Nysia Sewell
Cloud Deliver Partner - Deloitte UK
We are the Women in Cloud. We solve problems, see possibilities and create impact. We are making a difference, from the first day of school to the corner office, and from the farmer’s field to the factory floor. This could be you.
She helps clients see the wood for the trees
In her cloud delivery work for major private-sector clients, Nysia Sewell has had a hand in many kinds of migrations and transformations. And while she’s laser focussed on cloud as an enabler of business growth, she’s especially excited about what cloud-driven technologies can do for the social good and particularly sustainability.
Her ongoing interests include deploying geospatial technology in the cloud to empower consumer goods companies to make better global decisions about how to understand their impact on deforestation and decisions on ethical farming in the fight against the use of child labor.
In her 15 years with Deloitte, Nysia has seen the cloud grow from its origins as a source of off-premise computing power to its expanding role as the lynchpin of digital transformation. She’s helped deliver client success across myriad industries. One of her proudest moments was successfully helping set up a financial services company’s private cloud in the months just prior to an Olympic Games for which they were a major sponsor.
Customer satisfaction is what drives Nysia’s personal satisfaction. “My ambition is always to build out a ‘badge-less’ team, so we can leave the badges at the door, fully immerse ourselves in the client challenge and leave after a period of time with the client saying that they couldn't have done it without us,” she says. “I think that's the stuff that really excites me.”
Nysia’s career path started with a university degree in Business Information Technology, followed by a technical job helping build the communication systems of medium-orbit satellites. It was complex technical work—“but I very quickly realised that I can talk and encourage people faster than I can code and that led me into the sort of technology leadership roles that I’ve continued to do up to today.”
She points to her own experience at Deloitte as a case study in the positive shifts that have taken place for women in the technology field. Rather than the traditional term “working mom,” Nysia calls herself a “mom that works”; she takes advantage of Deloitte’s flexible working arrangements to devote quality time to children’s birthday parties, school events and extended summer time off. “And then,” she adds, “I quickly switch back into being able to talk to the C-suite about their cloud transformation journeys. And I think that being able to feel successful in my home life, as well as my work life, and striking that balance certainly shows how Deloitte is striving hard to support women in the firm.”
Those cloud transformation journeys, though often long, are full of possibilities, Nysia says. “A lot of my clients at the moment are looking at how they're harnessing the power of their data in one platform, what that can do and what insights that can bring. But I think there’s still a way to go for a number of our clients to truly get to what we call into a cloud 3.0—which is really treating their IT as a service going forwards and as an enabler for true scale end-to-end business transformation.”
