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Eloise N. Young heads up IT
for Philadelphia Gas Works
It’s been a long, hard climb from mailroom to CIO
for this vigorous IT pro. But she made it, and now
she’s managing a full-service IT shop
 Eloise Young’s career at Philadelphia Gas Works (PGW, Philadelphia, PA) started in the mailroom. Today she’s the company’s CIO, overseeing a $10 million operating budget and responsible for delivering the benefits of IT to PGW’s 1,800 employees.
Young makes a point of speaking plainly, whether to employees or vendors, and making sure everyone is on the same page. “We’re all in this together,” she says.
Full-service IT
Young’s department is a full-service IT shop that manages projects and turns out custom-made apps. There are sixty-five employees in IT, four of them directors. Consultants and interns also play an important role on the team.
Managing the department involves analyzing its performance metrics and making sure that her many internal and external customers are happy, the department is meeting its service level quotas and her own folks are getting the coaching they need.
Another big part of her job is working with vendors. “They’re a rich source of information,” she points out. “They provide information about new technology trends and IT-related services being offered, as well as insight into what other IT shops are doing.
“On the other hand, if a vendor is not meeting our expectations I have to pull that vendor back in line. That’s an important part of what I do.”
Apps for the field force
PGW is the nation’s largest municipally owned natural-gas utility, with more than half a million residential and commercial customers in the city of Philadelphia. Its largest functional area is field ops, Young notes. PGW’s field operations section has two major departments, each with different needs.
Back in the 1980s PGW was one of the first gas companies to use wireless technology, putting proprietary hardware devices in the service trucks. Servicing field ops raises some unique challenges, Young says. “First of all, the hardware for both departments has to be ruggedized and able to withstand severe conditions. Secondly, not everyone in the field wants to use computers.”
But they’re doing it all the same. For example, Young’s people built a mobile dispatching app that field techs use to respond to gas leaks, service gas appliances and turn the gas on and off.
The application is written in dot.net, Young explains. Release 1 of the mobile system was designed to address leak response, emergencies, service turn-on and turn-off, meter replacements and appliance repairs. Last year, release 2 of the app converted many of the department’s paper-based processes to an electronic system with a flexible workflow.
Unleashing creativity
Young and her team just finished a five-year business plan for the IT department. “The plan consists of pure IT initiatives,” she says. “Planning is a continual process.”
Her favorite thing about management? “It’s an opportunity to unleash creativity. I have the authority to engage very talented people, and the final product is so much better than anything I could do myself. The team is so talented!”
Born in Philadelphia
Young was born and raised in West Philadelphia. She went to Temple University in the late 1970s, intending to be an actuarial science major, switching to CS, then getting married and moving away for seven years, she recalls.
“It didn’t work out, and I came back to Philly and joined PGW because I wanted a job with a company that would pay tuition. I always knew I wanted to work with computers.”
That was in 1984. At PGW she worked the midnight shift and opened the day’s mail, then walked up the street to take classes at Temple University as a full-time student. During her senior year she married again and became a mom.
IT at last!
In 1987, based on the schooling she’d had so far, PGW moved her to a job as an IT developer. For four years she wrote custom mainframe apps, then worked as an IDMS DBA for another five. In 1996 she became a systems admin, first for CICS and then for Unix.
Rough apprenticeship
The decision to go into management “came out of adversity,” Young confides. She had been working for a brilliant boss, essentially “a one-man show.” Then one day he suddenly gave his notice, and Young had two weeks to learn to manage the complex infrastructure of the mainframe-based mobile application. To further complicate the challenge, no training or vendor support was available for the legacy systems, although PGW was still using them 24/7.
“Somehow I managed to survive,” Young recalls with feeling. The system was eventually replaced with a purchased app on a new platform as part of the corporate Y2K remediation effort.
In 1998 she was promoted to manager and put in charge of PGW’s data center operations.
“It was very challenging. The data center could not be unmanned at any time,” she says.
Up to director
In 2003 Young finally attained her BS in IT, with a focus on operating systems and programming, from the University of Phoenix. That same year she became director of PGW’s tech strategy and support section. She oversaw the developers, the application architect and the project managers in this full-service application services shop.
The favorite project of her entire career came along in 2004. “It was really slick,” she recalls. “Customer information is our bread-and-butter system, and it was getting old and slow. We changed everything underneath, putting in faster servers and an automated job scheduler. It was a six-month project that had an immediate benefit for PGW’s call center. We had a lot fewer abandoned calls and the average answer speed improved dramatically!”
...and CIO
Young took over her CIO job in 2007 when her predecessor became a senior VP. PGW does
a good job with succession planning, she notes. “Several of us participated in a leadership development program that sent us to Wharton for executive decision-making courses. We also received Six Sigma training with a real project to implement.”
Her unique career journey put Young first in line for the CIO job. She has worked in, and in many cases managed, almost every section of PGW IT. “I love learning new things,” she says.
Getting along
Through the years, Young often had to juggle her very busy career with motherhood. Sometimes she’d bring her children into work with her. “There’s no magic formula, but my husband and family have been phenomenally supportive,” she says.
Off the job, Young is a member of the Network of Women in Computer Technology, which offers speakers and mentoring opportunities to its Delaware Valley members. She also belongs to the Philadelphia chapter of the Society for Information Management, which has many CIO members. Every summer the group sponsors a tech camp for teenagers, where Young volunteered last year.
Her advice to other upward-bound managers: learn from criticism; it can take your career to another level. Work very hard, and work happy. Keep your confidence, even on your worst day, and above all be yourself. “I’m an African American female and I never try to hide what I am or where I came from,” Young declares.
D/C
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