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Tech & Innovation Blog
Nicole, Senior Director of Operations, Translates Business to Technology
Women in STEM, Voice of Our People, Innovation
Nicole, Senior Director of Operations, shares how she transformed from business to product and technology throughout her career journey at ADP.
Coming to ADP
Nicole’s career journey to Tech was an evolution. She has 20 years of experience in payroll and hadn’t thought about the technology behind it when she first started. “A mentor of mine changed my thinking. She reminded me what we did was software implementation, which changed my perspectives on projects and future opportunities,” Nicole says.
Nicole’s Family
When she came over to ADP’s Global Product and Technology (GPT) group, Nicole played a role in translation between business needs, operations goals, products, and technology. “With my background in payroll, I can put processes together and execute them,” Nicole says. “I proudly serve as a liaison between business goals and technology to build great products.” She felt accomplished when another ADP associate thought she came from a traditional product background. It was a defining moment for Nicole, knowing how much she transformed into a product and technology subject matter expert throughout her career journey.
Designing for People
“STEM is the foundation of our daily life, constantly changing and transforming how we do things,” Nicole tells us. “Working at ADP is exciting!” She loves how ADP always offers a variety of new projects. “Even though we are a large corporate company, ADP values the individual voices of its people. There’s always an opportunity here to deliver impact and make a difference,” she says.
Early in Nicole’s career, she worked on a migration project for over three years with about 200,000 clients. She is currently working on projects Payroll Innovation (PI) and Next-Gen Technology. “The Next-Gen in payroll calculation and compliance is powerful. These are my favorites because they are at the core of how ADP operates,” she says.
Nicole looks for opportunities to lead others who come from similar backgrounds in operations and business sides, getting them closer to ADP’s products without feeling apprehensive. She also recognizes the value in bringing the operational and the business sides closer to technology. For those who have a traditional tech background, she makes sure they understand the impact.
ADP: Transformation to Tech
Nicole always likes to ask other leaders their thoughts on ADP’s transformation into a technology company. As an associate who’s been here for 20 years, she enjoys ADP’s blending of great service and technology. “We went from a traditional service provider to leading with technology, and eventually, we hope tech is the first thing that comes to mind in the future,” she says. “I enjoy watching the transformation, as do other long-tenured associates! Seeing them use innovative technology in new ways is inspiring.”
“I am blessed to have some incredible mentors who have shared valuable insights with me,” Nicole says. She also had the opportunity to mentor multiple talented individuals, and advocates organic mentoring relationships. “I’ve never met a leader who refused to spend time with associates. Be open and ask questions! Mentors are there to guide your learning experiences. It’s a growing process for everyone,” she says.
Everyone is a Leader
Nicole at Banff National Park, Alberta Canada
Nicole thinks highly of her associates and recognizes people’s strengths and understands how they fit in her team. She likes letting someone develop what he/she is good at, providing all the support. “I ask questions: Is that skill an asset? Do we need the skill in the team? Job descriptions for my team are detailed and crafted with intention,” she says. Nicole loves learning about people’s passion and motivation behind the tasks.
“It takes confidence to be bold and conquer the fear of leaving your swim lane,” she says. Nicole encourages STEM women to speak up and offer ideas, even if the ideas are not mainstream. As she says: “Always be prepared to back up your opinions with a clearly articulated vision for the team! It is one thing to have an idea and another thing to execute it.”
Nicole has a 10-year-old daughter who loves robotics and electronics. She loves supporting her and getting involved in a lot of youth activities at her school. “It’s great to see children get creative and passionate about technology!” she says. To her, #ADPTech is creative, human, evolving, and diverse. The elements together create a culture that is inclusive and understanding. Regardless of experience and background, people take the time to listen to one another’s opinions and ideas.
Recharge and Reset
Nicole in Costa Rica
Nicole loves to travel. She books with a company that caters to women traveling alone, and gets to meet other amazing women during her trips. Some of places she has visited include Glacier National Park in Montana, Banff National Park in Alberta, Chile in South America, Calgary, and Costa Rica. Her next trip, a fitness retreat in Bali, is coming up next year. She can’t wait!
Nicole has always been an athlete, and her trips often involve outdoor activities. “As much as I love technology, I love to disconnect and travel solo,” she says. Traveling allows her to rest and recharge. When she comes back to work, she is filled with innovative ideas and so much energy. “Not to mention, these experiences make me a better person.”
Interested in a tech career at ADP?
Click here to search for your next move and visit Who We Hire.
Tech & Innovation Blog
Innovate with ADP: AfroTech Conference
Inclusion, Belonging, Voice of Our People
ADP was proud to sponsor AfroTech 2021, an innovative conference for leaders in technology and business. We sat down with six ADP associates who attended the event and learned about their career interests.
Innovate with ADP: AfroTech Conference
ADP was proud to sponsor AfroTech 2021, a multicultural tech conference in the United States, bringing together leaders in technology and business. This year, the panel included a series of in-person and digital events happening during the week of November 18. The attendees got the opportunity to exchange ideas and together built a strong black tech community.
AfroTech World: November 8 – 13
“It’s about connecting and learning from a diverse group of people,” Denise J., Principal Product Manager, shared her perspective.
Dawn D.R., Senior Tech PM
Dawn D.R., Senior Tech Project Manager, believes AfroTech is an opportunity for associates at ADP to think about the future of technology. “Being able to share these ideas and have discussions with others who may have crossed the Digital Divide is special. It’s a win-win. I got to learn from a technology community with cultural similarities and served as a representation for people of color,” Dawn said. “Representation is sometimes all that’s needed to encourage someone and show his/her interest in technology can be more than just a hobby.”
Denise R., Manager of Apps Develop (middle)
“Technology is a bridge to unity, and I was excited to be part of it. I wanted to see how others use their talents to build the bridge and find out how I can share my talents as we move toward continuous improvement and growth globally,” Denise R., Manager of Apps Develop, said. She believes AfroTech is about connection, inspiration, and motivation. “It was wonderful to be a part of the group. I was ready to contribute, exchange ideas, and build a community,” Denise said.
“For me, AfroTech is a place to find acceptance and foster new ideas,” Hafeez R., Director of UX Design, said. He looked forward to discussing technology trends that impacted and enhanced the people of color’s community.
Nathaniel T., Lead UX Designer
Nathaniel T., Lead UX Designer, believes AfroTech is a culmination of hard work, perseverance, and a true testament to the community’s determination. “I was so excited to attend a conference like this. While there are few of us represented in tech, it gave me hope and encouragement when we listen, learn, share, and pass the knowledge along for the folks up next,” Nathaniel said.
“To me, AfroTech was a new experience. It was my first time attending a professional conference. I was very excited to take this opportunity and find out what makes our industry so special,” Sean G., Associate Application Developer, said. He was curious to learn how difference and diversity help innovation in tech.
Who We Are: Belonging and Designing for People
“It’s exciting to hear ADP is a sponsor of AfroTech 2021! ADP proves every day that they are at the forefront of inclusion and diversity, encouraging associates to learn from each other and be who we are,” Nathaniel takes pride in working for ADP.
When it comes to team dynamics and mentorship, Hafeez is grateful for genuine relationships with his peers and teams. The environment motivates him to take part in conferences such as AfroTech. “I am grateful for ADP as I recently took part in a management accelerator program sponsored by McKinsey, in which I learned about business strategy, operations, and leadership training,” Hafeez used the opportunity to broaden his horizon.
We offer a variety of programs and conferences to our associates across the globe. “AfroTech is one of many different opportunities that helped me fuel my growth. The GPT program I joined taught me brand new concepts and ideas about the industry,” Sean said. He also told us he met some of his best colleagues through the program.
Sean G., Associate Application Developer
“I have had the opportunity to attend numerous industry conferences and take advantage of ADP’s tuition reimbursement program. In the past few years, I have achieved two professional certifications from Stanford University using this wonderful program,” Denise J. said. “I feel like I belong when I know my opinion counts. I have also built many valuable relationships throughout the years and created life-long friendships.”
Denise J., Principal Product Manager
At ADP, we value associates’ personal growth and encourage everyone to continue learning. “There is no room for stay comfortable or stagnant, especially in technology. I have access to different learning tools and opportunities to attend conferences like AfroTech, Grace Hopper, and many more! The possibilities are amazing,” Denise R. said.
In addition, Denise said, “I learned about different communication tools from a mentor, and I applied the insights at work and in life. I’m super grateful for the resources provided by ADP! I am looking forward to what’s to come in the future.”
Hafeez R., Director of UX Design
We want to make sure every associate feels supported and performs at their best. “I am always challenged. Growth is valuable to me. ADP, once you are deemed a Subject Matter Expert (SME) in an area or topic, you can seek and offer something completely new. In the beginning, you may feel uncomfortable, but there will always be support,” Dawn said. “There are a few categories in our timesheet that always make me feel supported because I know ADP values my learning and philanthropic growth – Training & Volunteering. Seeing these options listed has encouraged me to explore personal goals and aspirations.”
In the future, ADP will continue providing training and conference opportunities for associates. We encourage our technologists to ask questions and problem-solve, investing in personal growth and learning from each other.
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Learn more about what it’s like working for ADP here and our current openings.
Tech & Innovation Blog
Celebrate with ADP: National STEM/STEAM Day
Impact, Culture, How We Work
Consider volunteering, joining mentorship programs, and giving back to the communities!
Celebrate with ADP: National STEM/STEAM Day
November 8th is National STEM/STEAM Day! Celebrate with ADP and learn how we participated in various events, supporting technologists across the globe.
ADP associates at Grace Hopper Celebration
Supporting Young Talents & Women in Tech
ADP associates from New York and New Jersey volunteered at HackJA, a 24-hour hackathon with more than 100 high school students participating during the last school year. Our associates helped with students’ projects and reviewed the final submissions. The students were assigned challenges related to computer science and information technology. It was an excellent opportunity for young talents to participate in workshops and meet mentors from diverse backgrounds.
“I liked the different activities we could do. I had fun using VR and learning more about Python,” says Jane, a 9th-grade student. “I applied my previous knowledge at the event. I also learned how to be a group leader and split work up evenly,” says Kush, an 11th-grade student.
To encourage women in pursing tech careers, ADP sponsored three scholarships through the Women in Tech (WIT) organization, promoting STEM opportunities. We provide annual scholarships for female leaders who devote their careers to advancing technology.
“At ADP, we are passionate about nurturing and fostering female talents. We believe this is the key in moving our workplace forward,” says Melanie Shook, Vice President at ADP and executive sponsor for WIT on behalf of ADP. “These scholarship investments, through our partnership with WIT, are one way we look to advance technology talents forward.”
ADP sponsored three $5,000 WIT Campus scholarships this year, with ADP’s GPT business unit representatives attending the check award ceremony. “I am extremely thankful to have been chosen as one of the scholarship recipients by ADP and WIT Campus. This money allows me to continue my education at Georgia Gwinnett College and pay off my student loans. It also allows me to connect with many amazing women who were there to support me,” says Briana Hickson, one of the ADP Scholarship winners. Watch the full award recognition video here.
ADP continues sponsoring conferences such as the Grace Hopper Celebration by AnitaB.org and virtual AfroTech Conference happening the week of November 8th, supporting the future generation of technologists.
AfroTech Conference Sponsored by ADP
Get Inspired: Mentorship Program & The Future
We encourage our associates to keep learning and discovering. ADP started the Inspire Business Resource Group, a community mission to imagine, question, and empower. The global group has more than 3,000 associates from 30 countries who actively develop innovative ideas in conversations. The group hosts creative activities such as speaker series, inspired challenges, and innovative discussions. New members are always welcome!
ADP launched the Women in Technology Leadership (WiTL) mentoring program in 2020, providing development opportunities for women technologists. The program pairs Global Product & Tech (GPT) women from different leadership levels with three goals in mind. One goal is to advance diversity and inclusion. Another goal is to increase, retain, and develop top, diverse talents. The third goal is to create a talent pipeline for future leadership roles.
“The program provided a fantastic opportunity for women in leadership to connect and share their experiences. I found it rewarding and inspiring,” one attendee shared. “I gained valuable insights on how I handle challenges in my job. The experience brings confidence and broadens my network.”
Initiatives such as WiTL have helped ADP earn recognition from different organizations. We are named the 2020 and 2021 Top Companies for Women Technologists Winner in the Large Technical Workforce category from AnitaB.org. Readers of Woman Engineer Magazine chose ADP as one of the Top 50 US companies they would like to work for and believe it provides a positive working environment for women engineers.
Communities: Giving Back
It is about sharing knowledge and giving back to our communities. ADP’s UX team from Pasadena provided mentorship and training support to STEAM:CODERS, a California-based non-profit organization with a mission to inspire underrepresented students and their families through STEAM. Our associates invited the participants to our office before the pandemic and provided user experience research and design training as a part of the Design Thinking course.
NJIT Women Hackathon
During the pandemic, ADP sponsored a first all-female 48-hour hackathon in partnership with Major League Hacking, a 24-hour hackathon with New Jersey Institute of Technology Girl Hacks, and a national non-profit organization, Girls Who Code, supporting girls and women in the tech community.
Celebrate National STEM Day with us! Consider volunteering, joining mentorship programs, and giving back to the communities.
Don’t forget to subscribe to our tech blog! #ADPTech
Learn more about what it’s like working for ADP here and our current openings.
Tech & Innovation Blog
Great Stories: From LEGO® Bricks to Data
Senior Leaders, Innovation, How We Work
ADP is in the enviable position to use our data to continue to make impactful and meaningful changes across organizations.
Great Stories: From LEGO® Bricks to Data
By Jack Berkowitz, Chief Data Officer, ADP
My kids loved LEGO® bricks when they were growing up. They’d play for hours separating the pieces to get the right sizes, analyzing what they had, and then putting them together to build massive cities. I’d watch as they’d use the structures to create stories about different places and events that would happen in the cities they built. It was exciting to see. They knew that individually, each LEGO® was important. They weren’t interesting when looked at as individual pieces. It wasn’t until the pieces were all together that they shined and were able to work together to tell a great story.
As ADP’s Chief Data Officer, I lead data and analytics management in partnership with service, product, and sales operations leaders. In my role, I have a unique lens into how we manage data across our products. ADP has the most comprehensive workforce data anywhere, and we’re able to take that data and help our clients create the stories they need to make real-time and long-term decisions.
Individually, like a single LEGO® piece, each element of data by itself means almost nothing. However, when it’s constructed together, we’re able to build stories, gain insights, take action and make informed decisions. With the right data, insights, and vision, we’re accelerating the use of data as an asset to help our clients.
When we look at our data strategy, we can break it down into four areas for our clients:
- Protect My Data: With a focus on data security and governance, we think like owners and can applaud how we protect our clients’ data. Our clients respect our processes and trust us to keep their sensitive information private. With a culture rooted in integrity, we are all privacy and data evangelists.
- Answer My Questions: ADP’s unmatched data platforms and analytics help clients make better decisions about their people. The amount of data across ADP’s platforms is astronomical. We serve data in meaningful ways for immediate evaluation, understanding, and action. For clients using ADP Human Capital Management (HCM) platforms with capabilities through ADP DataCloud, analytics help our clients explore data, get insights and benchmarks against which to compare themselves in a truly differentiated way. Without insights, it’s just raw data. ADP is committed to helping businesses take reliable insights from the right workforce data in a way they can understand and take action.
- Improve My Experience: Through our data transformation and initiatives, we are paving the way our data is used to proactively respond to client needs, solve problems that keep them up at night and help our clients make real-time decisions. We’re working on developing innovative products that use our workforce data to help organizations gain reliable insights to invoke action and achieve results. However, it’s beyond products. We continue to innovate and strategically centralize client data from their first through current interaction into one system, resulting in a better client experience.
- Guide My Future: We will expand our solutions to help shape business decisions and investments. We can identify new ways for businesses to tap into the massive ADP data set, including new use cases and user personas. For example, geographic income data may provide insights to help companies figure out where to build their next location, or this data could enrich valuation models for the investment community. The potential is endless, especially built with our commitment to data privacy at the foundation.
We’re continuously proving ADP is the undisputed leader in data. With solutions such as our award-winning ADP DataCloud, we can take our information and offer clients something no one else can. Recently, our ADP DataCloud Diversity, Equity and Inclusion dashboards won the Top HR Product from Human Resource Executive, marking the seventh consecutive year ADP earned this award. ADP DataCloud was additionally a recipient of the AI Breakthrough Awards, Data Breakthrough Awards, and Stratus Awards for Cloud Computing, owing to its powerful capabilities and latest enhancements.
The past 20 months have changed the world of work, and people’s data has never been as important as it is now. Businesses of all sizes across every industry are using (and asking for) people data at rates we’ve never seen before. There’s a massive global shift in hiring needs, patterns, and retention. Businesses need information about industry trends and their ability to match or exceed where the global workforce is shifting. Real-time people data is what drives clients’ decisions, product innovation, and the global economy. ADP is in the enviable position to use our data to continue to make impactful and meaningful changes across organizations.
I’ve never been more excited to work in this space than I am at this moment. I’m enthusiastic and focused on where we’re headed. It’s about taking data to tell a story, and it’s exciting. It’s not unlike the excitement my kids experienced when I brought them years ago to LEGOLAND® (both in California and the U.K.), where creations they made in their imaginations came to life in real-time.
Interested in a tech career at ADP?
Click here to search for your next move and visit Who We Hire.
Tech & Innovation Blog
How ADP is Using Data to Make Our Clients—And Ourselves—More Diverse, Equitable, and Inclusive
Senior Leaders, Innovation, Future of Work
ADP has a culture where you can raise your hand and suggest something new no matter your role or background.
How ADP is Using Data to Make Our Clients—And Ourselves—More Diverse, Equitable, and Inclusive
By Giselle Mota, Principal, Future of Work
With more than 900,000 clients around the globe, we at ADP often notice shifts in the working world relatively early on—and that was certainly the case with the increase in corporate attention toward diversity, equity, and inclusion. To help our clients and internal teams track DEI, we launched the DEI Dashboard in December 2020, which offers insights and actionable recommendations to form more substantial teams.
Giselle speaking on TED Talk.
Getting Started: Data-driven insights
The ADP team tackles the DEI with a natural approach from a metrics point of view; we have always been a data-driven organization. By gathering time and attendance information, we can give clients helpful insights into things like managing overtime costs so they can make operational decisions. Our human resources platforms contain a wealth of demographics, including team members’ races, ethnicities, genders, ages, and disability statuses. What’s more is we help our clients understand the employee experience throughout their entire lifecycle, from interviewing, onboarding, leadership development to compensation and retirement.
Going Deeper: A push for accountability
Our team added filtering options that allow clients to get more granular with their newfound insights. One such resource is our new Candidate Relevancy app, which uses Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) to help recruiters organize the thousands of résumés they receive. This tool has become critical for helping mitigate unconscious biases. We train the model to eliminate discrimination by focusing only on the skills and competencies needed for the roles. At the same time, we’ve made sure all hiring managers have access to make human decisions on pursuing candidates. The same is true with our AI-driven Chatbots that provide pre-screening functions for recruiters.
Giselle M.
Looking Inward: ADP’s journey
Our team recognized the DEI Dashboard project as transformative for both our clients and for ourselves. Like many organizations, we have long championed diversity, equity, and inclusion. But we knew there was room for a renewed and enhanced approach—and it had to begin with the people creating the DEI Dashboard.
While our Data Science team took the lead on the initial build of the platform, we brought in experts from each of our products to help us understand how we could reimagine through a DEI lens. Our goal was to expand on EEOC requirements and consider anything relevant to our clients and their employees, creating more equity across the recruiting space.
With our goals in mind, the insights we gathered from the DEI Dashboard on ADP have led to several new initiatives and processes, including surveys, mentorship, leadership development programs for underrepresented groups, and the job auditing process for discriminatory languages. Not only did we hire recruiters who specialize in finding diverse talents, but we also focused on disability inclusion, from raising standards for vendor products to rebuilding product features. ADP is committed to achieving a fully accessible user experience across our products.
What’s Next: The inclusive future of work
Giselle M.
We have continued to evolve the DEI Dashboard since it launched, and a long roadmap still lies ahead. One upcoming project is benchmarking—leveraging the unparalleled scale of ADP’s data and insights to help our clients understand how they stack up against other companies in their demographics.
My colleagues and I continue to ask questions, regularly creating new projects for ourselves. For example: Should remote and hybrid workers be paid differently apart from their in-office counterparts? How can we move beyond pay equity to true financial inclusion by giving employees the guidance they need to build wealth? We should have a lot to keep us busy!
With global and social changes happening during the last year and a half, I have seen our team move quickly and respond with solutions. ADP has a culture where you can raise your hand and suggest something new no matter your role or background. My Future of Work teammates and I are living proofs. With this mindset and institutional support in place, I believe we lead the way to a more inclusive future of work.
Interested in a tech career at ADP?
Click here to search for your next move and visit Who We Hire.
Tech & Innovation Blog
Dr. Raji, Senior Director of Data Science, creates impact with data automation and transformation
Women in STEM, Voice of Our People, Innovation
Dr. Raji, one of the pioneers bringing AI/ML to Pi-Payroll innovation products at ADP, shares her career journey and the different automated processes her team creates.
Dr. Raji, Senior Director of Data Science
Dr. Raji came from a lower-middle-class family in which both of her parents did not receive high school diplomas. “I saw their struggles, and as a girl growing up, I also faced different social pressures. Then I soon realized my love for math at school.” As she says: “That was when I made the connection in my mind, and I believed a STEM career could make a difference.”
From Bioinformatics to Automotive Industry
Before joining ADP, Dr. Raji has worked in various industries, including three years in the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, where she worked on H1N1 Vaccine strain selection models. Her team took serology, sequence, protein structure, and phylogenetic data; they compared whether the current vaccine strain covered the virus’s dominant circulating strain. Dr. Raji took a break from Bioinformatics and later joined a Cox Automotive company called Manheim to help roll out OVE, a product providing car recommendations for online users. She also worked at a healthcare fraud prevention company called Cotiviti that focused on claim overpayment, fraud predictions, and prevention.
“When I first came to ADP, I was surprised to see the amount of data. We can produce so many innovative products from these. Every data scientist would love to work for ADP,” she says. “The second thing that surprised me was the freedom I got. The amount of support I got from the leadership teams was terrific. I got to be myself at work, knowing they welcomed innovative ideas.”
Dr. Raji and her family
Coming to ADP
When Dr. Raji joined ADP a few years ago, the company didn’t have many data scientists. She built a team of full-stack Automation Intelligence Machine Learning (AI/ML) technologists from scratch. “We call ourselves PiBrain, and we solve use cases across different business units through an advanced state of innovative AI/ML products and solutions,” she says. “I built three notable products through Digital Transformation, using AI/ML algorithms and APIs.”
“The first product involved automating digital implementation for some of our products, which eliminated manual processes and increased our net promoter scores, gave a better user experience, and increased client satisfaction,” she says. This process gave her team a more accurate data conversion process and saved costs for the clients. Dr. Raji introduced another automated compliance checkup product for pay statements, which eliminated the laborious process of scanning pay statements one by one and automating the process. The last project involved form digitization with a feedback loop that continuously learns from overrides.
Deep Learning
Dr. Raji’s team focuses on several key areas in their current work. The first product is Deep Learning, an authentication stack that identifies, extracts, and connects the documents. Another one is a Natural Language Processing stack that demonstrates transformation translation.
Her team helped build API services that take company handbooks as inputs. They used Natural Language Understanding models and elucidated answers for questions such as “What holidays are offered?” and “What is the holiday pay for full-time/temporary employees?” The responses were automatically sent back to implementation systems as callbacks to fill out the guided interview process.
Dr. Raji and her team at the Southern Data Science Conference
Giving Back to Community
Dr. Raji and her team attended last year’s GPT Connect and gave three presentations. The first presentation was open-source tools for AI/ML. Another one was Computer Vision and Deep Learning for naïve to advanced data extraction. “We also showed our Associates how to interpret Vendor Language and map those in ADP constructs,” she says.
“My team and I looked for outside opportunities to create an impact. We attended the Southern Data Science Conference in 2019, where we used data to predict human trafficking.” Her team successfully visualized and built models to predict trafficking. They identified “hubs,” where children were trafficked to and who trafficked them. An FBI director attended the presentation ceremony and found Intel helpful in targeting criminals. “The project gave me satisfaction because we worked for a cause. We wanted to make sure our knowledge continues to help others and give back to the communities,” Dr. Raji says.
One STEM Education at Innovation Academy
“People say it could be engineering, science, or math. But to me, STEM is a combination of all! It is an application of each field coming together to solve a business problem,” Dr. Raji says. She believes STEM is an applied field where interdisciplinary work is valued.
This is especially important in Dr. Raji’s involvement with Innovation Academy, a STEM school ADP sponsored in Alpharetta. “The goal is One Stem Education. I was one of the ambassadors who helped set up the syllabi and influenced the type of education students received,” she says. Dr. Raji’s love for children and STEM made this a perfect opportunity for her to have conversations about STEM opportunities. She is looking forward to planning and creating lab spaces for more talents who are interested.
Dr. Raji is also a painter. This is her work: Serene morning sunrise at St. Simon Island.
Best Advice
“We talked a lot about my background and where I came from. My life is a lesson itself. If you have a dream, don’t give up,” she says. Dr. Raji believes the secret of life is to fall seven times and get up on the eighth. For those pursuing data science, she recommends thinking outside the box and approaching problems from different perspectives. “Keep in mind being a data scientist means spending substantial time in data prep, data cleaning, deployment, and data quality checking. Patience is critical as each of the tasks is essential in building a complete model,” she says. “There will be challenges and disappointments, but don’t lose faith. Keep learning and chase your dreams.”
Dr. Raji is looking forward to inspiring more people and attracting more talents to ADP. To her, #ADPTech is innovative, supportive, and welcoming. Her team wants to mentor more women technologists and have more of them in leadership positions!
Interested in a tech career at ADP?
Click here to search for your next move and visit Who We Hire.
Tech & Innovation Blog
GPT’s Jesse W. Won Built In’s Inaugural Tech Innovation Award
Lifion, Innovation, Award
Jesse joined ADP just over a year ago, and his work on the Engineering Reliability (EREL) team for Lifion had already created an impact. He shared insights on how ADP is pursuing new technologies to benefit the world around us.
GPT’s Jesse W. Won Built In’s Inaugural Tech Innovation Award
Jesse W., the Senior Director System Reliability Management, recently won Built In’s Inaugural Tech Innovation Award, honoring visionaries in tech space and making significant contributions to the world of tech.
Jesse helped created a Global Reliability Operating Model that gives developers clearer direction, more agency, and improved job satisfaction while allowing them to deliver more innovative codes to customers faster and with fewer mistakes. His contribution to ADP represents a new culture of ownership-driven outcomes rooted in document-driven engineering, self-service onboarding, and human-centered designing.
Jesse focused on his team, “I want to give credits to the teams we work with. Without them, we would not be able to execute this larger strategy.” He worked with engineering leaders from product-minded approaches to backend engineering, connecting technology capabilities to business goals. Together, they build faster and safer software.
What are some fun facts about you?
I am an innovation leader, a prop plane pilot-in-training, and a vintage Japanese watch collector.
Could you tell us about the Engineering Reliability (EREL) team?
The EREL team is a platform engineering group that builds tools and infrastructure with a vision to help enable an outstanding developer experience at Lifion. It offers capabilities for feature teams to manage their security and develop their cloud-native infrastructure. My team works with them to provide self-service incident and change management.
A vital part of this success is the Global Reliability Operating Model (GROM), a holistic approach to building complex software in the cloud. GROM has allowed software teams to work autonomously, pushing collaboration to the max and minimizing complexity within Lifion’s systems. EREL is constantly building upon its systems, focused on feedback to understand what tools and pipelines can evolve to improve the user experience.
What words would you use to describe engineers at work?
Simplify, Innovate and Grow. EREL actively measures its impact based on real data available to them within the systems. Utilizing real-time data makes this possible and provides a creative space for all engineers at work.
Jesse (right) with his family
What advice do you have for those with a focus on innovation?
Separate the ideation and inspiration from the execution allows your leadership and individual contributors to devote their full intellectual capacity towards solving problems in the most innovative way.
Don’t limit yourself to what you think is possible. Look out three, four, five, or even twenty steps ahead of what can be done right now, then figure out the north start you need and inspire your teams to meet the larger business goals.
Congratulations, Jesse and the EREL team!
Learn more about working at Lifion and make sure to subscribe to our blog!
Tech & Innovation Blog
Putting Technology—and Technologists—First: Digital Transformation at ADP
What We Do, Why ADP, Future of Work
We strive for ADP’s products and services to be universally recognized, easy to use, and accessible anywhere.
Putting Technology—and Technologists—First: Digital Transformation at ADP
Urvashi Tyagi, Chief Technology Officer
ADP has always been more than a payroll company: In addition to payroll software, we also provide thousands of clients worldwide with tools that help them manage HR, benefits, time, recruiting—everything “from hire to retire,” as we say. But while ADP always leveraged technology to do our business, we have historically been a services company. Over the last several years, we’ve genuinely transformed into a technology-first, a products-first organization focused on excellent service.
For ADP, digital transformation is about serving both our clients and our internal associates. To continuously drive value for our clients, we develop the best possible tools. And to create the best possible tools, we need to provide a superior experience for our developers.
Of course, digital transformation is not a new idea at ADP. Modernizing tools and products is a business necessity for any company that wants to stay competitive. But digital transformations often happen piecemeal and in silos—and they often fail to meet their expected results. That’s why ADP embraces a holistic, enterprise-wide approach that relies on collaboration across business units and focuses on cloud technology.
Unifying Cloud Strategy
Cloud technology is vital to our future. It allows us to offer higher resilience, improved security, stability for our applications, and an improved customer experience on the client side. On the enterprise side, cloud technology allows us to access a global infrastructure, simplify our application architecture, and innovate faster, significantly reducing our time to market. So prioritizing cloud strategy is a given—but how do we determine what that strategy should be?
We strive for ADP’s products and services to be universally recognized, easy to use, and accessible anywhere. We’ve had cloud-native applications before, but previously, our developers had to make tradeoffs. That’s one of the aspects of the cloud—you have a lot of options. But that also means the cloud experience can look very different from one developer to another.
To help give our clients a seamless experience of our many products, we want everything to look and feel familiar. That means the way we modernize our technology stack and re-architect products need to be consistent as well, and that’s where a unified cloud strategy comes into play.
When I came on board in 2019, we had different cloud strategies across business units with individual DevOps teams building bespoke tooling for their developers. We decided we needed more product consistency and closer alignment on our principles of cloud strategy, for example, in terms of multi-cloud vs. hybrid cloud. The way we did that was to put our best engineers in the driver’s seat.
Reducing Silos, Aligning Internally
There’s a quote I love from Dan Lyons, the author of Disrupted. He says, “If you want to be a technology company, put the technologists in charge.” That’s what we did to streamline our cloud-based DevOps processes. Technical leads from various business units came together to create a vision and build strategic and technical alignment so we could begin to consolidate. Instead of having 14 independent CI/CDs, we are on a path to two.
We took a similar approach to establish our DevSecOps tooling. In the non-Agile world, there’s a developer, a security specialist, and a System Reliability Engineer (SRE) managing the operations of running your product. With the Agile model, the developer holds all three roles because the operations engineer and the security specialist’s work is now digitized. Most tech companies use DevOps and DevSecOps as a core strategy because it allows the developer to build, secure, and deploy the code and own it—from the dev box into production. This approach leads to better quality and faster delivery.
When we began driving the change to establish enterprise-wide DevSecOps, the chief architect on my team worked with a lead developer from each of our business units, including the Global Security Office. They met weekly, sometimes daily. Each of those groups had its own DevSecOps processes already, but they came up with a unified approach that made sense. The chief architect presented a proposal to start with, and the conversation continued from there. We ended up with what we call an application security workbench. When a developer checks their code into a branch, this tool automatically runs and lets the developer see any security issues in their code and gives them guidance on how to fix them. Further integration of the tool into the Integrated Development Environment (IDE) allows developers to see security issues as they write code and address them in real-time.
Another way we collaborate internally is code sharing across the enterprise. So if you’re building an enterprise product, anybody within the company can look at your code and make changes. That significantly helps with minimizing silos, because now when a team wants to build a new capability, they make it for the whole enterprise. So if you work on enterprise, essentially, the entire company uses what you’ve created in all our products.
Continuously Driving Value with NextGen Products
When developers have an aligned approach to using NextGen tools and technology, they’re empowered to create NextGen products. To that end, our future products will all be cloud-native and embedded with AI and touchless technology. And we’ve already begun adapting some of our current-gen products to be touchless. For example, early in the pandemic, we worked quickly to make our clock-in systems touchless with facial recognition and voice commands.
We know that our business users spend 20–30% of their time looking for information, so we’re working on ways to optimize data analysis. For example, our ADP DataCloud team is a powerhouse for employee-related data. We’ve released several services focused on autonomous analytics in the last year, converting the tremendous amount of data we have into usable insights about how people work.
Another big focus for us is real-time applications, particularly real-time payroll. The acceleration of the gig economy means an increasing demand for payments that can be made instantly at the end of a shift, so creating a real-time payment ecosystem is critical. We’re also looking at blockchain for ID applications.
Ongoing Change, Ongoing Opportunities
There is never really an end to digital transformation. Once you start the work, you have to keep going. To promote continued collaboration and discourage silos, we encourage daily communication between teams, functions, and business units. We know it takes time to absorb and implement change, so we also share information repeatedly and in multiple ways.
At ADP, we recognize that change, like collaboration, is a team effort. When we present our enterprise-wide proposals, we never attach names because our software strategy, design, and development do not belong to any individual. We build off one another’s ideas, allowing us to grow and innovate as a cohesive company.
We’re on a transformation journey and committed to a holistic strategy, which means we are incrementally modernizing. As we do that, we’ll also deliver new capabilities to our clients as we re-architect existing products and update some of our highest-revenue-generating products for the cloud—as well as create new applications from scratch. The possibilities are endless!
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Tech & Innovation Blog
Innovating Retirement: How ADP Uses Machine Learning to Plan for the Future
How We Work, Culture, Team Collaboration
At ADP, people don’t have to be a leader by title. If there is an idea, and you can think big and innovate, that’s all you need.
Innovating Retirement: How ADP Uses Machine Learning to Plan for the Future
As one of the country’s leading HR technology companies, ADP uses its unmatched data in exciting and new ways. We had an opportunity to catch up with two people critical in recognizing the opportunity to innovate and create a machine learning product for Retirement Services.
Hemlata R., Director of Product Development, oversees the entire product development process. In addition to managing scrum masters, architects, developers, and tech leads, she also heads web development, mobile development, and the machine learning strategy for the entire Retirement Services team.
Sanjay V.R. is the Lead Application Developer and oversees the machine learning practice within Retirement Services.
We asked them how their small team creates cutting-edge technology to build data-driven solutions for their customers, and here’s what they said:
First, let’s hear a bit of what brought you to ADP.
Sanjay V.R.
Sanjay: I started at ADP as an intern while I was attending school in upstate New York. Once I completed my internship, I actually had multiple offers to join other companies. I chose to stay at ADP because getting good opportunities is one of the most challenging obstacles in today’s job market, and at ADP, if you put in the work, getting rewarded is the easiest thing.
Hemlata has been my director for 80% of my career, and I’ve been able to turn to her if I have an idea or if I want to pick up a new role or responsibility. She’s always encouraged me. My senior leaders make sure to recognize me for my hard work. I’ve been promoted three times in my three years at Retirement Services, and that speaks volumes.
Hemlata: I also had several offers when I was looking for a change after my last job. I was attracted to ADP because I’d heard that it was moving toward being more of a technology company that valued innovation—and that its leaders prioritized diversity and inclusion. I’ve seen first-hand that you don’t have to have an impressive title to be a leader here. You can be a leader at any level. You can innovate at any level, and ADP supports and invests on that front. I’m so happy and thrilled that everything I had heard about ADP turned out to be more than true.
Speaking of innovation, tell us about the Retirement Services product you built.
Sanjay: People Like You is a new feature based on machine learning algorithms; it helps participants better prepare for their retirement by offering benchmarks on how people similar to them are planning their retirements. For example, we can show you what percentage of your coworkers are contributing to their 401(k)s and how much of their income they’re contributing. Maybe you contribute 5%, and when you see that your peers contribute 8%, you have the confidence to invest more.
In the retirement industry, advisors usually group people by age or salary and then start giving advice. We wanted to answer the question better and offer advice based on what others in similar socioeconomic situations are actually doing.
Hemlata: ADP pays one out of six Americans; the amount of data we possess is unparalleled. When I joined the company, we discovered that many of our clients’ employees do not contribute to 401(k)s. Since we work for Retirement Services, we saw this as a problem. People often look at their peers and follow them, so we asked ourselves how our data could help create a solution.
How did you go about building People Like You?
Hemlata: We tried to combine the mind and the machine by leveraging our experts’ expertise at ADP and machine learning.
Sanjay: We have folks at ADP who have over 20 and 30 years of experience in Human Resources and Retirement Services. As much as data is our strength, our people and their expertise are equally valuable. So first, we talked extensively with our internal stakeholders since they already know the ins and outs of the industry intimately. Then we conducted market research to understand people’s motivations and concerns better about retirement investing.
After that, we went back to our data sets—everything we have from our payroll and retirement resources—and we started looking at this socioeconomic information to see any relevance between multiple parameters. For example, does age or compensation influence your retirement decisions? What if you’re married, single, or have kids? Based on our internal and external research, we were able to identify somewhere around 30 factors that make an impact; we then narrowed those factors based on the extent of their influence on an individual’s decision. Once we started analyzing that data and built models to create the personas, we realized that we had something worth integrating with our existing retirement products.
When we began this project, it started on a small scale. It was just one other data scientist and me. The two of us created the machine learning part of it, but as we built specific pieces of code for the APIs, we pulled in engineers as we needed them.
Were there any complications you had to work through?
Hemlata R.
Hemlata: The tricky part for me was to make sure that we were compliant with all the security olicies. People trust ADP. It’s our brand. That’s why they come to us for payroll, compliance, workforce management, legal, and security solutions. ADP knows what to do and takes excellent care of its customers, and we take this to heart and always obtain the consent of our clients and employees before we include their data. We’re extremely careful to keep all the data anonymous and not look into any specific client or individual employee data.
Sanjay: Yes, ADP is very sensitive toward privacy laws, so we were very specific about reading only as much data as people were comfortable with. One of the biggest advantages we had was that we partnered with ADP’s DataCloud team. They acted like a data custodian in the project and were responsible for making the data anonymous. They also made it possible to identify an employee—only with their consent—if I needed to access that data to connect specific pieces of information.
I’m a millennial, and I’m one of those people who always clicks on “Do Not Sell My Info” on websites. So, I’m particular about my data, and I think I always had that in the back of my mind. DataCloud made my job easy in that regard.
How do you think machine learning will affect your future work?
Hemlata: We are looking at leveraging this concept of combining the mind and the machine on other aspects of our business, such as compliance processes. As of now, we have used descriptive and prescriptive analytics. Next, we are planning to use predictive analytics to help our clients predict the upcoming required actions. ADP and our clients can solve any predicted problems upfront. We’re always trying to see how we can take our ideas and solutions to the next level.
Sanjay: This is the beginning of an entirely new way of thinking about improving our clients’ experience. We want to look beyond traditional solutions to ensure our clients and their employees feel empowered by our products. ADP also has a general excitement to identify pain points to be resolved and processes we can enhance using machine learning.
Speaking of your customers, do you see any results from People Like You? Are more people signing up to contribute to their 401(k)s?
Hemlata: The results are way better than what we expected. Employee contributions and new enrollments have definitely increased. We also saw this product gain so much attention internally within ADP that several other teams contacted us to see how they could leverage similar solutions within their departments. It’s been fascinating to see the outcomes and the interest from all the other teams.
Sanjay: It’s funny because a bunch of my peers was like, “Oh, I don’t really need a 401(k). I’m too young for that.” Then, two or three months after we released People Like You, someone remarked during lunch, “Hey, did you know that I just signed up for my 401(k)?” Then others joined in—four people also signed up. It’s just a wonderful experience when you hear people say your solution impacts their lives.
After we launched, Don Weinstein pinged me on Webex Teams and said what a great job I’d done and that he was looking forward to what I’d build next. It was a total fanboy moment for me.
Hemlata: This goes to show you what I was saying earlier. At ADP, people don’t have to be a leader by title. If there is an idea, and you can think big and innovate, that’s all you need. Once you have that, you can take it to any level, and people will be so open to talk to you, encourage you, and help support any of these thoughts. It’s really amazing to see that!
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Tech & Innovation Blog
CI/CD at ADP: Going Global with GitOps
Engineering, Innovation, What We Do
Leo Meirelles first worked at ADP for more than six years as a lead technical analyst and senior software programmer. Then he left for stints at Google and The New York Times, where he had the opportunity to learn new environments, improve his knowledge, and refresh his tech stack—all benefits he brought with him when he returned to ADP in 2016. Below, Leo discusses the continuous integration and development (CI/CD) process he implemented with his team and the company-wide plans for adopting it.
As we globalize and streamline GitOps, we are laying the foundation for our future.
CI/CD at ADP: Going Global with GitOps
By Leo Meirelles, Principal Software Engineer and Principal Architect
As a principal software engineer and principal architect at ADP, I work on multiple projects and provide support as needed. Since ADP has a lot of products, one of our biggest challenges is streamlining our processes. Our engineers work on payroll systems, retirement services, and pension services, to name some, for both small and large companies—and that’s just in the United States. Each country we support has different portfolio options for companies that integrate ADP products. Since we continue to evolve our technology, we’re never short on opportunities.
I worked at ADP for close to seven years the first time. When I returned in 2016, I got involved with a great project to aggregate multi-country payroll; we integrated with in-country providers, with internationalization (i18n) and accessibility (a11y) support. I’d spent a few years at The New York Times and then eighteen months at Google, and I was excited to bring that skillset back to ADP. At ADP, I’d always liked the people I worked alongside, and with ADP’s pivot to a technology-first company, I knew I could have a real impact here. In particular, I had the opportunity to implement continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD), first with one group, then two, and now we’re looking at global implementation throughout the company.
CI/CD combines continuous integration and delivery practices, relying on automation to guarantee that code changes are efficient and that application deployments are reliable. With the project I was initially working on, we had teams in multiple countries and multiple time zones, and when you have such a large amount of people spread out like that, you need to stay efficient.
Before this project, to deploy in a QA environment, we needed a UI Development Lead and a Backend Development Lead to approve a deployment release request since they were the most likely to be aware of any issues that could hinder QA work. They had to give the green light and say, “Hey, this code is good to go.” But when you have 30 developers, things get more complicated since you have to merge multiple pull requests. On top of that, we have eight microservices in the backend and three micro frontends—the login, the old application, and the new application, because we’re migrating a few things toward a new Angular version. This level of complexity underscores why ADP needed a global, automated solution that can work for everyone—and why we started the CI/CD implementation via our GitOps project.
GitOps is an evolution of infrastructure as code, where you build the whole environment from a configuration/definition file, and it stays together with the application source code. Later, it can be run by machines and build new environments without human intervention. The idea of GitOps is to use tools that you already use every day, which makes things easier since you don’t have to add new tools to your stack or change how you get work done. Instead of emailing, messaging, or calling someone to say, “Hey, can you deploy that version for me?” now you do that using Bitbucket and make a pull request, make a commit, and merge your code. After that, everything else happens automatically behind the scenes, and you can skip trying to find people for approvals. Because both the infrastructure and your code go into Bitbucket—in fact, the whole process for a new release—we’re able to have a new deployment in 10 minutes for the local environment using GitOps once the code review is finished, approved, and merged. From that point onward, QA owns the release management for their environment; they control what goes into the environment without involving DevOps and managers, giving more autonomy for the team to manage releases.
We knew that having GitOps would make life easier for DevOps and allow them to focus on other things, like maintaining production and improving monitoring and availability. Also, engineers deserved to oversee their code. But we had to figure out the best way to introduce the new process. So, we started slowly to minimize disruptions with the current software development process and give people time to adjust to a new way of doing things.
We had to get developers over the fear of breaking something. Everybody wanted to be either first or last. If they were first, they wouldn’t have to merge their code, and if they were last, they could make sure everything was working before adding theirs. Until we got into a rhythm, it was a stressful time. But once the teams started adopting the new process, things changed dramatically in a positive way. Instead of making considerable changes in the last few days of a sprint, we slowly transitioned to making several small changes every day. And if something didn’t work, it was a straightforward process to revert changes. Since everything is on Bitbucket, we can see the previous versions, making the long-term management much easier.
I talk to team members often, and we’re in a sweet spot right now. What really helped adoption was implementing a process when everyone was ready and open to trying a new process. I prefer to lead by example rather than trying to force people to do something. But as time passed, we built trust when it became obvious the new system worked. Now people have the flexibility to start working in whatever time zone they’re in and look at our online chats to see what’s changed since they last looked. We even have a bot that judges the quality of a pull request. We have twenty to thirty deployments in our development environment every day, and no one even notices. And if we need to make a production fix, we can do it in 20 minutes using GitOps and our other automation tools.
I’m looking forward to the full adoption of GitOps globally. We have a lot of products on a lot of platforms, so that will take time. But there are a lot of exciting things happening right now at ADP. We’re an evolving tech company and developing a cohesive development engineering team. Since I’ve been back, I’ve seen the environment grow stronger. We communicate and share between teams, do a lot of cross-team collaboration, and help drive innovation and ideas through events like global hackathons. As we globalize and streamline GitOps, we are laying the foundation for our future.
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