Gülsen Arıcı İskender

Service Delivery Director

Turkey

Gülsen Arıcı lives in Istanbul, Turkey and she has been working at NTT DATA Business Solutions since 2010. She started out as a consultant, then transitioned to working as a manager in the Product Lifecycle Management Group. These days she is in charge of the Service Delivery department and is responsible for more than 40 ongoing projects in more than 20 industries and over 20 countries. She is married and has a young child, so enjoys her family time, in particular at the park with her son at the weekends.

Creating value and purpose for our clients and us.

Tell us about an interesting project.

Since the start of the pandemic, we had a lockdown in Istanbul from March 2020, which meant that we started to work remotely for the first time. During those days, we had discussions about how to work remotely in an effective way. This was important to us because we had a large project ready to go-live. In the end we figured out how to get the project moving while working remotely.

The most memorable part of this project was the go-live phase due to go online in April 2020 because it was, by coincidence, related to the pharmaceutical industry. Our customer’s main product is a type of serum, and at the same time the customer was experiencing the busiest period of all time due to obvious overcrowding in the hospitals. This situation was very risky for us because we couldn’t stop the customer’s processes for even a second. So, production and shipping had to continue uninterrupted.

We needed to do a faultless go-live and do it remotely for the first time. We organized a very large-scale helpdesk organization using the online platforms and the go-live phase went off without a hitch, much to the delight of the team and the customer. We went through this whole process without any problems, which I think showed what a great job we did right to the end of the project.

How does NTT DATA create social impact?

Let me tell you about a project I was involved in called New Generation Heroes. In this project, which started in 2017, we provided primary school children with training and education in robotics and coding. In total we were able to reach 66 children from disadvantaged backgrounds, who otherwise wouldn’t have received such an education.

Our goal was to give children better opportunities in life in terms of their educational development and opportunities for future employment. I feel very proud that we as a company were able to pull together and contribute to society in a way that affected a really positive change.

What’s great about life at NTT DATA?

When I started to work as a new graduate, there were only 150 people working in Turkey office. However, nowadays there are almost 2000 people, and we are the industry leader in the SAP integration in Turkey. This growth has happened completely organically, just like the growth of a family. I have witnessed this growth and it has been a unique experience for me. But it’s not just the number of people that are significant or have grown because the organization has grown in every sense in the fields of new technologies, new products, and new clients. We are growing up all the time, but I never lost the feeling of belonging to a family.

I think that the most important thing is to feel safe, wanted, and happy in the workplace. NTT DATA makes me feel that way, which is why I love it here.