Anisha Vaswani, IT and social impact leader to watch
Anisha Vaswani has been a rising star since the day she started at Box in June of 2015. After almost five years serving as VP of Enterprise Systems Anisha was recently promoted to the role of Corporate CIO at Box. Throughout her Box journey, Anisha has been proactive about partnering with Box.org and weaving social impact into her leadership approach and personal development. It's common to see Anisha in the community supporting rising women leaders and the nonprofits enabling them.
In 2019, Anisha spent 4 months partnering with Rippleworks to help Tides redraft their IT strategy and had an awesome time doing it. “It was awesome. It’s rare that you get to use your IT skills to help a nonprofit,” shares Anisha Vaswani,
Rippleworks initially reached out to Anisha through LinkedIn. She thought the opportunity sounded interesting but wasn’t sure how legitimate it was. Fortunately, Rippleworks had the forethought to ask a previous colleague reach out to Anisha as well and share his glowing experience. She took the call and was so glad she did. Anisha was matched with Tides to help them build out their IT strategy over the course of 3-4 months. To ensure the project was as easy to engage with as possible, she was partnered with an incredible program manager from Rippleworks, Lindsay Blodgett, who Anisha said was fantastic at managing scope, logistics, deliverables, and chasing down people and getting commitments. This was a huge plus for her as the project required a lot of time but Anisha noted that Lindsay was "fabulous in structuring the engagement so that is was a productive use of my time and kept the entire project team on track."
To kick off the project, Anisha worked with Tides to build a framework for assessing the organization and analyzing the gaps around current processes to figure out what needed to be solved before Tides invests in new systems. Then, they mapped out the entire organization, what the different functions do, and how well they feel they are supported from a systems and process perspective to build a heat map. With all of this information, they proposed a set of investments in IT with the understanding that they are a nonprofit and gave them an idea of how to sequence the investments. Anisha was really impressed with how much complexity they deal with for such a lean organization and inspired by the way that everyone was so focused on doing good in the world.
One of her favorite parts of the engagements was being able to use her day job skills to help an organizations, while also incorporating additional skills, such as being a consultant and trusted advisor in a new organization and having longer lasting impact rather than a one-time transactional one. Anisha loved working with the entire Tides team and wanted to recognize the executive team Kriss Deiglmeier (CEO of Tides), Judy Hill (CFO of Tides), and Jonathan Mergy (Head of IT at Tides) for partnering with her and being patient with all of her questions as she came up to speed on their org.
When the engagement came to an end, Anisha reflected that she would have been happy to keep working with Tides but also appreciated that each engagement is so thoughtfully set up with clear deliverables and timing. Should the opportunity come up again, Anisha says she would jump at the chance to work with Rippleworks and another nonprofit again.
We at Box.org appreciate leaders that weave social impact into their day to day agenda and broader career journey. We're excited to partner with Anisha and here teams on even bigger and more impactful initiative this year and beyond.
Box.org, an embedded social enterprise at Box Inc, is proud to donate Box and offer digital capacity building support at www.box.org. We also offer free coaching on Box through our Box.org Coaching Corps program.
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