MARY GENDRONSenior Vice President and
Chief Information Officer
Qualcomm, Inc.
 The CIO of the Year ORBIE Leadership Award will be presented this year to Mary Gendron, who serves as senior vice president and chief information officer at Qualcomm Incorporated.
Gendron was chosen for the honor in large part due to her proven track record of successful technology leadership throughout her career. She has made significant contributions to – and had a meaningful impact within the Southern California technology and business community, while inspiring others through her personal, professional and civic contributions.
For her exceptional work at Qualcomm and beyond, her accomplishments have been acknowledged by peers, industry leaders and prior ORBIE winners, and she is clearly deserving of this year’s honor.
The Los Angeles Business Journal had a conversation with Gendron to learn more about her innovative work at Qualcomm and her perspectives on the evolving role of CIOs and the IT landscape in general.
Congratulations on earning the annual ORBIES Leadership Award! In your mind, what does it take to be an accomplished IT leader in 2021?
Thank you, this is a true honor.
IT is such an exciting place to be! The world is ever changing and every day it’s evolving more rapidly than it was the day before. Technology change is accelerating, data is exploding, geopolitical climates shifting, and new business models are evolving. An IT leader’s success hinges on speed and agility—it’s essential to embrace the momentum.
Technology is becoming more complex; it’s getting better and faster. At the same time, we are more connected, and business opportunities change rapidly. IT leaders need to orchestrate environments that help business stakeholders do their jobs better—environments where the speed of decision making, solutions, and responses can support the organization’s dynamic business.
This requires expertise in proactively leading change by strategically aligning the IT function to the highest priorities of the broader business; making continuous measurement, refinement, and monitoring part of the organization’s DNA; and shaping a culture that thrives on being limitless—one that looks beyond what’s happening now and focuses on connecting longer-term dots that enable employees to innovate and help shape trends. You have to do better than simply matching the needs of the workforce you’re supporting. You must get out in front of them.
How has the pandemic changed the nature of CIO leadership?
From the onset of the pandemic, I knew that it was critical to lead with empathy. While all our life circumstances are different, we can each understand another person’s frame of reference when we consider their unique situation. Taking a genuine interest in your team and approaching them in a way that shows you understand their challenges and feelings helps them feel supported. While I have always strived to be empathetic, the coronavirus pandemic amplified its significance.
In addition, the pandemic showed us the importance of enabling our business in a connected world, allowing people to work from anywhere in a secure manner. Qualcomm had been enabling this vision, but in fact it wasn’t until the pandemic hit that what we had been working on as possibility, quickly moved from a nice to have to a critical need. As a result of thinking ahead we were able to navigate the early days of the pandemic quite nicely. Some of the challenges we’ve experienced during the past two years have always been there, but the pandemic has given us the ability to reimagine the workplace and workforce of the future in new and exciting ways.
How does an effective CIO achieve collaboration and support from the other members of the C-Suite?
I’ve found that collaboration and support generally come through a true interest in learning and active listening, no matter the level of employee and the c-suite is no exception. Top executives want to know that you understand and appreciate their top issues. CIOs need to bring insight that spans the business, not just the IT function—this is part of getting out in front of the workforce. You have to spend enough time building relationships, understanding the business imperatives, and understanding the world so you can see issues through the other c-suite members’ lenses.
Approaching work in this way enables you to be proactive and anticipate the solutions that IT can provide to create the most business value. Typically, other members of the c-suite don’t initially consider what they need from IT. It’s the CIO’s job to take initiative, to show how IT can be a differentiator and how it can help accelerate the organizational strategy.
What’s the most meaningful technology trend you’ve observed in the last 10 years, in terms of impact on the workplace?
Considering the rate of change, it’s impossible to choose just one technology trend. So many trends have impacted our workforce. We are able to process extremely large data sets thanks to the evolution of IT architecture and the cloud, and those data sets are always increasing in size. We can also leverage data analytics, machine learning, and artificial intelligence to exploit data by identifying patterns and providing insights into solving bigger problems. What used to take hours and involve human intervention now takes minutes or seconds for a machine, freeing up humans’ time to do the more important work of disseminating information and making decisions.
Another trend is moving to the edge – processing at the point where the decision is made. This minimizes latency, improves versatility, enhances reliability, eases scalability, and ultimately increases value. This has an obvious impact on the efficiency for any workforce. My favorite example of the edge is autonomous driving where automobiles adjust based on real-time information, making them safer and more efficient.
Please share the “OneIT” concept you have developed at Qualcomm.
OneIT celebrates both the individual pieces that make up the information technology organization and the collective whole of the organization. As with any IT function, ours is made up of individual capabilities, each an expert in their domain. The OneIT concept creates a community of IT professionals who are united and working toward a set of overarching goals – creating a common linkage, direction, strategy, and values that drive the individual capabilities in the same direction. It supports aligning the IT function to the highest priorities of the broader business and allows us to make the biggest difference by creating the most business value. We can do more together. In addition, OneIT creates a brand that helps our business stakeholders understand who we are.
Are you seeing more women entering the IT space in general?
While I’ve seen an increase in women entering the IT space during my career, statistics show that women in tech are still underrepresented. Even today, the percentage of women in tech is drastically lower than the percentage of women in the workforce. On a positive note, the proportion of women in tech has grown slowly but steadily for the last couple of years. However, we have yet to fully understand how the coronavirus pandemic affects that trend. Some early studies have found that women in tech have felt the pandemic’s impacts more than their counterparts.
Looking beyond women in general, we should be looking at representation of women of color in technology as the statistics are even more grim. We need to be comparing our organizations to the national statistics, developing strategies to outperform the averages, and continuously comparing ourselves to ourselves so we’re increasingly mirroring the characteristics of the broader population.
Overall, leaders need to do a better job of creating an environment that welcomes, continuously develops, and supports the advancement of women in IT, and they need to morph that environment as the world around us changes.
Do you have any predictions for what the future might hold for excellent CIO leaders?
Information Technology has become a key differentiator for organizations as technology evolution has introduced big data, artificial intelligence, machine learning, edge computing, and other trends. Businesses are seeking to do more, increasingly accurate, and faster work, and IT is a key enabler. In a short amount of time, organizations that fail to embrace technology as one of their key pillars will struggle to deliver on their strategy and commitments. They will lose to the competition. The IT function is becoming more in demand which requires a seat at the table and alignment with the rest of the business.
As for excellent CIO leaders, there’s always going be room for innovative, courageous, capable leaders – it’s always about the people!
