Women’s History Month: Meet Navanian & CIO Kim Huffman
Samantha Shankman
Navan is committed to uplifting women, embracing equity through company values, and being involved with nonprofit and community impact causes. As March is Women’s History Month in the United States, United Kingdom, and Australia, we’re profiling innovative women throughout the organization.
Today, we spotlight Chief Information Officer Kim Huffman, who joined Navan with 20+ years of experience leading business transformations that empower companies to scale and grow. She is responsible for Navan's technology function, which includes the Business Systems, Data, IT Services, and Security & Trust teams.
Kim started her career in consulting and focused on technology as the key lever for enabling businesses. She was amazed to see how technology had the power to consistently improve businesses across multiple industries and functions. Driven by her interest in products and industries changing the status quo, Kim has worked for a diverse group of companies, from pre-IPO startups to large organizations. Her real sweet spot, however, is focusing on high-growth organizations like Navan.
The CIO role requires making tough decisions daily, and Kim leads efficiently and empathetically. Whether identifying a part of Navan’s tech stack that needs consolidating or offering an analogy to foster comprehension around why a change is being made, she brings an empowering leadership approach.
When Kim joined Navan in 2021, the brand was scaling quickly, and speed to market was critical. Serious work needed to be done to establish a stable and agile technology foundation that could scale and sustain a fast pace of growth.
Over the past year, Kim and her team migrated to a modern data stack and an API-based, event-driven architecture, enhanced product security and incident response processes and tooling, optimized technology utilization across the business systems portfolio, and streamlined IT services and operations processes. The result has been increased customer growth and revenue, reduced costs, increased employee satisfaction, improved stability and uptime of all internal systems, and a significant reduction in day-to-day support requests.
Kim truly cares about every member of her team and other team members across the organization. Beyond her professional role, she prioritizes mentorship opportunities and is the executive sponsor for WhoRuntheWorld, Navan’s female empowerment employee resource group (ERG). She advises on high-level strategy and provides a leadership perspective.
Outside the Navan offices, Kim is dedicated to increasing the number and diversity of female board members. She is a founding member of FirstBoard.io, a curated group of accomplished female executives in technology working together to increase the representation of women on boards.