Meet the Team: Katrina, Customer Success Lead

Want to know more about the team behind SICCAR? We all share the same mission of connecting and protecting business and society with trustworthy data. Look out for our ‘Meet the Team’ series to learn about the individuals leading, creating and communicating the SICCAR platform.

Meet Katrina – our Digital Transformation & Customer Success Lead.

Describe your background and experience in as few words as you can:

I initially started out as a counsellor, working with young people, which I found really rewarding.  Motivated by personal circumstances, I progressed into more of the management side and eventually took on a more regional role. This led me then to participate in a lot of change management projects, which of course had a focus or involvement with IT – bringing in new systems, upgrading equipment, improving office functionality. I eventually ended up leading on a large change management programme across DWP in Scotland.

With this, I made the official transition into IT. After a few interesting years working at Grampian Police, I decided to move to the private sector. I then spent time working for tech companies of various sizes which gave me such a breadth of experience. I spent a couple more years back in public sector, at Revenue Scotland, before accepting the position at SICCAR as the Customer Success Lead!

What interested you in a career in technology?

My entire career has always been focussed on customer service – whether it was citizens, my colleagues and staff, or clients. I discovered early on this is where my passion lies, and indeed what I was good at. With all digital transformation, there is the technical side and the adoption side to it. My interest was specifically in the adoption of tech, and that allowed me to tap into a lot of my customer service knowledge and expertise.

With blockchain, public sector organisations can share efficiently, while allowing the citizen to stay in control of their own information and so preserve their privacy.

So why did you join SICCAR?

Well of course there is the element of us working with a new technology; one that I’d not worked with before. I also liked idea of working in a start-up again – I’d worked for a start-up before, but there I was very much focused on the customer service and management side. I was building the process but didn’t have much involvement with the product. 

With SICCAR, it’s both. I’m working with a blank slate when it comes to the customer success function, which allows me to utilise all my experience. But also, I am directly contributing to building a product that fulfils all our customer requirements. Working so closely with the sales and marketing teams, and the development team is exciting.

What industry or technology trends do you think will have the biggest impact on organisations in the coming years? 

Cyber security is the thing for me, because more and more you are seeing attacks on organisations that are not prepared enough. A denial of service attack for example, is not necessarily a breach but it is annoying. When IT started no one was really thinking of data security as critical – it was more of an add on. We need to think about being more resilient, rather than reactive. With all organisations having to be remote during the pandemic, the issue is only getting worse. 

Also on a personal level, we don’t have any control over our own data anymore. People don’t think of their data being an asset or being tangible. For example, a CV: you may think of the actual CV as tangible, but if you submit that to an agency online you have no idea where any of that information is going. We at least need to trust that organisations will look after our information, or be careful about handing it out.