Geeta Pyne
Chief Enterprise Architect
Intuit
SEPTEMBER 2022
Geeta Pyne is a force who comes at you in a tiny frame, but huge mind and heart. Her hunger lies in her passion for lifting others up and in carving out spaces for women looking for jobs in technology that truly excite them.
Listening to Geeta talk about her work, it's apparent her love for asking questions and finding answers. As the Chief Enterprise Architect at Intuit, Geeta is the dictionary example of curious. In her role, she gives visibility into the business and how it’s running. She believes with visibility one can analyze inconsistencies from duplication to a strategy. Fostering data and understanding can create value and guide decision making. Thinking about innovation differently is the lynchpin in the business.
Business leaders need to utilize enterprise architecture to create a truly sustainable and flexible digital ecosystem that allows for faster decision making and true business value. It’s about keeping information safe but also accessible to those who need it.
At Intuit, Geeta leverages business architecture practices with stakeholders to explain the added value of building an innovative digital foundation that allows for fast adjustments when needed. She plays a key role in helping the company navigate through crises and develop a plan to deliver high-impact, business-outcome-driven advice.
Part of that includes having the tech systems in place that allow for clear communication between all sides of the business. It’s a balancing act as she is “thinking about how we organized the group in a way that based on the scope and domain, responsibilities are defined. You must provide visibility with a dashboard, so you can see what decisions are made and when.”
This floods into having accountable leaders with checks and balances. Geeta strives to figure out how to make “architecture democratized so that people can do what they need to do.” That is where you see Geeta soar, as she knows people and she knows how to communicate.
From Humble Beginnings to Leadership Roles
Geeta started with what she describes as humble beginnings in a small town in India. Her intellectual abilities created an opportunity for her to become the first person in her town to go to boarding school, and she earned a merit scholarship from the Government of India. She grew up being as she describes “fortunate to be good at math” and ended up helping her peers learn. That sense of helping others grow has stayed with her all these years later.
Fast forward, she started working at the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) as a scientist and engineer. Think NASA of India if you are not familiar. She kept moving up and up, developing satellite image processing software for remote sensing and communication satellites to provide data-driven insights for managing natural resources like vegetation and weather forecasting.
She also worked on India’s first indigenous parallel computer, PARAM. Soon, she made her way to the United States through various roles leading global companies through digital transformations, cloud migrations and new business strategies at Arrow Electronics, BMC Software, VMware, Veritas Technologies and Zuora. Most recently she landed at Intuit.
Promoting Women in IT Leadership
As she rose to the top of organizations being an IT leader, she was sad to see the lack of women in roles like hers. She encouraged women to go into engineering and to find passion in technology. But people are all different, so while she supports the more outgoing women in the tech space, she often looks for those with softer voices and tries to enable them to be successful as well. She tells women that they must know their craft and believe in themselves.
You have to declare your seat at the table.”
While she helps others, she hasn’t been without her challenges. She recalled a time after first getting married around 2006. Assigned as a lead architect and implementing a major project, she had to travel every week. She remarked that by sheer rigor, she got through that time. But it really made her think.
“Things happen. Life happens, things happen at work. Those hard moments when you deserve something, but don’t get it… You have to believe in yourself and know your craft,” she says. She remarked that how you react is key.
Now, as she continues to grow in her role, and as a co-chair for Evanta’s San Francisco CIO Community, she continues to share her story and to share the stories of others who make rising up the ladder more accessible to people. She pays back by paying it forward with her outreach. All this as she coaches other architects to understand their organizations and their teams and to keep communication open.
Special thanks to Geeta Pyne and Intuit.
by CIOs, for CIOs
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