Pia Baker: Our woman in ICT

PIA Baker is living proof that women are present in, and leading information and communications technology (ICT), and that they can, and have been working from the ground up on their own merit. As a sixth former she worked summers as a customer care representative for Air Jamaica’s baggage department. Years later, after graduating with a bachelor’s in sociology and doing a stint with the Ministry of National Security, Baker would return to taking customers’ calls, this time as a team leader at Digicel Jamaica’s contact centre. But she did not get it right out of the blocks. In fact, she was placed on a performance improvement programme after training because she was not meeting key performance indices. 

“After that I said nobody will ever put me on performance improvement again, and it never happened,” she beamed as she spoke with All Woman ahead of International Girls in ICT Day, which was observed last Thursday. Today she is Digicel Group’s director of customer experience and operations.

“But these experiences not only allowed me to communicate with persons of different backgrounds…they also allowed for me to appreciate what technology was doing, and how to grow along with it,” she said. “I was then moved from team leader to operations manager because I was able to improve my team’s performance significantly in a short time, with a different way of managing.”

Baker would continue to climb the rungs within Digicel, and with every step she took she would seek out further training to equip her with the necessary skills to carry out her functions. In seven years she had held more than that number of roles, each one propelling her toward the next. She now reflects fondly on the time when she deliberately tried to avoid the ICT sector out of fear of just walking in her father’s shadow.

“I never really had such an interest in telecommunications to be honest, because my dad was a legacy in telecommunications,” she said of Jeremiah Baker, now deceased, who fathered her and her two sisters. His career in ICT, which spanned over three decades, saw him spending over 20 years with Jamintel, and being seconded as general manager of the Jamaica Civil Aviation Authority’s Kingston Air Traffic Control Centre.

“He moved to aeronautical engineering so I had an image of just the computers and the lines and the formulae and scripts and all of that, and I wasn’t interested in that. I was more interested in connecting with people so I studied sociology,” she shared. She now concedes that it was destiny for her to find her way to ICT, but on her own terms and merit.

“Now everyday I am more inclined to learn more about technology, because how our customers interact with technology is ultimately what will change the business,” she said. She credits one of her most rewarding achievements as director of customer experience and operations, in part, to advancements made in technology.

“Years ago while I was operations manager we had CHIKV. Around the same time there was also dengue and chickenpox, and it was a mess,” she recalled. “The challenge then was, ‘How do we manage agents’ attendance to work?’ So we started putting a lot of processes in place — processes that we leaned heavily on our IT resources to develop.

“So now, as soon as the coronavirus threat was spotted in China our team was on it. I was called in on this from January, and from a manager’s perspective one of my biggest accomplishments will always be the fact that I was able to get my entire department 100 per cent remote, with no COVID-19 cases,” she beamed. “Getting people home and safe with minimal impact to the customer wasn’t an easy task.”

Baker is not content to just sit at the head table. She uses her voice and resources to motivate and create room for women and girls to join her there.

“Now, more than ever, we need girls in ICT. The coronavirus situation has fast-tracked Jamaica’s digital strategy, and so with the need for more innovative digital solutions the sector could do with more hands on deck,” she said.

“It’s very important for girls to start going into non-traditional fields, not because somebody says they should go into it but because they have an interest…and they can have an interest in tech,” she said. “Technology doesn’t see size. It doesn’t see gender or sex, and it doesn’t see age. It sees skill.”