Power BI, but what's, what's the capability we really need, and are we using the right tool for the right thing?

Because if we're just visualizing some data in Excel, there's probably a way to do it, rather than if you join in data together from different sources, etc. So it was really then looking to rationalize the the amount of systems we had delivering the capability.

So that's where we had to take the business on, on this journey with us, because it would involve them potentially changing the systems that they used. We know people get very precious about the systems that they use. They know it. They love it. They understand it.

I don't want to change it. Thank you very much. Even though that thing's cheaper, they they don't, they don't necessarily like change. So actually saying that the end to end processes could be streamlined across the business. We can reduce complexity in the landscape.

We can reduce cost of delivery of that to the business from an IT perspective, that gives us more money to invest in other things or future ready in our organization as well.

It's been a huge journey, but now, when I hear the business talking about we need to add this capability to the road map, and it is a true capability, and we use Lean IX and the the manufacturing model within there, I feel like I felt when the first time my daughter said please or thank you, and I didn't have to nudge her, it's almost like, oh yeah, they've learned the language.

They know what to do, and they know how to do it. And that makes me feel, you know, really proud that that they're there, and it's taking them on that journey and explaining, rather than telling, you have to sort of explain the benefit.

So what's in it for them all the time? Not why it's better. It strategy, yeah. And, I mean, I always it sounds like it's very inspirational.

And, you know, I always reference the IT Crowd, you know, the two guys and the woman in the base, girl in the basement. It's like, have you tried turning it on and off again?

I guess also in that roadmap, the capabilities changed, you know, especially post covid, of like, not them asking you, you know, how do I fix this? But more like, how do we build our business capabilities, right?

And it's not about just calling down to you, saying, hey, what do I do? You're like, saying here, this is the road map we want to build, and this is how things fit together to create business excellence, yeah.

And when, when we look, and we look at some of the larger enterprise systems, we've probably got the capability already there that we could switch these 10 things off over here, just use something we've already got, yeah, and make things even better for the business.

So that's been something. We've been working really closely with our sort of strategic partners in in those spaces.

To say, you need to come on this journey with us, because actually we will then be a real, sort of success story for you to help define your products as well. To say, here's how we added value. So I've been pulling everyone in.

I've been pulling our partners in, as well as, as well as, as well as the business to to get us there. And it's, it's, it's hard. I'm not going to say it's, it is a hard thing to go on, but you just have to start.

It's like with everything, everything's hard when you first start.

Yeah, yeah, especially when it's new, when you're changing languages and ways of working, especially when the person doing it doesn't know anything about building cars, you're always going to get potentially a little bit more resistance, yeah, but that's you need lots of persistence and patience. Yeah. Fantastic.

Thank you for sharing, and it really does segue well into our next question as well, too, because we're, you know, it's around innovation and Gen AI.

So, you know, I have a lot of conversations with CIOs and IT leaders from around the globe talking about how they're utilizing Gen AI to build productivity for the value in their business.

Now, IDC, our organization, predicts that in 2025 2026 most companies are still at the adoption stage, you know, the AI pivot, which will really build that AI field business model.

I think, you know, we were just talk chatting before we started recording. And I was saying, you know, one 娇色导航said to me last week, data is the feel for AI.

And so I think there are a lot of components of it that we're seeing through our research that you really have to have excellence in in order to make that AI pivot. So just wondering what your thoughts are around this.

You know, any predictions for the remainder of 2025

so I say something similar. I always say there is no AI without data. So the thing that we've been working on for the last two years is the data strategy, understanding the governance, the framework, and everything else that we need there as the foundations.

We've done a lot of work around data literacy and upskill in the organization, as well as we've been doing that in in preparedness for AI

because we we know it's, it's the it's the new Kool Aid. Everybody wants it. It's everybody wants it now, but they don't necessarily know what they want it for. So it's about creating that safe space as well, where people can plug and play and test and learn.

But really, I've been working in partnership with the chief strategy officer to say, this needs to be a joint business, and IT strategy around data and AI. It can't just be from it.

We need to really work together and work with the business say, what do we want to use AI for so we can get to value sooner?

And if you think about what we've been doing for the last sort of three years in moving to the enterprise systems and reducing the systems landscape and really making sure we understand what data we've got in those systems, it's all been sort of creating the pathway and the foundation levels that we need to get us there sooner.

Now there's, there's things that we're doing. So we've had trials of copilot and and it's people are just really starting to learn. But, but to me, it's the education is massive, because

there's a four box grid that I reference, and on one side is competence and one side is consciousness. And if we're not we're not careful, we'll have lots of unconscious incompetence, and that's the worst place that we can be.

And so the me, the upskilling is, well, putting the focus and then giving some some tools that we know in a safe space to for people to really learn to think about where they can get business value from. It sounds really wonderful. I appreciate your insights.

So very much. Kristy, I appreciate you joining me today. Thank you so much. I'm very happy, and I hope that helps some people in some way. Thanks so much, Kristy. And if you're interested in listening to this video or others, please head on over to CIO.com.