Clare Hickie, chief technology officer (CTO) for EMEA at Workday, sits in the Customer Experience Centre in the technology firm’s European headquarters in Dublin and reflects on the characteristics that have helped her to succeed during her digital leadership career.
“I’m a change maker; I was born as one,” she says. “The most important thing for me is that I’ve always got a pragmatic understanding of what needs to happen and how it’s happening, and that’s the only way that I can help our customers move forward.”
That’s certainly Hickie’s priority at Workday, where she’s helping the cloud-based HR specialist to stay competitive in the age of AI. As Computer Weekly discovered during a recent innovation media event in Dublin, Workday is developing a range of data-rich and agentic services to help CIOs and other business executives embrace digital change – and Hickie relishes the opportunity to help other executives gain the benefits.
“I genuinely believe I’ve got the best job in Workday. It’s an incredible role to be able to help our customers get the most from their investments, but equally to inspire our potential customers or prospects on their journey in terms of choosing Workday as the right partner for change,” she says.
“I’m in the very fortunate position to be able to do that every day and to inspire, motivate and have the hard conversations. We’re very candid in our roles. To have these strong conversations with CIOs is an incredible job to have.”
Taking on a new challenge
Hickie joined Workday as regional CIO in June 2018 and was promoted to EMEA CTO in June 2021. Before joining the firm, she spent 15 years at multinational pharmaceutical and biotechnology company GSK, latterly as global head of IT HR services.
It was during her time with GSK that Hickie became exposed to Workday. She says the pharma giant started working with the software-as-a-service (SaaS) specialist in 2011. GSK was an early Workday customer, particularly from European organisations. The business was eager to standardise services across 135 countries and 120,000 employees by working with a trusted transformation partner – and Workday proved a good fit.
“I was asked to lead that project from an IT perspective, and it was new technology,” she says. “At the time, it was one of the first big SaaS services to come in, because we were very much running on legacy infrastructure and architecture. After leading the implementation project, I went on to set up everything from a shared services perspective and to lead the teams.”
Hickie reflects positively on her time with GSK: “I had a tremendous career at GSK that was very diverse and gave me a huge amount of development opportunities along my own career path. But once I got involved in this technology project, I thought the service Workday offered was incredible.”
While Hickie says she didn’t expect to join Workday during her time implementing the firm’s technology at GSK, her interactions with the company left a good feeling. When the opportunity to join Workday came, she already had first-hand knowledge of its services. As a values-driven professional, she says the company’s people and its approach to business chimed with her.
“It’s interesting, because a lot of people thought at the time that it was a bold move, especially leaving a company like GSK. But from the day I joined Workday, I’ve never looked back. GSK is still a major Workday customer. I’ve got huge admiration for GSK and everything it stands for in healthcare. But for me, at the time, I made the right decision,” she says.
“I’ve never stopped developing – in my entire career and at Workday. As a digital leader, you’re at the heart and soul of innovation and development as it occurs, and you’re looking forward to what could happen next. To me, Workday is a great place to work, with super colleagues.”
Managing technology operations
Hickie says what’s clear from her CV is that she likes to get stuck into the business and develop new capabilities.
“I’m a very loyal employee, as you can tell through my timeline,” she says. “I was at GSK for 15 years, and I’m now entering my eighth year at Workday. Even though I was at GSK for a long time, I had nine different roles as I developed my career.”
During her time at Workday, Hickie has moved from a more internal-facing position as CIO to an external-facing role as CTO. In her current role, which she assumed as the business emerged from the challenges of the coronavirus pandemic, she reports to global CTO Joe Wilson. Each major region in Workday has a CTO.
“As a digital leader, you’re at the heart and soul of innovation and development as it occurs, and you’re looking forward to what could happen next”
Claire Hickie, Workday
Internal technology at Workday takes a centralised approach and is led by CIO Rani Johnson, based in the company’s US headquarters in Pleasanton. While technology continues to play an ever-increasing role in modern business operations, Hickie says decisions on the strategic direction of travel and implementation of services don’t have to take place at the local level.
“I’m not sure that’s a necessity for an organisation like Workday,” she says. “Like many organisations that are built out at a global level, we’ve got our own technology stack, which involves more than just Workday. We’re also Workday’s first customer, and we’ve got everything bedded down for the applications and technology that’s available.”
While decisions about technology strategy are taken at the global level, Hickie says local teams bed systems down and manage their own IT infrastructure, whether that’s in EMEA, Asia-Pacific or North America. She says the technology stack is supported around the clock, with systems and services swapped in and out due to business requirements.
“As a company, we don’t need to make different decisions to support the regions. There are certainly areas that could operate slightly differently, but that variability is more about culture, languages and geographical locations, not at a technology level,” she says.
“We come into work and we know exactly what we’re operating on. The stack runs really well in our enterprise. We’ve got escalation lines when something doesn’t happen correctly, but we’re pretty slim in how we operate.”
Leading from the front
While Hickie’s role is more externally than internally facing, she still has to keep a watchful eye on technology developments behind the enterprise firewall. A strong awareness of Workday’s innovative activities makes it easier to work with CIOs and other customers.
“It’s about working with the product teams and understanding requirements from a technology perspective,” she says. “We have to understand the architecture, the infrastructure and then be able to communicate those capabilities out as an external perspective. Equally, we always need to understand the roadmap and what we’re doing.”
Hickie says Workday benefits from having access to a big network of customers and potential clients. Interacting regularly with these outsiders gives Workday’s insiders a sense of the challenges that CIOs face and the product innovations they require.
“Most of my role is having one-to-one conversations with CIOs and CTOs,” she says. “We also work with digital leaders in large forums. I was in London this week with 120 CIOs, including some who were customers and some who were not. We also bring a lot of our customers into Workday to have these conversations and understand their challenges.”
Hickie says her biggest achievement since becoming CTO is helping some of the firm’s key customers get the most bang for their buck. As one of the most senior executives in the business, she also serves on the board of directors for the Workday Ltd subsidiary, suggesting that another main focus area is supporting women in science, technology, engineering and maths (STEM).
Workday was named STEM Employer of the Year at the 2025 Women in STEM Awards in Dublin last October for the second consecutive year. Hickie also leads Women@Workday, an employee belonging council that creates mentoring circles, encourages shared learning, and opens new opportunities for professionals to develop.
“A big achievement for me is to see how diverse we continue to be and that we’re shining a light in terms of encouraging young females into technology,” she says. “For the staff who are here at Workday, we’re mentoring and coaching them every day in terms of this technology sector, which can be a tough place to work but also provides an incredible career.”
Developing new skills
Hickie recognises that the IT profession is undergoing fundamental changes due to the adoption of artificial intelligence (AI). It’s a transformation that’s taking place in Workday and externally, as the company rolls out new agentic AI services to its customers.
At the event in Dublin, her senior executive colleagues discussed the company’s product roadmap and the introduction of agents that the firm hopes will remove repetitive tasks from human resources, finance and other business functions. Hickie says the human remains very much in the loop, even in an era of agentic AI and increased automation.
“Skills become absolutely imperative,” she says. “Our unique capabilities are becoming the foundation of how we operate as people in our job roles and functions. Emerging technology brings change, but it also brings flexibility, as the enabler of new and interesting career paths.”
Hickie suggests that many organisations are eager to take a two-phased approach to AI – they want to boost productivity through automation, but they also want to retain their talent. While some industry experts worry that the introduction of emerging technology could lead to a jobs apocalypse, Hickie is more optimistic.
“In terms of dealing with our customers every day, we’re often asked how we see other organisations are managing those changes,” she says. “It’s interesting, because as businesses have continued to grow and be successful, we’re seeing that other skills are literally being created every single day. And you can only see that trajectory accelerating.”
