Kate Romanova: The ‘war time CIO’

While studying computer science at a conservative Australian school, Kate Romanova – now a self-described ‘war time CIO’ – was told that she might be better off focusing on something that would help her get married in the long run.

“When you think about it, this was terrible on a number of levels,” she tells Sit-Down.

Romanova has always been fascinated with how things work – in computing terms, the idea that a bunch of zeros and ones could drive a machine, in her words, “seemed like magic to me.”

In the early days, she flirted with the law and hated it. Having some legal nous clearly helped with interpreting contracts and negotiating with vendors, but her heart was in organisational, operational, and process transformation. This created an obvious segue into technology, which she rightly says is now intertwined with business strategy.

In 2009, after completing a few project roles that intersected with technology, Romanova was employed to help with a core banking system modernisation at the Commonwealth Bank.

“I was an executive manager for project delivery, core banking was part of it, and I had a couple of roles that would now be considered RegTech (regulatory technology) projects that were in the portfolio too.

“This was interesting because it gave me a view of the complexities of [IT projects], particularly with core systems – it’s a great passion of mine, fixing and uplifting, optimising and modernising,” she says.

Romanova left CBA and moved to Hong Kong to work on a $2.5 billion global technology program at HSBC. She was responsible for a transformation piece, largely in the investment banking arena, across the Asia-Pacific region. She says that her experience breaking apart large legacy systems and “hairball architectures” at CBA came in handy during her tenure at HSBC.

“This is standard best practice now, but at the time, we were all thinking about how we would do this and how we could optimise delivery to the business. They [CBA and HSBC] were two of my first technology roles and I loved them. They were both hard problems, the HSBC role was a harder problem because it was truly global in scale.”

Going into battle

These days, Romanova delights in resuscitating toxic and dysfunctional IT environments and turning them into high performing departments. She has worked hard to lift the capabilities of Greyhound Racing Victoria (GRV), the statutory body that regulates greyhound racing in the state.

Romanova’s leadership is helping the Victorian racing industry move towards its strategic goal of acting as one holistic entity. It also earned her a top 25 spot in last year’s CIO50 Australia awards.

“I like the excitement of delivering, but I think when we talk about toxic and difficult environments, most of the time [they are like this] because of the way that technology is enabled to operate.

Issues at GRV that were highlighted as part of Romanova’s CIO50 entry were acknowledged by the tech team when she arrived at the organisation in 2021.

“So, they had seen the things that needed to be changed. I came in and said, ‘sure, let’s make it happen.’”

Recovering from technical debt, looking to the future

Romanova inherited some serious technical debt when she arrived at GRV. Systems were still using SFTP file drops and CSV files for data transfer. The organisation's core platform was proprietary and specifically designed for the racing sector.

But since 2021, Romanova and her team have delivered innovations that are fixing this technical debt while introducing best practice processes and policies that support the ecosystem across Australasia. They have deployed the Azure Confidential Ledger blockchain that will come into its own as more data is gathered and new AI and machine learning capabilities are rolled out. These capabilities will work in conjunction with a rules engine that will allow GRV to review the outcomes of previous decisions to make better ones. This engine is currently used to determine if a greyhound is eligible to race.

“We’ve got some rudimentary AI, we are exploring more advanced AI and there are certainly machine learning opportunities down the track. These are the kinds of innovations that we want to deliver to the business as an integrated whole to set it up for success whatever the journey looks like in the next couple of years,” she says.

Romanova says her team looked at using ChatGPT, but it couldn’t be configured for the organisation’s requirements, apart from giving a staff member a 62-page 'Dungeons and Dragons’ plan. Instead, the team used different tools to build an internal chatbot to help its contact centre staff collect the details that they need.

Facial recognition for greyhounds is also in the pipeline.

“This is important from an integrity perspective because we need to be able to demonstrate that ‘Fluffy is Fluffy and not Tuffy.’ I am geeking out on this one because it’s so cool. When you have million-dollar prizes for some races, it does become reasonably important.”

The wrong roles

Romanova says that dysfunctional staff are that way because there are often issues with their roles. Super smart people, whom Romanova inherited as part of her current position at GRV, are disenchanted because they feel like they will never be able to deliver projects that they expect to deliver good outcomes.

“There are people who are not in the right role; they might be doing UX when they really want to be in the back end. So, you work out what people really want to do and you work with them. I’ve got a fantastic dev, but he doesn’t want to be a lead, ever. He loves playing with code, that’s his life. He will be 75 years old and writing the latest, greatest code; it’s that passion that should drive all of us.

“The last lot are the people who are not in the right organisation to succeed and they will do much better in another organisation. If you can sort that out and get the right people behind you, anything is possible,” she says.

A clear mandate for change

A key determinant of success in any technology leadership role is having the backing of your CEO and board with a clear mandate for the role IT will play across the business, says Romanova.

“When I was younger, I fell into that trap; you have a great idea, you know it’s logical and you want people to get on board, but it doesn’t work like that. There’s the stakeholder engagement piece, it [support] has got to come from the top.

“Lots of times when we do the hard problems, we’ve had three or four cracks at it, materially behind time, so they [CEOs and the board] need to have that commitment there. When having conversations with people, if I feel like we won’t have that kind of relationship, then I let whatever challenge [we are dealing with] slide,” she says.

One way Romanova has sold technology to the rest of the c-suite has been to look at previous investments over the past decade (if she can find that information) and average it out to what the industry investments should be to determine if there is a shortfall or not.

“The hardest thing to get people to invest in is technology that prevents stuff from happening, security being a big one, but you’re keeping them off the front page of the paper. Also, if you inherit a large amount of technical debt and there are data puddles all over the organisation – a lot of them living in Excel spreadsheets – before you do anything cool, you’ve got to get that into a data lake.

“The business won’t necessarily see that benefit at the point in time that you are doing it, so you need give them a timeline and deliver to that timeline,” she says.

Work anywhere, do anything

Romanova advises young people who are working in IT or considering a career in the field to be curious, passionate and keep learning.

“The good thing about tech is that it underpins every single interest or industry that you might possibly be fascinated with – you can work anywhere and do anything. There are digital nomad visas for more than 40 countries.

“Being passionate and finding your interest is important because, in my experience, technology is not really a 9 to 5 job. You do need to like what you do because there are going to be times when you do it outside of what is a standard business day.

"Technology drives everything, whatever your interest is, you can make it happen."

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