Heidi Lorenzen: Reimagining the Role of Women in Tech, Business and Beyond

Accela provides market-leading cloud solutions that empower the most innovative state and  local governments around the world to build thriving communities, develop strong  economies, and protect citizens. More than 275 million citizens globally benefit fromAccela’s software for permitting, licensing, code enforcement, and service request  management. The company’s fast-to-implement Civic Applications, built on its robust and  extensible Civic Platform, help government agencies address specific needs today while  ensuring they are prepared for any emerging or complex challenge in the future. Accela was  recently selected by Government Technology as a 2021 GovTech 100 company for the sixth  consecutive year and was named an Inc. Best in Business Award winner.

A Pressing Passion in Governance 

Heidi Lorenzen currently serves as the Senior Vice President of Marketing for Accela. Heidi  joined Accela to help state and local governments work better for their citizens. She believes  that by improving everyday interactions between communities and their governments, we can  improve society as a whole and produce better outcomes for all participants.  

Prior to Accela, Heidi’s appreciation for good governance was sparked. She ran marketing at  Singularity University, where the team educated and empowered leaders to apply  exponentially growing technologies like biotechnology, artificial intelligence, and  neuroscience, to create a more abundant future and address humanity’s biggest challenges,  one of which was governance. 

For the last two decades, Heidi dedicated her career to bringing innovative technologyapplications to market. While holding senior marketing executive roles at large enterprise  software and technology leaders such as Autonomy, Interwoven, and Polycom, Heidi has also  served as the Chief Marketing Officer at Marc Benioff-backed start-up, Cloudwords.  

Right out of college, Heidi was the editor of five global trade magazines in Taipei, Taiwan at  United Pacific, followed by over seven years at Bloomberg Business Week magazine in New  York City -- a career that spanned three continents and began in media.

Empowering Women All Along 

Heidi started her career in Asia and came across incredibly positive examples of strong  women leaders running massive family-owned multinationals as well as local operations of  global companies in some countries. Moreover, in other countries, Heidi says that she saw  incredibly detrimental examples of bias that prevented women from being their fullest selves.  This scenario put forth stark examples for Heidi of what success can, and often doesn’t, look  like. 

In the late 80s, Heidi moved back to the US to attend business school, at a time when more  women were just starting to get their MBA. Heidi remembers how she and her female  colleagues stuck together and vowed not to squander the opportunity. Soon Heidi landed at  McGraw-Hill, which owned Business Week back then, and started the company’s first  Women in Management organization in the early 1990s. Over 100 women joined its first  luncheon on the 50th floor of the McGraw-Hill Building in NYC, recalls Heidi clearly. From then on, Heidi committed to the mentorship of women in companies wherever she worked,  formally and informally. 

At Accela, Heidi has helped contribute to launching and serving as the executive sponsor of  the employee resource group focused on diversity, equity, and inclusion. In addition, to  propel ongoing conversations about tech leadership and a focus on gender diversity in  government, Heidi designed and hosted a panel of women government and technology  leaders at Accela's 2020 annual conference, Accelarate, called, "Women Reimagining  Govtech Leadership and Impact."  

Heidi was recently elected to serve in the role of president of the Women Executives Channel  Advisory Board, which is dedicated to addressing leadership diversity in technology by  empowering and elevating women leaders in the technology partner ecosystem. She is also a  member of the Athena Alliance, which unlocks access for women on boards and in the C suite.  

Leaving no segment of women empowerment unaddressed, Heidi is committed to serving  women experiencing extreme poverty and oppression around the globe. She sits on the Board  of Directors of Rising International, a global non-profit that provides women experiencing  poverty and exploitation with entrepreneurial paths to self-sufficiency, locally in the Bay  Area and internationally in countries where it’s hardest to be a woman.

Mentors Made for a Positive Journey 

During the initial phase of her career, Heidi worked with media and considers extremely  fortunate to have had fantastic senior women executives to work for, model, and aspire to.  Heidi also had an incredibly wonderful and valuable male mentor. Heidi believes that the 10  years of her career spent overseas, and being a non-local, helped to overrule gender bias,  giving Heidi a more positive experience than many of the peers. 

The technology industry is where Heidi first observed the limited representation of women most palpably. She reveals that she was, and often still is, “the only'' woman around the table  or on a team. It doesn’t necessarily always translate to bad experiences according to Heidi,  but she recommends that women engage with other female peers inside and outside their  companies for sanity checks. Heidi believes herself to be fortunate at Accela to have male  executive colleagues who prioritize diversity and ensure women’s voices are heard.  

Her experiences were mostly positive, but Heidi is aware that much of it was circumstantial  and believes some may be because she chose early on not to make gender a focal point of  how one should do their job or how she believed others perceived her at work. However,  Heidi conceded that she witnessed some extremely unfortunate events and situations and has  therefore prioritized promoting gender representation and economic empowerment and  remains committed to helping others have the best opportunities for themselves.

Identifying the Strength in You 

Heidi’s leadership philosophy is firmly grounded in identifying unique talents everyone  possesses and putting them to optimal use. “People will often hear me say, ‘Celebrate  differences,’ because an array of skills and perspectives is what makes for the most complete  and effective teams,” says Heidi. She builds teams around people’s strengths rather than  focusing on improving their weaknesses, which is critical in helping to shape a team built for success. While everyone plays different roles and has their own goals, if teammates share a  common vision of what success looks like, they stay unified, aligned, and buoyed through the  grinding times, remarks Heidi. 

Empowering teams is also critical for success. Heidi states that her job, after making sure the  team is clear about what success looks like, is to make sure they have what they need to be  successful. 

Lastly, Heidi argues that the most important attribute of transformational leadership is  adaptability and ensuring one’s team is able to adapt to the exponentially accelerating pace of  change technologically, economically, socially, and environmentally.

Understanding the Needs 

Accela’s customers are government agencies, so rather than focusing on just the company’s  tech prowess, Heidi believes that it is critical to highlight how its solutions make a difference  in citizens' lives. Citizens increasingly expect a consistently convenient, openly transparent  view into their local government, and at the same time, these government agencies are asked  to do more with less, especially considering the pandemic’s impacts.  

Accela helps these agencies accelerate growth, efficiency, trust, and address the pressing  needs today while ensuring the agencies are well prepared for the emerging challenges of the  future. From a technology standpoint, however, one of the most critical paths to delivering  the kind of service, business, and security citizens seek is through the cloud, and Accela is  focused on successfully leading government agencies through the necessary digital  transformation to get there, states Heidi.

A New Disruptive World  

In the current scenario of accelerated disruption, change is inherently difficult for humans to  adapt to, and it is not inherently bad. Heidi believes that disruptive technologies are making  the world a better place and new examples like Google’s AI solving the protein structure  problem, climate-resistant green infrastructure by cities like Copenhagen can justify this.  While not all of us are dealing with such extraordinarily disruptive innovation, Heidi says  that all leaders have to adapt to new business models, new workplaces, new opportunities,  and new threats. In addition, leaders’ roles have evolved from managing just economic  performance outcomes for immediate stakeholders to the fiduciary and moral responsibility  of having a holistic view of everything, the impact of its operations and managing to the  triple bottom line of people, planet, and profit, Heidi observes.

Reimagining Business in the Pandemic 

Government agencies are continuing to adjust to the pandemic’s impacts and delivering the  critical services that citizens need. Heidi remembers how a year ago, many agencies were  focused on speed and implementing cloud and other technologies as quickly as possible just  to maintain operations and services. Now that many have taken these initial steps, Heidi  believes the focus will expand with more priority given on creating efficiencies and doing  things better for their employees and residents alike. The pandemic has provided agencies an  opportunity to re-imagine how they conduct business, and these strategies will continue to  streamline and improve, creating a better experience for citizens through technology,  concludes Heidi.

A Better Way Forward 

Heidi says that budding women leaders should play to their strengths and live by their values.  She asks young women leaders to not believe the voice in the head unless it is  complementing. Another piece of advice from Heidi is to build a great network of people 

who can support and inspire; if that is not the case, then those people are acting as a confining  and limiting cage and not an empowering and connecting network.