Cathy Highley: The Foundation

I had taken accounting in high school. I really liked it. I liked the structure of it and just how it worked. And I was really drawn to that. And so that's what I was gonna major in. And then you so declared accounting as my major, and then as a prerequisite, you know, have to take some core business classes, no matter what business major you're in. So I took a basic programming class, the BASIC language. And that was my first exposure to programming. And I just I fell in love with it like instantly. It was like a no-brainer, you know, and it still had some of the structural things that I enjoyed about accounting too. And and you know, some predictableness of how you structure things, but I I really loved it and declared my major right away after I took that class.

Just some really smart technical minds that were ways way smarter than me but to figure some of the things out but but really I think I was good at organizing and you know communicating out making sure everybody knew what was available.

Thanks for having me. It's been a while.

Twelve, so it was a long, seems like a long time. I was thinking, you know, thinking back over my career preparing for this, I'm like, I've been in IT for 40 years.

Yeah. Yeah. Well, I was born and raised in central Illinois and basically never left. So I had big dreams at one time of living and working in Chicago. That's still out there. I might get, I might get an apartment in Chicago after I retire. 'Cause I still I love that city. But anyway, we're in central Illinois and I got married straight out of college. And so, you know, my my first job right out of college, you know, I started I started right away.

And one thing about college, about me, I guess thinking about the winding road as a topic for this this podcast, I started in college to be an accounting major, like I had it all figured out. I had taken accounting in high school. I really liked it. I liked the structure of it and just, you know, how it worked. And I was really drawn to that. And so that's what I was gonna major in. And then you so declared accounting as my major and then as a prerequisite, you know, you have to take some core business classes, no matter what business major you're in. So I took a basic programming class, the BASIC language. And that was my first exposure to programming. And I just I fell in love with it like instantly. It was like a no-brainer. You know, and it still had some of the structural things that I enjoyed about accounting too. And and you know, some predictableness of how you structure things. But I I really loved it and declared my major right away after I took that class.

Yeah, it was programming, yeah. And the languages were different back when you and I went to college, right, than they are now. I mean, like COBOL, you know, they taught COBOL. The BASIC class was the intro. They taught COBOL, they taught Assembler, Fortran, those those languages. But of course that was before, you know, object-oriented programming and, you know, the graphical interfaces we didn't have yet at that time.

A a weird thing about me is that I have the ability to like play music on the piano. Like I can hear a tune and then I can play it without reading music. So like, they call it playing by ear? My son, my oldest son does the same thing.

Yeah. Yeah. And I think that ability translates into programming because you can visualize in your mind, you know, back then it was looping, like, you know, exiting out to a loop and performing it and then coming back. Or, you know, think of it as music like that has, you know, the verses and then the chorus that repeats and then you go back to the verse. It's very similar like that. And I think it's just a way that some people's minds are able to visualize that easier. I think that that's one thing that really drew me to it. It was familiar to me just because of that kind of aspect of it.

You know, I think there I think there is. I think I've read, I think I read something about it, but I just know that was true for me. I'm not sure how it translates to others.

Correct.

He did. I don't think it's necessarily a programming hotbed, if you will.

That's pretty good.

It's just an hour. An hour. It's an hour.

At one time it was almost a hundred thousand. Now it's, I don't know. I think it's under ninety, eighty or ninety something.

Wow. ADM is a Fortune 50 in two hundred countries, all the time zones, forty-one thousand employees, seventy languages, thousands of products. So it's a big company.

Yeah. Yeah, it is. Now recently our global headquarters are in Chicago, 77 West Wacker, but the North American headquarters are still in Decatur.

Yeah. And I know we had talked about, you asked me about mentors, and I was giving some thought to to mentors. I think that really lends itself well to to mentoring. A lot of those relationships are forged already. And so a lot more people are open and, you know, amenable to doing that just in a natural way and not a forced way.

But the other things I thought about were having children, especially small children, when you first start out and you're really wanting to make a good impression in the workplace and be there and be present, you know, for your job and your teammates and your employer. But, you know, I had three kids under five. So I mean, there were times when, you know, family took me away. And the great thing, I think I had more than mentors, was more a mom network basically, of people who could help each other out, go pick up from preschool if something happened, you know what I mean? Just a network of coverage that we provided for each other, which I think was good for the company and also good for us, to be where we needed to be when we needed to be there.

Yeah, yeah, mostly. Mm-hmm.

Illinois Power. Yeah.

Yeah. So my first job out of college... So I got married pretty soon after college. And then my first real big job that I interviewed for, I got the job and I accepted. And, you know, in the time between when I had accepted and when I started, I found out I was pregnant. And so it was like the first day I had to kind of go in and say, by the way... I really didn't plan it that way. But they were very understanding, though.

That was Horace Mann in Springfield. I was pregnant again with my second. And then I started thinking, it was a commute. It was an hour commute every day, which I know in Chicago it's not that big of a deal, but in central Illinois, an hour is a long time. So I was literally eight months pregnant, and I went to this job interview because I applied for it. And obviously they could see I was pregnant. But honestly, it turns out the guy that was interviewing me did not know, even though I literally was. And so they're offering me the job later, you know, after that interview. And I was like, so is the fact that I'm, you know, pregnant, is that a problem? Or how will that work? Because I'm probably only gonna be working like, you know, a month or two and then I'm gonna have to take maternity leave. And he was like, “You're pregnant?”

Yeah. Yeah, it worked out, it worked out fine. I'm like, I can't win here with this. I came to Illinois Power after that.

Not so much being passed over, maybe not thought of first for certain assignments. You know what I mean? Like maybe you weren't the first, you know, name that popped to the top of the list, I think, until you get a little bit of a track record built where you kind of prove, you know, prove out, and also learn, you know, maybe the types of things that you're better suited for. Your name starts popping up. But for a while, I felt like... but it's probably like that, proving yourself, whether you're a male or female. But I just felt like once I got my feet under me and I really could prove myself, then that became less of a thing. But I think initially maybe your name doesn't always pop to the top of the list for new, you know, new exciting projects.

I did Bring Your Daughter to Work Day, where my daughter promptly put her head on the... we were in a meeting and she just put her head on the table after a while. It was a very technical meeting and she was just like, what in the world? I still don't know what you do. No, I wasn't involved in Women in Technology, though.

Yeah, that was a great, great, very forward technology company, very leading edge. And we did really, gosh, amazing work there. I was there for 14 years and I always thought, well, this will be the bulk of my career. You know what I mean? I'll probably never work someplace for 14 years again. But now I've been at ADM for almost twenty.

But we were just a pretty small company. When you think about Illinois Power, a public utility in Illinois, we were in one state. We had four service areas, one time zone, one language, 4,000 employees, basically two products, gas and electric. That's not a very complex delivery model. You know what I mean?

Yeah, right. So we did, we did amazing things there. We were ahead of the game on object-oriented programming. We had reusable code libraries where we could just put things together in modules, and we could just deliver really quickly, really elegant solutions. And I feel so lucky to have had the experience of working there, and the very, gosh, smart people that I worked with, and it was a great experience. But we were bought out by Ameren.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So then that was like a winding road, because I would probably still be at Illinois Power today if I would have had the opportunity. But we were acquired by Ameren and then all of IT moved to St. Louis. And my kids, you know, were in like grade school, junior high and high school, and I just couldn't bring myself to uproot everybody. Although the people that did that, they ended up fine. You know what I mean? I probably was overthinking it a little bit.

Yeah, it would have been different. And, you know, again, people did fine. Their kids are resilient. You know what I mean? But both of our families were here too. We're very family oriented, I guess, and close to our parents, and today our kids are very close to us. So that just, I guess, goes against maybe some basic core, I won't say principles, but you know what I mean. Family first. Being close was important to us.

So when I came to ADM... at Illinois Power, we were just like a well-oiled machine and we could crank out some really great products technology-wise. And then I go to ADM, which is, you know, a Fortune 50 company in 200 countries, all time zones, 41,000 employees, 70 languages, thousands of products, literally thousands of products. So I roll into ADM and I'm like, so you guys don't... do you have common objects? Do you have common code modules that you all use? And additionally, ADM has really grown a lot by acquisition. So, you know, we acquired companies, so we acquired their systems and applications and things.

So I rolled into ADM and it's just like, well, I can't believe you guys don't have... you mean you don't have a common code library, or you don't have common integrations that you can reuse? And they were exactly right. I mean, that was a lot to think that they would have all that, based on how the company started, how it grew, how it evolved. It would be very difficult to have highly object-oriented code libraries, at that point anyway. You know what I mean? So I feel bad now that I came in kind of, you know, big gun, saying, I can't believe you guys don't have this. You know? And now I understand fully why we're structured the way we are, and we're always getting better all the time. And there are reusable integrations now. There are reusable code libraries and things. It's just the sheer size and complexity of our company is amazing. Just getting something done in a big company is a lot harder, to even get approval to do something. It takes the process part.

It wasn't me, but there were just some very... I guess, yeah, we did have leaders that would give them the range, you know, the range to work. Give them the, you know, the decision making.

Yeah, definitely empowered. And then just smart people, like way smarter than me. It was just a great team. And there really did end up being a lot of women there too. So it was both women and men, but very empowered, I would say. And just some really smart technical minds that were ways way smarter than me, to figure some of the things out. But really I think I was good at organizing, at, you know, communicating out, making sure everybody knew what was available. We had like good, you know, guidelines. All our products looked the same. They were very predictable in the way they behaved, you know, which made it better for our users. They knew what to expect. So if they got a brand new system, a lot of times how it behaved and the functionality was familiar to them. So it was a lot less stressful to move to a new system.

Yeah, I think definitely, technical-skills-wise, probably my bigger strength is people and communication, and maybe being able to, you know, discern requirements or something after talking to people or seeing how they do their jobs. You know what I mean? I guess having a little bit more skill on the people aspect versus the technical aspect. But you need both of those. A team should have both of those.

That was the big one, the big decision point. And really, as you know, once that decision was made and we got down the road a bit from that, I think we were very comfortable in the decision that we made. And I think from that point, we knew that we would be staying. My husband started a home building contractor and design business, and his business was very much based on our local, you know, our local town and local relationships as well. So at some point it probably was not even on the table anymore to think of uprooting everybody, especially when his business was established.

Yeah. It's right up there. Yeah.

Right. Yeah, you know. Be present and available for your, you know, for your project that you're working on. I mean, yeah, for sure. And I think that just goes back to, our parents were here. They helped us out. And again, we had friends that could pitch in when there were gaps that we couldn't cover. And I'm sure it's like that in bigger cities too. You develop your core people that you can be there for each other and help everybody succeed in what they're trying to do. But just pulling up roots and moving just seemed not the right decision for us. So here we are, 40 years later.

They are. But as bad as COVID was, I think it really demonstrated to everyone, to all of us, you know, what we can accomplish, even if we're not able to be together or be in the office where maybe we could work closer together. But I think that did show us how much we can really accomplish through the flexibility. There's more than one way to do it. And we proved that we could do big things even if we were all, you know, kind of separated. That helps with family and everything else too, having that flexibility. I think it just gave the companies confidence, once they saw it in action, that it can be flexible and be effective, maybe even more effective.

No, but I went to an accounting project. It was a financial consolidation project, basically a general ledger consolidation, because we had sixty-eight different general ledgers. And it was called Project Cornerstone, and it involved, you know, getting agreement on the general ledger structure and then, you know, converting all the other businesses to come through that same structure instead of having sixty-eight different general ledgers. And then there was IFRS, the International Financial Reporting Standards. Do you ever remember hearing about that?

IFRS was going to be like replacing US GAAP. It was going to be an international structured accounting standard that we thought would be implemented in the US. It didn't really get a lot of traction. Parts of it, like lease accounting and a few things, ended up coming out of that. But we were preparing the company for IFRS. So I did that for a couple of years.

It did end up coming in handy. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Sure. It makes it easier. And speak the language, speak the language, working with the accounting users and being able to understand what they mean when they're throwing around their accounting terms.

No. I think that a lot of that really came from Illinois Power, and how object-oriented we were and how structured, and almost incented to reuse code and make sure that we, you know, made the most of our resources. And when you think about enterprise architecture, you want to have architecture principles that you adhere to, and standards, so you're delivering a predictable, repeatable product. You know what I mean? And you don't have all these different methodologies going on.

So that's how I wound up in enterprise architecture, just because when I left Illinois Power and saw how structured and how uniform and predictable and supportable our products were that we developed, I wanted to bring that to ADM. And like I said, I came in, I'm embarrassed now, because I'd be like, you mean you guys don't do this? And it's a completely different landscape, a completely different type of company that is so complex that it takes a lot to do that. But in enterprise architecture, we did, you know, develop the principles and standards and, you know, code structure standards and things like that, that have really proven to help us be more agile in our delivery, because we're doing things in a more structured, repeatable way.

No, no, no. I think that is just coming from the background of seeing, you know, standards and principles and those guidelines and guardrails, how much more efficient you can be if everybody's using the same guidelines and structure.

I guess, and I kind of mentioned, my, you know, people skills are stronger than my technical skills probably. But I remember at Illinois Power wanting to be a team leader so bad. I really wanted to be a team manager, lead. I mean, we had teams of maybe seven or eight developers.

Yeah. Yeah. I was never a manager there, but I wanted to be so bad. And then I came into ADM as a team manager. So when I made that move I actually got to, for the first time, you know, have the management aspect of a team. So that was fun. And I had another really technical team. They could code circles around me, absolutely. But we did some pretty innovative stuff. We started implementing aspects of Scrum, because the people in my team were always wanting to do, you know, new things and adopt new methodologies or whatever. So that ended up being a really great match for me, because I wanted to do that too, because that's a lot of what I had done at Illinois Power. We did the daily stand-ups, we did, you know, all the Scrum aspects, and nobody else in ADM was really doing that at the time. But we had a good team. We had a good team going on.

I did. That is what I wanted to do. So yes, and I liked that. I liked it a lot. And I think we developed, again, did some great work and developed some really innovative solutions. So yeah, that was a happy time in my career. But then I did end up leaving that to go to some of the bigger projects in the company, just as more of an individual contributor, not a team leader. But they were bigger, I guess you would say programs, if you will.

I guess I would maybe chase after the newer things a little bit, the shiny things.

Just newer projects, probably. More impactful projects, the better. So that was an example of one that was going on in the company. One of many, but one that I felt like would be a really big impact to the organization.

I guess if we're all gonna be here, let's do something great, you know? Might as well. We're all here. Let's do something great.

Yeah, I pretty much settled back into enterprise architecture. So more back into the structure and groundwork of, you know, creating something that everybody can build on, you know, the most effectively that we can. So kind of back out of the big project and more into the inner workings and the foundation, and making sure we get that right so people can be effective in building on top of that. So that's really where I am now.

Yeah, service-oriented architecture. That's foundational. Yeah. Definitely. Yep.

Why I like that... that probably came from Illinois Power, because we just had a lot of progressive minds, great technical minds there. I was really, again, not that technical, nothing compared to what these people were, but just wanting to improve all the time, constantly trying to find a better way. I think that aspect is most gratifying to me. So sometimes that's either building a better foundation that people can build on, or maybe it's some really new technical thing, the next big thing, possibly. I find gratifying work out of both of those, really. I don't know if that answers your question.

Yeah, I guess I have an eye, maybe an eye for that. Just, hmm, that looks interesting. But I wouldn't say consistently. But I'm definitely not afraid of trying a new project. I can be adaptable, I guess you would say.

No, I won't say bored. I guess challenge. I like that word.

Figure it out. Yeah, I guess so. Yep. That sounds closer, at least. But I'm not constantly doing that. Again, like I said, I can be happy with trying to, you know, improve on something that's already there, something that's been there forever. I could be attracted to improving that and making it work more consistently and predictably, I guess, is where I get satisfaction.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, Brad. You're smart.

Yes.

It's gonna be twenty years.

Yeah. Yeah. Forty, fifty years or something like that. Their whole career.

Yeah. Actually the person that hired me.

At ADM. Yeah. Yeah, definitely. He would always see things that he thinks I might be good for. Somebody out there that's keeping an eye out for things that would energize you, or that you would be a good fit for. That's always good to have, if you can have somebody that can kind of line up people with work that, you know, can be fulfilling for them, I think. So I did have someone like that at ADM.

So after that, he pretty much directed me to that financial reporting and that structured project, where we were all gonna get aligned to the same GL and that whole thing. I guess after he directed me towards that, pretty much everything else just kind of fell into place from there, you know. But I would say he was instrumental in saying, hey, I think you would be really good for this and I think you should go for it, and here's why. Because I probably wouldn't have even known about that project. I might have known of it, but there was somebody, you know, looking out, that knows my skill set and knows what the project needs and was able to put that together.

Yeah. Yeah.

I just talked to him. We don't work in the same building anymore, but I just saw him on the street outside of our buildings, just the day before yesterday. And, you know, now it's been so many years. It's gonna be soon that we will think of retiring, you know, which is weird in itself. I can't even think of that. It's very weird.

They will keep me busy.

Restaurants. Yeah. Yeah. I know. Once a year we take a family trip up to Chicago. We take everybody, and we're Bears season ticket holders. So we go to the Bears game and we go out to a fancy dinner. So she's actually given me babysitter recommendations and restaurant recommendations. She knows all that stuff. But I call her too. She's very good at that.

Yes. In college.

I guess I would say, I wonder what it would be like if... they made part of my curriculum to take a programming class. So I guess I was just thinking, what if I was in a major and I just never took that class? You know what I mean? Literally.

Yeah. No. I know. If they didn't make me, I don't know if I would have even taken it. Isn't that crazy? That was my whole career.

I know, see. Yeah. This is way better. That was literally one class. Career changing.

Although I did get to work on that general ledger consolidation, chart of accounts stuff, standardized chart of accounts. But I liked accounting because of the structure of it, and I think programming gives you that too. Structured programs and modules and fitting things together and all that.

In high school.

We've been married forty-three, but see, we dated five years before that. So forty-eight.