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In the rapidly expanding data center construction and operation business, EdgeConneX and its finance team have played a pivotal role in its growth.
EdgeConneX’s CFO Joe Harar has been at the helm of its finance operations for over 11 years, but a recent career change for the company’s former chief accounting officer Jenny Zhan — who has worked with Harar for her entire tenure with the company — provides a real-life example of how spreading financial talent across the business, an initiative that many CFOs have been working towards, can be beneficial. Now the chief transformation officer, Zhan’s job is to lead the company through all digital transformation efforts.
The job
With the role of data being crucial both internally and externally at the organization, Zhan said her recent job change is largely due to the need to provide finance-inspired guidance around data usage.
With change and growth happening so fast in her industry, she also said she believes her background in finance and accounting can help provide a grounded baseline from an analysis perspective that can then translate into things like product development and strategic decision-making.
“The reason the company is having me take this role is because what made us successful today is not going to necessarily work in the same sense tomorrow,” said Zhan. “When it comes to technology implementation and transformation in fast growing businesses, we need to be able to analyze moving pieces of information, react to those changes and stay ahead of the market.”
Zhan said the role is slightly similar to what she was doing from a skillset perspective, but the value she can provide is more visibly impactful. “Though transformation is based in numbers and analysis, it’s also about being a good communicator and negotiator with colleagues across key organizational pillars that also influence to drive change,” she said. “My goal is to make sure we are armed with the right business intelligence.”
The work
Zhan said the work now is about putting in diligence in research and development, listening to customer demands and aligning the parts of the company needed to help develop and launch successful projects at this scale. Though the work has similarities to accounting, this is a bit more communication-centric.
Among a few other parts of the job that come with the onboarding process, one of Zhan’s main focuses right now is developing an end-to-end construction and real estate management platform. This project is creating a type of enterprise software designed to manage the entire lifecycle of real estate development projects, a core component of EdgeConneX’s business, from site selection through to construction, engineering, market enablement and ongoing support.
“Right now, we are going through and doing our diligence, we are understanding the everyday processes this will require, all of the dependencies, and trying to fit it into a holistic system as much as possible — with the idea of building a satellite support system on top of that to make sure it works,” she said. “My job is to lead the research while also communicating with the engineers and the market enablement team, support our customer conversations and understand the legacy problems that our clients are facing.”
Zhan said the company’s culture and current age (it was founded in 2009) are driving factors towards its embrace of change. “The good thing about us being a fairly young company is that we are inspired to innovate and use technology ourselves, and right now [the market] is in a phase of technology innovation too. So we can leverage that and continue our growth beyond the 28 countries we are working in now,” she said.
The past and future
Despite the work and pressure it takes to step into a new role in somewhat unfamiliar territory, Zhan said this is not only something she has replicated in her career but is the driver to why she has stayed put at jobs that provide her with value.
“I never want to get bored at work,” Zhan said. “Every three years, I try to see if I can do something different within the organization. Previously, this had been working in other parts of the world or doing different things within accounting or FP&A, and then I took the role of chief accounting officer here which I’ve done for a while because that is always coming with change.”
She said her work now is similar to her previous work in corporate finance within hospitality. “Now, I get to go back to working with real estate like I was [in previous roles] while also working with technology, which I have grown to enjoy doing,” she said. “I know that many companies [our size] don’t have a chief transformation officer so for our board to recognize the need for one here as well as allowing me to do it, it’s something I am really excited about and looking forward to helping drive all the positive change moving forward.”
This interview took place on Feb. 6, 2025, at SuiteConnect in New York City.
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