Meet the Top 10 women in technology in Asia-Pacific

5 Janice Lai

President

NEC Corporation

Taipei-based Janice Lai is President at NEC Taiwan, leading the Japanese multinational tech giant’s business in Taiwan since 2017. She is also chairman of the board at software and services company PTC. Janice has 27 years’ experience in IT leading companies with exposure to solutions, sales, marketing, and organisation transformation, holding sales and business development leadership roles at tech giants SAP, Dell, IBM and Oracle. Janice earned an MBA from National Taiwan University.

6 Vidya Rao

Chief Information Officer

Genpact

Bengaluru-based technology leader Vidya Rao has led IT and digital at Genpact for nearly three years as CIO, responsible for building and leading a world-class technology and global business.

Vidya has more than 25 years of technology consulting leadership and delivery experience and joined Genpact from Accenture where she spent more than 16 years, where she held diverse roles and more recently led the technology delivery for some of the tech consulting firm’s very large global multinational clients in consumer goods and pharma. Vidya began her career in 1993, working with multiple IT companies like Infosys, Wipro and Cambridge Technology Partners. She has a degree in statistics.

7 Shivani Saini

Global Digital & Tech Head, Business Units

GSK Consumer Healthcare

Armed with a track record of driving digital transformation in sales, marketing, supply chain and organisation culture, Shivani Saini has led digital and tech globally for GSK Consumer Healthcare for nine months, having worked her way up from CIO APAC for Consumer Healthcare.

Shivani has 24 years’ experience in IT in consumer goods and healthcare, with six years at GSK and 19 years at Proctor & Gamble. At P&G, she worked across countries and business units, spending nine years in Japan as digital marketing IT leader, seven years in Belgium as supply chain systems service and delivery leader, and three years in Singapore as Japan CIO. Shivani is passionate about making tech a competitive advantage for business. She has a degree in commerce from the University of Delhi.

8 Evelyn Su Mei Ooi

CIO, APAC

Geodis

An experienced IT leader with more than 20 years of multinational corporation experience, Singapore-based Evelyn Su Mei Ooi has been CIO Asia-Pacific for supply chain operator Geodis since 2019. Well-versed in digital transformation and change management projects, Evelyn has held senior tech roles at DKSH Corporate Shared Services Center, where she spent more than a decade defining, driving and implementing IT strategy and digitalisation initiatives. Prior to this, she was a technical consultant at IBM Malaysia. She has a degree in Computing and a master’s in managerial psychology.

9 Julie Canepa

CIO APAC, Greater China & Japan

Cisco

Julie Capana has been Cisco’s chief digital officer in the Asia-Pacific region for the last nearly eight and a half years, first as CIO Australia and New Zealand, responsible for IT service delivery in support of Cisco business across these two countries, and now as CIO Asia Pacific, Greater China & Japan since August 2021, driving digital outcomes impacting growth, productivity and user experience through cross discipline partnerships and driving synergies between business leadership, operations and IT.

Julie has more than 25 years of diverse IT leadership experience, leading IT initiatives in a wide variety of global and regional roles, and has worked for Cisco for more than two decades, including as Chief of Staff for Asia-Pacific. She has featured in the top 50 CIOs in Australia for the last five years. She is passionate about elevating women in tech and is an executive sponsor of women at Cisco to attract and support women in the industry and is a board member for the Diversity Council of Australia.

10 Genevieve Bell

Director, School of Cybernetics

The Australian National University

Genevieve Bell is a cultural anthropologist, pioneering technologist and futurist best known for her work at the intersection of cultural practice and technology development. A distinguished professor at the Australian National University (ANU), she currently leads the School of Cybernetics and is director of the 3A Institute at the ANU, which she founded in 2017 with the mission of building a new applied science around the management of AI, data, technology, and their impact on humanity.

She is also a Senior Fellow at Intel Corporation, where she spent 25 years prior to ANU, helping guide Intel’s product development by developing the company’s social science and design research capabilities – from developing the first UX roadmaps for Intel, to conceptualising and leading Intel Labs. She has a PhD from Stanford University in cultural anthropology.

She is a member of the Prime Minister’s National Science and Technology Council, an Officer of the Order of Australia, and a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Technology and Engineering.