You can admire Sophie Vandebroek from two very different angles: as an intellectual giant heading the global innovation laboratories at Xerox, or as a woman who raised three children on her own after she stood by helplessly as her husband died of an asthma attack on a camping holiday.
Taken together, those make Vandebroek one of the most courageous and tenacious women in the business. She's likeable too, with her Belgian roots blending with the traits of her adopted US homeland to make her warm, open and efficient. You sense it would be a pleasure to work for her, if you were as talented as the people employed in the research labs in Palo Alto, Canada, France and India.
Vandebroek studied micro-electronics and holds 14 patents for her research. She's the chief technology officer of Xerox and president of the Innovation Group, talks to governments about technologies to improve our cities, and is the champion of the Xerox Black Women's caucus group.
The last of those surprises me, and she laughs when I ask if her skin colour doesn't make her under-qualified for that job. "We really focus a lot on being an enabling company, whether it's based on gender or race. Everyone, including single mothers, can live a full life at Xerox," Vandebroek says. The company actively promotes diversification and reaches out to specific groups at universities such as gays, lesbians, blacks and Hispanics. The caucus groups for those employees are led by champions who are not one of them, so they really get to understand their issues. As the sole white woman at the meetings, she felt awkward, she admits, but gained an inkling into how black women must feel in a white, male-dominated industry.
Inclusive culture
Half her staff is female and Xerox strives for its researchers and engineers to be at least 30 percent female, ten percent Afro-American and ten percent Hispanic. "It's not easy, but if you do it, you create a truly inclusive culture where people come in with different mindsets and histories and you can be so much more creative," she says. "Our customers are global, so we create products, solutions and services from a set of people who are also diverse."
Vandebroek was in South Africa to visit Bytes, its largest partner in the world for its document technology business. One aim was to forge further tie-ups with Bytes and its parent company Altron, because although Xerox is still best known as a printer company, that is nowhere near the full picture anymore. Now it pops up in places you'd never expect, with technologies for healthcare, transportation, education, financial and HR services and customer care. The technologies Xerox is developing are largely analytical tools to exploit big data. "We've been making this transition for about a decade to move more into other services, jump-started by acquisitions of e-litigation and e-mortgage companies," she says.
Call centres have become a major arm, employing 50 000 agents to handle customer interactions for the telecoms, retail and healthcare industries. It also processes 950 million medical claims annually, and wants to broaden its businesses into many different countries.
Transportation is an area to explore in Africa, she agrees, as we discuss traffic in Lagos and Johannesburg. "We're not in Africa at all yet with transportation and South Africa is the first because it's the most high-tech country. You already have a lot of traffic - I've sat in it a couple of times!"
The first client in South Africa for its transportation tools will be a small bus company wanting an e-ticket system. "We process billions of transaction payments for public transport like buses, taxis, highway tollbooths and parking. The big value is we have so much information around where citizens go and when throughout the day, so we've created a dashboard to show the flow of citizens through a city and how to optimise it."
Livable cities
Analysing masses of data could show that more buses or trains are needed at certain times or on different routes, or where the cost of parking could be raised to free up more space. The aim is to minimise congestion and carbon emissions, give people their time back and create 'more livable cities'.
Another tool that could be useful in South Africa turns multifunction devices in schools into analysis machines. Teachers can print out tests for the kids, then scan the handwritten answers back in. The device uses handwriting recognition software to mark the tests and categorise each student to show what problems they have, such as a weakness in maths. Hours of manual work can be done in minutes by the machine, yet the results are personalised.
I love my job for three reasons, I get to work with really amazing people around the globe, I work with different people of different cultures, and we get to create the future today.
Sophie Vandebroek, Xerox
"That's the beauty of automation. Work can be much faster and simpler for the teachers and personalised for the individual students, so there is this dual value of producing work on a massive scale, yet making every interaction personal," Vandebroek says.
That is the essence of what keeps her excited. "I love my job for three reasons, and most probably more if you let me think a minute. I get to work with really amazing people around the globe, I work with different people of different cultures, and we get to create the future today."
Her global teams are looking into the future and as experts in their field, they can push the boundaries of the unknown. "We're asking how can we make things better or more environmentally friendly or at a lower cost, or come up with a new algorithm to be able to predict a stroke in a patient?" she says. "We look at the situation in the world today and go a little bit beyond."
This article was first published in Brainstorm magazine. Click here to read the complete article at the Brainstorm website.
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