Above: Pamela Maynard of Avanade with David Geilhufe of Oracle NetSuite and Bryan Breckenridge of Box.org, part of the six Founding Partners of NetHope's Center for the Digital Nonprofit during the 2018 NetHope Global Summit.
This is the eighth installment in NetHope’s Destination Digital podcast series.
For Pamela Maynard, President of Product and Innovation at Avanade, her first foray in the tech industry interning at IBM introduced her to how the power of technology, when paired with strategy, can help clients solve real-life business problems.
“There isn’t a single client that you talk to nowadays that isn’t looking at digital transformation,” says Maynard who, through her tenure with IBM, Oracle, EY, Capgemeni, and now at Avanade, recognizes that employee digital skills are vital in successful digital transformation. She emphasizes. “So much is about people and it’s about the human-centered side. It’s not just about affecting the change. It’s about sustaining that change.”
As a global professional services company, Avanade provides IT consulting and services focused on the Microsoft platform with artificial intelligence, business analytics, cloud, application services, digital transformation, modern workplace, security services, technology, and managed services offerings.
“Now people are actually understanding that once we’ve made that step into digital transformation, it’s all about sustaining it,” she stresses. “And evolving from it. No longer is a client looking at huge, monolithic, large-scale IT programs in the past. It’s all about delivering incremental value.” To do that, a company, private or nonprofit, need the skills and capabilities and the change agents to identify the signals that are out there, and to understand what the data is telling them and “stepping back and really thinking about your data strategy.”
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After several years managing the operational side of Avanade, Maynard has stepped out of operations to focus on strategic development, spearheading the strategy of Avanade offerings and services worldwide.
During Maynard’s tenure at Avanade, the company became a Founding Partner of NetHope’s Center for the Digital Nonprofit. The partnership was emblematic of Avanade’s growing interest in influencing results using Microsoft technologies, coupled with its technology skills and capability, in the arena of social impact.
“Over the past two decades we've done literally thousands of projects for customers across all sorts of different sectors,” Maynard notes. “But we're at a stage in our evolution where, as we step back and reflect on where we want to go next, we've recently created our technology for social good initiative… it’s all about taking what we're really good at in terms of being a Global Systems Integrator and enabling our employees to apply the know how around Microsoft technologies in the nonprofit sector, so they can see how they can create and do human impact and do good in the social sector.”
In this eighth installment of the NetHope Destination Digital podcast series, Maynard joins NetHope CEO Lauren Woodman for a lively exploration of how the private tech sector is helping provide the tools and expertise needed to move the needle on digital transformation for the nonprofit sector.
Maynard is optimistic about current trends for digital transformation in nonprofits but notes that “there is still a huge amount to be done on just understanding what (organizations) are sitting on in terms of data” and getting it into a state that can be accessed and used. “But this requires a focus on the fundamentals…if we could get it into a state where they could share, we could provide the insight which would help many of the organizations become much more effective and efficient.”
Pamela Maynard
President, Product and Innovation
Pamela Maynard is responsible for spearheading the strategy of Avanade’s offerings and services worldwide. In this role, she oversees the Modern Workplace, Business Applications, Applications & Infrastructure, and Data & AI businesses; the innovation, incubation and development of new offerings; Avanade’s Advisory Services; and the company’s delivery organization.
Prior to her current role, Pamela was president of Avanade Europe, where she directed strategy and operations across 13 European geographies. She also previously held the role of General Manager of Avanade UK.
Pamela came to Avanade from Capgemini, where she led its Accelerated Development Centres and IT performance improvement for global clients. She also has held IT strategy and program management positions at Ernst & Young and consultancy roles at Oracle.
Filed Under: Collaboration, Destination Digital, Digital nonprofit, Faces of NetHope, information, Organizational Capacity, Partner Highlight, Sector-Wide Change, Social and Behavior Change Communication, Technology in Our World, The Center for the Digital Nonprofit, Thought Leadership, Utilization of Technology