Joey Chow joined ITS in 2007 after many years' experience working with SAP. Now, she serves as the Manager of the BI Team, helping guide her team as they adjust to new reporting technology and build countless new Power BI dashboards in response to the pandemic. She devotes herself to making sure the team stays connected and in high spirits, and still jumps in to solve coding issues now and then. When she's not at work, she is traveling the world!
What is your role in ITS?
My title is BI Manager, my role is to ensure the BI team delivers meaningful, precise data analytics and reporting for our business. We are here to help business looking into the trending data, to optimize their resources, and plan for the future. As you know we deal with many systems and multiple reporting visualization tools. I'm very proud of my team because there is constantly new technology, new tools coming in, the team has to ramp up and keep themselves up to date with technologies.
Fantastic. I've worked pretty closely with your team for a couple years and seen you go through at least two different platform changes for analyzing data.
Yep, we recently implemented BI Gateway, and migrated all Analysis for Excel reports to the new platform. Because this is new to the users, we have to ensure users are adopting the new tool. We partnered with training and communication team to have many coaching labs and private trainings. Kudos to Bobby, Faisal and Kaushal on the training side. Also big thanks to communication team to keep sending reminder to users about the BI Gateway and Coaching Labs.
How many years have you been with ITS + WCM?
I joined in 2007, so it will be 15 years in June. My son had just turned one when I joined and now he’s almost 16!
Wow! And what did you do before you joined?
So I was always working in SAP. I started as an SAP ABAP developer in IBM, then I moved into the Business Warehouse (BW) area on my 2nd job with a pharmaceutical company. My first job was with IBM, then right before this job I was working for Queens Library.
Oh cool. Doing SAP there as well?
Yes, I performed 2 job duties – I was doing ABAP coding as well as BW development. Basically, we were doing finance and HCM, just like what we are doing here. But in addition to that I had to build program and report on the gate count to see how many people are coming in and out of the library, and book circulation in each of the 66 Queens Library locations.
What are examples of projects or initiatives you've been working on to improve IT for the WCM community?
Well, as you know we’ve been in this pandemic for the past two years. For Power BI we’ve developed many dashboards that relate to the pandemic. We have the COVID-19 Employee Vaccination Dashboard, and recently we finished the COVID-19 Employee Boosters Workflow and Tracking dashboard. These dashboards are important for HR to keep track of our employees are compliant to the mandated regulation. Also recently the BI team created the Institutional Diversity and Equity Dashboard. This visualization report is to showcase how employees in WCM are being represented from all diverse identities and backgrounds.
The Diversity and Equity dashboard in Power BI enables staff in the Office of Institutional Equity to view diversity information against compensation, merits, and promotions.
Your group had to respond in real time to many of these new pandemic demands.
Yep. This is very challenging and exciting for the team, I am so proud of BI team have a such quick turnaround time for these urgent requests.
As I mentioned earlier, another big thing we’re doing is the BI Gateway. This is huge because it impacts every reporting user. We’re going to migrate all our reporting into BI Gateway. Our goal is to make BI Gateway as one-stop-shop for reporting. It means users can execute any type of report such as Power BI dashboard, Concur, Employee Central, Payroll, Ariba reports within BI Gateway. This way the user doesn’t have to think about where to go when they have to run any report. They’ll have access to all the reports in one place. That’s our goal.
We’ll get there. So since we’re talking about how we responded to the pandemic in work, how has this experience been for you personally?
There are pros and cons. I do think the team has become more productive. However, since we’re all sitting in front of the machine, sometimes we forget to take breaks. We’re working extra long hours. I have to constantly remind myself and the team to take a break in between meetings.
One thing that’s missing is in-person interaction, we strongly suggest that everyone turn on their camera so that we can see each other’s face. It’s been two years, that’s very long time.
The BI Team has a lot of activities to improve our team spirit and make sure everyone is engaged. We have Master Chef, where we cook together on the Zoom call. We had a Halloween party. We’re doing activities and games together. We dedicate two hours’ time every 2-3 months so that the entire team can participate. In our team meeting, at the beginning of the meeting we ask everyone to send their baby picture or their kid’s baby picture and then let everybody guess who they are. It’s a good kickoff for the team meeting. Now we’re thinking about doing something different, maybe everyone shows their artwork or their craft. Just to do something besides work since we focus too much on work, we lose sight of the personal touch. I'm trying to have these fun activities to have the team come closer together.
The BI Team does Master Chef cooking challenges on Zoom to stay connected as a group.
What keeps you inspired and motivated?
There is a lot. But first definitely the people, my team is wonderful, we get lots of support from leadership. I like working with users and helping to solve their problems and improve their process. Working for WCM, even though we are not directly saving lives, we are the backbone to the process. Especially during this pandemic time, I feel we are truly helping the community.
Also, everyday learning new things. IT is a very fast paced industry, on the BI team we have so much new technology, new tools. We have to constantly learn and keep up-to-date.
What is your favorite part about your job?
Working with the team and helping to solve business issues. I’m moving toward a lot of managing, but from time-to-time people come to me and ask, “Joey how do you do this?” And sometimes I’ll go into the system and try to resolve the issues, and I feel very good at the end of the day if I’m able to do it. I’m like “oh I still have my technical skills, I’m still able to help resolve the technical issue.”
I'm sure your team loves that you're able to do the technical work too.
Yes, I know a lot of technical background, so when they come to talk to me it's not like they have to explain from the beginning. We understand each other very quickly.
Who are some women you admire and why?
Of course there's a lot. Everyone that I encounter, work with and I learn from. They all inspire me in different ways. But one example is my first manager, Georgia, from IBM. She's a great manager, I don’t know how she does it, and right now every time I’m hitting a roadblock in my manager role, I always think about how she would handle it.
She's very caring. I was hired before I graduated from college, so she came in for the college recruitment, and she had an interview with me. And first she asked me, “have you heard of SAP?” And I said “no, I don’t know anything about SAP.” So we talked for a while, and I think she probably got a sense of if I would fit into the culture. And she said “Joey, if you come I will hire you.” And I said, “if you hire me I’ll join.” So that’s how I started my career. And besides work, she was great. I was very shy and she knew how to bring me out of my comfort zone. I moved to Binghamton by myself, so she asked me to join activities. And when I went to the naturalization ceremony, she came with me. I’m very grateful to have her as my first manager.
Joey's first manager at IBM put together this booklet to celebrate her citizenship naturalization.
Where did you grow up?
I grew up in Hong Kong. I came here in 11th grade, when I was 17. So that’s why I really thank her, because besides work, I also needed to adapt into the culture. Work culture and school culture were so different. She was always trying to take care of me. She’s very active, and has a very high spirit, it always makes people happy around her.
What do you like to do outside of work?
Traveling!
Oh yea, you go everywhere!
Yeah, me and my husband travel a lot. And I like to travel with a big group of people. During the pandemic right before Delta – remember there was a couple months? I went to California with 32 people! We try to go out multiple times a year, and one thing I do with my husband is that in September we have an anniversary trip, and just me and him will go somewhere. Every year we pick a place. Last year we went to Spain.
Joey with 32 of her travel mates on a trip to California last summer.
Joey in Yosemite National Park.
And where is your next trip?
Next September we’re going to Berlin. He’s running a marathon and I’m going to watch him. I’m not running!
Joey's pups