Wednesday, May 18, 2016

Sheryl Lemma – How to Stay Focused on Solving the Right Problems with Technology

Sheryl Lemma has over 20 years of experience in higher education technology and has been with Ellucian for almost 16 years. She currently serves as Director of Product Management, with responsibility for Ellucian’s document management solutions, Ellucian Mobile, and Ellucian Reporting, powered by Ellucian Ethos.

Prior to this role, she served as product owner on new product development teams in areas such as reporting, Ellucian Portal, ILP, and most recently, Ellucian Mobile. Before joining Ellucian, she worked as a Colleague and Unix system administrator at Lebanon Valley College. Sheryl is passionate about creating unique and exciting applications that solve people's business problems, and is looking forward to engaging in new areas.

You’re at a 48-hour hackathon. What would you love to create?
It’s funny you should say that because my company just participated in hackathon at William and Mary College. Ellucian makes software for colleges and universities, so there’s a good chance that you may have used our software! We have 154 products and one of the products I’m responsible for is mobile. So when I look at a hackathon, I would love to be able to sit with college students and ask them, “What do you want?” What problems are they having that their device could solve for them? Those are the things I really want to build.


I’ve spoken about technologies in search of a problem rather than problems that can be solved with technology. One of the things we’re thinking about as an arrow in our quiver is location-based technologies. We know where you’re sitting right now – what can we do with that? What problems can we solve? We’re looking for example at attendance tracking instead of faculty members taking attendance, which they’re required to do by state law and federal law – there’s actually federal student dollars attached to that so they have to take attendance. What could we do so that they don’t have to do that and can teach and spend more time in the classroom? I would love to see how students can solve that because I know students will have a very different approach to that from administrators who have to collect that information.

Speaking of problem-solving, what advice would you give to someone facing challenges in the workplace? How do you stay energized when you inevitably encounter problems in any kind of working process?
Particularly when you’re younger – and I went through all of this as a younger person, especially when you’re female – the way people interpret how you  react to those problems can be vastly different. We’re doing a whole cultural transformation at my company, and one of the behaviors we identified was assume positive intent. And this is something I wish I had known when I was younger, I’ve used it with my kids and my spouse. Most people are trying to do they best they can with the information that they have. So when they come to you and it sometimes may feel negative, assume the best, assume they’re trying to move forward. They may not always be, but you certainly feel better and approach it differently.


I think one of the traps that technologists in general and perhaps women fall into is the stress or strain of trying to be the smartest person in the room. In general, in technology, that’s been the biggest barrier to success that most people have had. You don't have to have all the answers, and if you can be confident enough to say, “Can we stop and back up, can we reframe this a little bit” – another one of our values at our company is pause, assess, restart: let’s bring this back to the problem we’re trying to solve – being confident enough to say, “I’ve not encountered this before, can we back up and talk about it?” is really powerful and takes a lot of confidence. You have to grow into confidence a bit, but I think most people who are starting out now have more confidence than we did when we were their age. 

Do you think that’s a particular problem for women in the workplace, trying to be the smartest person in the room?
I think developers in particular, and I’ve seen it in the hot-shot male developers, think they don’t need business people and that they can solve all the problems when you don’t…and that’s ok. Part of it is that in technology in particular, we don’t value brawn, we value brains and knowledge, so you feel like you have to have all the answers from the start is hard. It’s hard on the people and leads to incomplete decisions and it’s very fast-paced. In fact it’s seen as a barrier to raise your hand and ask to stop for a second. Let’s just make sure we’re solving the right problems.


What advice would you give women who are graduating from college, both those who really understand where they want to go and then those who don’t? What are the first jobs they should go after and what should they make sure to do when they get those first positions? What’s your advice of how to utilize and to really pay attention to their early 20s?
Well first of all, don’t spiral downwards! It’s a very scary time and it wasn’t a pleasant time for me, and I think it’s because you go through school and do well, you’re a superstar, and then you get into the workforce…and you’re not. Or maybe you hit a plateau and you wonder what life has to offer you. I don’t work in the field I studied, I took a very left turn – I actually wanted to be in broadcast news but the great thing is that if you stay open to learning and recognize the things you’re good at, the things that are truly strengths for you actually cross entire disciplines.


I wanted to be in broadcast news because I’m good at talking, and if you can find a way to do those things every day, your job almost doesn’t matter. Find something that’s interesting to you, recognize that you may move around and it’s ok, be confident in what you’re good at and really think about what you’re good at – you will have confidence in that. I’m not good at coding, but as I got into the product side, I was able to jump around and take disparate pieces of information together, assemble them into something new and hand it off to someone else. I have a developer who is very detail-oriented, loves to code; I’m much more big-picture, so when we partner, something amazing comes out of it. So if you can partner with someone who has the strengths that you don’t have, it almost doesn’t what you’re working on because great things will happen.

When it comes to data, how do you teach kids about this nebulous, intangible thing that drives everyone’s lives – how do you actually understand and visualize data?
I think we do a pretty good job with people who are interested in STEM and are naturally talented at that. The thing that’s important that I don’t know that we do enough of is for people who aren’t necessarily interested in coding or the data or the infrastructure, because we still need those people. You have to have this basic understanding of these really complex pieces of information. It took me a long time to give myself credit for being good at communicating, and people like me are so needed to bridge the gap between the technical and the non-technical. There’s definitely a need for people who are in most art-based areas to be those communicators and translators of ideas.

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