Diana McKenzie, a 1986 graduate of the former Computer and Information Systems program at Purdue Polytechnic (then the School of Technology) remembers a very different version of the tech industry. She started working before many companies assigned personal computers to everyone, when it was rare to see women in leadership, and where mainframe computing preceded distributed network architectures and the internet.
In 1997, Diana was working at Eli Lilly and Company as the internet era was starting to take off. Diana was promoted to the role of Director of Strategy for IT—an experience that had an intimidating and accelerating effect on her career. In this role she was tapped to join the company’s corporate strategy team, which was a proving ground for high-achieving Ivy League hires on a fast-track for executive roles. She had recently decided to bypass earning her MBA degree to stay in the workforce and better balance her career with a growing, young family.
“I believed firmly that my choice to prioritize my family over business school meant my career would not advance as quickly as many of my peers,” McKenzie said.
As a self-declared “IT geek,” she accepted the opportunity with a healthy dose of imposter syndrome but saw an opportunity to learn and took it. The leader of the team was co-authoring a book about strategic planning frameworks with the Dean of Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business, thus McKenzie benefitted from a hands-on business education experience even at the graduate level.
“That experience dramatically reshaped the way I thought about our company, our industry, and how much more externally focused and networked I needed to be in order to add value inside the company,” she said. This opportunity was also the first time she remembers feeling the wind in the metaphorical sails of her career.
How the industry changed over time
Diana recalls how the shift to distributed computing introduced new opportunities to push boundaries. Digital communications enabled processes, such as applying for new drugs to be reviewed by the FDA, to be done on a computer as opposed to waiting for regulators to receive hundreds of thousands of pages sent out on a semi-truck. Eli Lilly was one of the first medical companies to make this switch, giving them latitude to drive significant changes in how drug reviews were conducted.
This certainly came with its moments of confusion—such as when the company sent a team member to the FDA to reprogram the scientific reviewer’s mouse (they found the double vs. single click feature confusing). Such hiccups were a small price to pay to help reviewers more effectively and quickly complete their tasks.
Breakthroughs like networked communications also occurred at a time when “salaries for tech professionals had been capped,” Diana said.
“The work we did to reduce review time by months and reshape how the FDA conducted reviews via an automated NDA submission was noticed by a well-respected scientific industry publication. These outcomes along with others that IT leaders were delivering at Eli Lilly resulted in the elimination of the salary cap and the implementation of a new IT technical career ladder.”
Two industries and a career inflection point
McKenzie spent much of her career as a technology leader and executive in the healthcare industry where she developed a strong passion for the role science and technology play in advancing human health. Over the years, she’s had a front row seat to major advances in disease areas such as oncology, heart disease, cystic fibrosis, sickle cell anemia, and pain, and she is optimistic that a functional cure for Type 1 diabetes is on the horizon.
During her time as Chief Information Officer at Amgen, she spent time with Silicon Valley health care technology start-ups to learn more about how their products would help patients. These interactions offered her exposure to a possible healthcare technology-focused future that went beyond the boundaries of her CIO role.
“I realized I wanted to work more with these types of companies” she said. “I believed I could help them with the steep and ever-evolving life sciences learning curve. They saw the opportunity to solve a problem with technology, but with a better appreciation for the domain and associated regulatory requirements, they could build their products with the right foundation from the start.”
While she wasn’t yet sure how such an opportunity would take shape, she believed this experience was helping her to craft a bridge to her next chapter.
McKenzie says accepting a role at Workday as their first CIO positioned her well, because it offered her the opportunity to learn first-hand how a world class software-as-a-service (SaaS) company grows and scales. This was a gap she knew she needed to fill to achieve her long-term goal.
From the C-suite to the boardroom
After McKenzie joined Workday, she participated in a women’s board readiness program offered by The Athena Alliance which prepared her to more deeply appreciate the world of corporate governance and expectations of board members. The program provided McKenzie and her Silicon Valley peers valuable access to committed board members who wanted to see greater diversity in the board room. These leaders generously donated their time to facilitate board room simulations, assist with crafting board biographies, and help the women prepare for interviews.
Two years into her role at Workday, McKenzie joined the board at MetLife. Shortly thereafter, her growing network presented additional opportunities to serve on boards, particularly in healthcare, her area of greatest interest. Today, in addition to MetLife, she also serves as a board member for Vertex Pharmaceuticals, agilon health, Paradox, T200 and as a special advisor for Brighton Park Capital and Red Cell Partners.
While McKenzie believes she still has much to learn, she has valuable experience to share. Her proudest achievements include co-founding the Silicon Valley Women’s CIO community in 2017 and bridging that group with T200 in 2019. T200 is a nonprofit CXO Women in Technology community with a mission to “foster, celebrate, and advance women’s leadership in technology.” One of McKenzie’s greatest joys was serving as a board member and Business Development Committee Chair while helping to grow and scale the community to over one thousand members.
Diana’s advice for how to make an impact
McKenzie is a lifelong learner accustomed to being one of a few women in the room, beginning with her time at Purdue and extending to her tech industry career and board memberships. She’s now passionate about accelerating women into leadership and executive roles in technology, which is why she now sponsors a scholarship for cybersecurity students, actively mentors men and women in technology at all levels and serves on the T200 board.
McKenzie has always been driven by a challenge. She leans in when most people want to step out of the room and uses her discomfort to fuel her drive to succeed. Her favorite mentoring advice is “when presented with more than one option to advance your career, chose the path that scares you most. Taking the risk will teach you more than you would have learned had you taken the comfortable path.”
McKenzie also offers this advice for new technology graduates entering the field:
1: It’s all about the people.
“Psychology is an essential skill all technology graduates should cultivate. Technology by its nature introduces change which isn’t always welcomed in the workplace. Through relationships, you learn more about the people the technology will affect and when you truly understand and can meet or even exceed their needs, you can have a supersize impact on the organization.”
2: Stay curious, combine inside-out with outside-in perspectives.
“Possessing a firm understanding of how your department or company operates internally is considered table stakes. The path to making a more impactful contribution, is to be curious and a student of what’s happening outside your department, company and in your industry. When through your external networks and resources, you proactively introduce valuable perspectives about emerging risks or creative ways others have approached problem solving or out innovated the competition, that is when you add differentiated value.”
3: Recent graduates won’t always be able to see how the work they do impacts their company’s results. Diana says understanding the symbiotic relationships between companies and shareholders can be a new employee’s secret ingredient.
“One of the challenges people early in career experience is they don’t understand how their company’s success is measured,” she said. “Take time to read and understand your company’s annual report and quarterly earnings reports. This offers an outside-in perspective on what your shareholders care about and how your CEO is being measured. You then can reverse engineer how the function you perform, contributes to helping your company and your CEO be successful.”
McKenzie says people who show up and care about what the greater organization is trying to do will be self-motivated by their own “why and become a “bright light” to leaders.”
McKenzie’s own not-so-secret ingredient is evident in conversation. She speaks on any topic with ease, expresses curiosity about people and processes, and shows up as her full self, ready to tackle the biggest challenges facing technology with vulnerability and humility.
“You asked me about how to make an impact? Figure out how you can help other people.”
Diana McKenzie is a Purdue Polytechnic graduate. She earned her Bachelor of Science in Computer Information Systems in 1986 and is originally from Plainfield, Indiana. Now looking ahead at a season of semi-retirement from her home in North Carolina, she hopes to continue engaging with Purdue as she takes on a slower pace.
Additional information
- Diana's alumni profile at Purdue Polytechnic
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Thriving in “Chapter 2” with Diana McKenzie & Karenann Terrell (Ouellette and Associates Consulting, Inc.)