James McGlennon is govt vice chairman and CIO at Boston-based Liberty Mutual, the sixth-largest property and casualty insurer on the earth, with greater than 45,000 staff working in 29 international locations.
McGlennon and his staff are answerable for constructing, managing, sustaining and innovating the corporate’s international expertise portfolio. And like many IT leaders, McGlennon has been on a journey to reimagine IT to assist a brand new period of enterprise productiveness, a transfer accelerated and formed by the pandemic.
McGlennon sat down with Clint Boulton at CIO’s 2021 Way forward for Work summit to debate the transformation journey and partnering with the enterprise to make sure profitable outcomes. What follows are edited excerpts from that dialog. For deeper insights, watch the complete video interview embedded under.
On Liberty Mutual’s transformation journey:
James McGlennon: I feel our journey began a number of years earlier than the pandemic confirmed up or earlier than the virus confirmed up. Our targets and goals have been very a lot round agile, enabling the enterprise, and that concerned a whole transformation of how we construct and run our software program for the corporate with our enterprise companions.
We additionally decided a number of years in the past now to start to maneuver all of our infrastructure and backend processing out onto the general public cloud environments.
After which, after all, like many firms, we recognized years in the past the worth in information insights and what that brings to bear.
However the arrival of the pandemic and the virus actually gave us a shot within the arm (no pun supposed) to attempt to go rather more rapidly with the transformation that we knew we wanted to make.
On accelerating digital enablement:
[We] have been already on a multi-year journey to have the ability to digitally allow each single interplay that our staff have with our clients or that our clients have with us, both straight over the web or over cell functions. [But] the main target for digital enablement wasn’t merely the web site and the cell app, but additionally how will we digitally allow the entire channels that we that we function in.
We’ve used all the pieces from robotic course of automation applied sciences to machine studying interfaces that helped information us as to what our clients needed. And, like quite a lot of different firms on the market, we centered on instrumenting the journey, in order that we may see precisely what was occurring as we measured each interplay, each from a buyer satisfaction perspective, and the place have been issues complicated, and the way may we make that extra easy for our clients.
On guaranteeing profitable enterprise outcomes:
Our targets and goals, our enterprise metrics, they’re not stage-gate milestones for our expertise tasks. They’re consequence pushed, the place we tried to drive buyer satisfaction, retention, margins, the premium—the entire issues that you’d need within the context of all these enhancements.
[W]e’ve been actually centered with our enterprise companions on educating and studying in order that we make higher choices collectively about the place we have to make investments for the applied sciences for the long run and studying what’s labored effectively and what hasn’t been the place we needed it to be.
On the expertise problem:
The conflict for expertise is actual. It’s on the market. We’re continuously attempting to grasp what our staff want, what our potential staff would search for.
What we’re discovering is that increasingly more, persons are serious about the place we stand on ESG (environmental, social and governance) points, on variety, fairness, and inclusion points. Our firm has been very centered on how we impression the communities by which we function. Our staff actually resonate with that.
The opposite half, which isn’t going away, is that we have to proceed to retrain, upskill, reskill our staff. So, if we are able to’t discover increasingly more individuals to return in (though we’re doing a good job of that), we wish to check out the worker base we’ve got and say, what abilities will we’d like in one other 12 months or two that we don’t have sufficient of right now? And begin these inside retraining processes and fashions.
[And] we’re centered on our annual consumption course of. We’ve employed some 150 or so new graduates yearly, so we’re trying on the make-up of that cohort, and we’re actually centered on variety and inclusion and searching broader when it comes to the place we are able to discover of us.
On making hybrid work:
I’m not going to declare victory or that we’ve got the one mannequin that works. I’ll say that when the pandemic arrived with the virus, we found out that now the ban was not the time to alter our core rules. It was not the time to alter the values on which we’ve sort of constructed our decision-making mannequin.
So, issues like placing individuals first, preserving it easy, treating individuals with dignity and respect, all of those sorts of issues. We determined we’d put these entrance and middle when it comes to the choice making, and that has of actually helped us.
The opposite factor we mentioned was that pre-pandemic, we trusted our staff members and we trusted our staff to do the best factor. Managers or senior managers or executives can’t make all the choices in a corporation. In truth, they don’t even know all the choices which can be being made on a day-to-day foundation. So, you need to empower and belief of us to make the best resolution.
