娇色导航

Hello, good afternoon and welcome to 娇色导航Leadership Live. I'm your host Maryfran Johnson, CEO of Maryfran Johnson Media. This video show and podcast is produced and sponsored by cio.com and the digital media division of foundry, an IDG company.

We're streaming live to right now on LinkedIn and to our 娇色导航channel on YouTube. And we invite our viewers most cordially to take part in today's conversation by tapping in your own questions in the chat and we have editors watching that to pass them along.

My guest today I'm very pleased to bring to the audience is Kathy Kay. She is the executive vice president and 娇色导航of Principal Financial Group.

Kathy oversees this Fortune 200 companies global technology and digital strategies, it and digital operations as well as its innovation efforts to support current and future business needs.

PFG is a $20 billion global financial services company that offers a wide variety of financial products and services, including retirement Asset Management and workplace benefits, based in Des Moines, Iowa.

The company has been in business since 1879, and today and employs roughly 20,000 people around the world and it operates in 80 countries.

Joining Principal Financial in May of 2020, Kathy brought along 30 plus years of her cross industry experience in IT leadership, most recently as the 娇色导航and VP of Business Technology at Pacific Gas and Electric Company. Before PG and E she served as the enterprise CTO at SunTrust.

And before that held the IT leadership positions with General Motors and Comerica among the many topics we'll be touching on today.

Our principles focus on serving customers holistically, not just digitally unbalancing the use of traditional AI, which the company has been doing for at least the last decade, with all the emerging Gen AI possibilities.

We're also going to talk about nurturing a more inclusive company culture, and leveraging how Kathy and her technology team leverages study groups inside the company to expand the IT business skill sets and collaboration efforts. Kathy, welcome. It's wonderful having you here today.

Thank you so much, Maryfran, it's a pleasure to be here. Good, good. Tell, let's dive in and talk about what the big picture impact was, has been on PSGs business and customers. During these last few disruptive years you arrived right as the pandemic was starting Aurora up.

And now here we are, hopefully blessedly post pandemic. Talk about what that has what that ark of customer need and business, you know, business issues has been during that time.

Sure, I will say, you're right, as I started in May, of 2020, of course, there was a focus of keeping the business running, serving our customers. But also it really caused us to be close to our employees, listening, understanding.

And in doing that, both with our employees with our customers, it really helped shape where we were evolving our strategy.

And what I mean by that is, I'm sure every company experienced this, but with during the pandemic, some of the customer's needs and demands changed in terms of how they wanted to be served.

And while we have always been listening closely to our customers, and we were on a journey, to serve them differently, I think the speed at which we really had to pivot in some cases happened during this time, your customers as an example expect us to know who they are, depending regardless of the channel that they're coming on, that is not new, but the pace at which they expected us to change from how they used to work.

Again, a lot of our businesses are businesses that you interact face to face in person. And that changed dramatically through the pandemic. And so finding ways to serve them digitally, but with that same feeling of serving them in an intimate interaction if needed, was critically important.

I would say the same with our employees.

We have this great culture of inclusivity and making sure our employees were taken care of or heard or feeling included, especially with The new leader in the mix was really important for me to make sure I was leading through that as part of the changes, right?

Well, and one of the points that you made when we talked earlier was that customers would come in to principle financial.

And depending on what their needs were, a lot of times they're involved with multiple products that you have your asset management, your 401 K's, the retirement stuff, but they would have to have, essentially a few years ago, they had to have a different approach, and figure essentially figure things out differently, I guess, digitally and whether they were calling and that was one of the first things you tackled was trying to essentially coordinate all that.

Talk a little bit about that, and how the especially how the other C suite leaders were involved in what you needed to do there. Sure.

The good news is I will say, and I think we talked about this, Maryfran is all of the leaders, so our leadership team, all were aligned in understanding that how we served our customers in the past was not going to be the way we need to serve them in the future.

And you're absolutely right, we were aligned by products. And we served our customers based on products.

And now they're you know, they were all saying and customers are saying this and every company, regardless of where I'm coming into you, in this case principle, if I have a question about my 401 K, and then a benefit that I have with you, I expect you to know that I don't want handoffs, I expect an you know, a holistic way of being served.

And we aligned on that as a as an organization. And so a lot of our strategy was pivoting that right. Yes. So the good news is, I joined as this was happening, so I didn't have to do a lot of convincing.

What I did have to do, though, is with our IT leadership team is really look at what the implications were of the technologies, we had a lot of things in place that weren't going to serve the needs of the customer in the way we wanted to in the future.

And then there were technology that was working okay, but needed to be, you know, maybe refactored or something to serve the needs better. But so we had to do a lot of that.

And I think that was really working with the IT leadership closely with the business leaders, was really what I had to influence more is, you know, what are the technology roadmaps?

What types of capabilities are going to be useful to the customers in a way to serve as well as our advisors and as well as our employees so that we can do this really well? Yeah.

Well, and I think and you've been interviewed and other technology publications and business ones, and talked about the fact that your business strategy and your tech strategy, were not on two separate tracks. Was that that was essentially already aligned when you got there?

Or were you driving more of the tech strategy into aligning with the business strategy? Yeah, I'm a huge believer that they have to be intimately integrated. And, and so when I first got here, I would say they kind of ran on two tracks.

And we would always bring them together as part of the planning season, if you will. But there's always this bit of catch up, right? Oh, we need this for our strategy. Oh, let's go back to it and figure out how to solve that problem.

And if you do it together, you have this partnership with the businesses. And you know, it forces you to understand the business, the customer. There's this conversation about what technology capabilities are the art of the possible, if you will.

And so by intertwining them, you have much richer conversations, and I think it makes planning prioritization, all of those things much easier because you have this natural alignment, because it's not something separate. It's just harder the company strategy. Yeah.

What are some of the common problems that Yeah, I know, you get out in the industry a lot. What are some of the problems of the your 娇色导航peers in financial services, but maybe in related industries, and adjacent ones are also tackling today?

Is it is it this sort of thing where it's it's essentially trying to figure out the best way to serve customers, you know, in this fast evolving with technologies changing and all that? Or is it is it something new and different from what you've seen in the past?

Yeah, so I will say there's, there's probably a couple of different things. There is, you know, I think the pace at which companies have to pivot to serve customers.

If you're listening closely, you have to do that much more quickly, you have to get feedback, you have to be able to respond. You have to be able to create new products or solve problems differently. So that's one thing.

And I think in the past, CIOs would maybe be in this supporting function. And now you have to be part of the problem solving, you have to be shoulder to shoulder with your business leaders, with your CFO and CEO to help get to good problems. That's one thing.

We're also all struggling with, with the movement of technology movement to cloud and the paces, you know, that we're moving, you have legacy technology that you have to devise.

So a whole modernization and, you know, simplifying environments, I think we're balanced, we're all balancing that, how do you get rid of the things that no longer are going to meet the needs of your future, at the same time, you're continuing to build new capability at the pace that you need to serve your customers.

And then finally, I think with the onset of the likes of, you know, chat, GPT, and large language models and the pace of adoption, they're the pace of change there, which is much faster than we've ever seen, I think, keeping up with that, trying to stay ahead of it, trying to be able to find, you know, share ways that you could solve problems with that technology, again, in a partnership.

So I think it's balancing all these things, delivering running the business, staying abreast of these fast things, and then cleaning up the things that no longer meet your needs.

Well, and I know you mentioned it, and of course, almost every interview I do over the last probably year, we've ended up talking quite a bit about AI and Gen AI, because it's it's had such an incredible hype cycle with the public with business with regular people, you know, you sign on to Google and Amazon now.

And they're asking you, do you want us to apply our AI filters to this? So with with that in hand, how has that? How has that had an impact on what you're doing in it and how your team responds to that?

Because I know that for the last probably 10 years, you've been using AI in various business processes as predictive analytics. So that's been going on for a long time, but it's not sexy anymore. So yeah, even though I will say the data, scientists find it incredibly sexy.

And this is true. Nonetheless, there's always those new shiny objects that we can play with, right, I think, certainly, generative AI has made it so easy for anybody to use, right.

And one of the things we like to do here, I'm a huge proponent of when there is something new, not, you know, not giving it only to the few elite to play with, but open it up to teams who are interested.

So you had mentioned that we have study groups.

So that's what we called it is, you know, there was so much hype about Gen AI, we said, if anybody's interested join this study group, and we had over 200 employees join we have, and they're from all over our business engineers, legal compliance, security, you know, all learning about the technology, it helps you identify problems, it also helps you identify problems that you really don't need Gen AI for, but it might just be cool to play with, right.

And so, so for us, it is no different than a lot of the other things we do focus on the problem at hand, making sure it's aligning to moving our strategy, solving a customer problem, enabling us to be more efficient, and then making sure that Gen AI is the right solution.

I think we had talked about in the past, we recently did a West Coast trip with some of our, our tech partners, and one of the heads of their AI group said, you know, we always kind of use generative AI as the last resort.

There's so many ways to solve these problems more simply, and making sure that you have the right technology aligned to solving the problem, I think is important. And so that's what we've been doing. Nonetheless, we found lots of great use cases and have been implementing them as well.

So again, I think that big team has helped us really get to some good problems and cool ways to solve them quickly to Yes, yes.

Well, and I want to come back to the IT organization and kind of how you've organized it and reorganize it over the last few years. But first I want to ask you about it. When I often ask about digital business models, is there have they changed?

or what have you had to adapt to during your time as CIO? It is, it's probably part of your, what we've already mentioned about getting in there and integrating the experience more for customers, but often there's an employee side of that as well.

Yes, you know, Maryfran, I have to tell you, I dropped to voice just for a second. So I have to ask you to repeat question, I apologize. Well, here we are talking about all the trials and tribulations of technology. This is to be expected, right? I know.

It's yeah, I should ask it for help. No way, wait, you're in charge of that? How have your digital business models evolved over the time you've been there at PF G, I know, we mentioned the integrating the customer experience on the front end through the website.

But you've probably had versions of it inside the company as well, even more significantly. Yeah. So and so when I started, I will say we were already on this path, right of making sure that we had a digital plan. Digital was the hype there for a bit.

And, and so there was, you know, there was a point. And the pandemic, as I mentioned, sped that up.

But what I will say is, there was this point in time where we thought during the pandemic, that everything's going to go digital, we're going to serve our customers all the time, digitally, we got to make sure all these channels are easy for them to get to, but what we learn, and you can see this across the financial sector is when a customer is making what they view as a big decision, from a financial perspective, they will go through the digital channel up into a point.

And then they want to talk to a human. Yes. And so this idea of making it easy for them to go through these channels, right, I'm, I'm gonna go in digitally, I now don't really feel comfortable making this decision, I want to talk to somebody getting there seamlessly.

And then maybe even getting them back to the digital channel, if that's where they want to be comfortable. That is something again, we are not done with that across the company, because you really have to stitch, you know, the experiences together very well.

But that is something that we are evolving and continue to evolve. Because it's the customers expect, well, and customers are evolving to I know that I think you made when we were talking earlier about the AI strategy.

You said one of your first principles with it is that there's there's got to be a human in the middle, you know that at some point, you know, it has to go through a human who could if necessary, talk to another human and explain what's going on.

Yes, I will say that is definitely our position with generative AI, all of the things that we're doing things that we're doing to help our employees do their work more effectively.

While it is speeding them up, we still will say, you know, you need to check that this is accurate, right? Because it's still so nascent that you do get different results. And the same with those that are serving the customers directly.

While we have tools to help some of our employees or agents that are working directly with the customer, we would never put Gen AI in, you know, directly in front of the customer without a human in the middle.

We view it more as a way to help them do their job and serve customers more effectively, then a replacement of you know, our customers now going directly to an LLM with directly to principal. Yeah.

Well, I've heard that also from other CIOs that having the speed that you can pull together relevant content, say for the person may be in the contact center, who's dealing with customers, that that sort of thing.

Gen AI does some what has some wonderful benefits just in the speed and the even the ability to summarize it in very, very good language. You even see that on a lot of the consumer apps. Now. They're like, do you want the Gen AI summary on this?

And you're always inclined to say sure, what is it going to say? And it's usually pretty good. Let's, let's pivot over and talk about the size and scope of your technology team at PFJ. I know that you've you've got business units CIOs, who do different functions.

Talk about all of that how this Is that in the scope of the activities and the things that you have put in place? As CIO? Sure. So, across principle, there are around 4000, a little bit over 4000 employees that are all part of the technology community.

And we do have CIOs that are partnered with each of our business unit leaders or our presidents of the businesses.

And so one of the things I did when I got here is looked at really how do we operate across the company I had mentioned, we were doing things that serve the customers holistically.

And so we knew we need to build enabling capabilities, if you will, while also making sure we could build those differentiating capabilities specific for our businesses.

So that caused us to look at the operating model of how it had been working to have teams that are sort of enterprise teams, building the enterprise capabilities, or the enabling capabilities.

And then CIO, and, you know, teams that are building technology closest to the customer and the business. And so that's how we're sort of aligned, I also have a data and analytics, organization, cyber course, and things like that.

But the whole concept is, how do we make sure we can do both enable the company and build capabilities that, you know, the areas can take advantage of, while also enabling us to build quickly these unique differentiating capabilities. Great, great.

And another, always a related topic to this is the challenges that you have around talent around finding it, recruiting it, and then probably even more important over the last few years retaining it, you've you're probably your percentage of millennial employees is much higher than it was maybe five to 10 years ago.

So talk about that about what you do to make sure that you have the talent that you need on staff. Yeah, so certainly, when I first got here, it was such a time of change in for all companies, right?

You've had people the great, you know, the great resignation principle. And we were really lucky that compared to a lot of other companies, while our attrition went up, it didn't go up at the extent of a lot of other companies.

But the thing that we did do, and this, this actually started with some of our interns, the first year I was here, I always meet with our interns and, and one of the things they said is, you know what, we are doing some really cool things here.

As interns, we're doing things that we can see how we are really impacting our customers or the business, maybe even more than a lot of our friends and other companies. But we don't tell that story.

If you look at principle, it's hard to find what we're doing in it and all the different technologies.

And so we started getting very focused on and I worked with our chief marketing officer and said, you know, we need help to put stories together to show what we're doing, to make it easy for people to learn about us.

And also getting out in telling a little bit of what we're doing here so that others can see, we're not just this boring, 145 year old, you know, company financial services, but that we're really doing some leading edge things.

And so if you're attracted to forward thinking and transformation, and leveraging new technologies and a global career opportunities, this is certainly the place for you. And so we spent a lot of time doing that.

Then we also had been looking at our talent because as we're investing in new technologies at the pace we are, we want to make sure we have a way to reskill the employees that we have, right?

I'm not afor I don't want to see these wholesale, you know, get rid of a lot of employees and bring in new ones with new skills. I think we are we value our employees.

And so we put a whole plan together about enabling employees to learn about cloud technology, you know, and a lot of the other technologies that we have, we have boot camps, we have training, we have certificates they can get, and so a lot of it and we were clear with where we're heading so that engineers or others could make choices.

I have a great story about somebody in one of the context centers who took training and is now one of our engineers, right and so you can really change and so but you have to be focused on that and identifying the gaps, where it is hard to skill up, we will be, you know, we will look externally for that for those critical skills, but it's kind of a very holistic plan of getting a story out understanding the talent you have, making sure you're giving them opportunities to learn.

So they do, you know, they are able to see their future here. And then also getting filling in the skills gaps where you need. And it sounds really simple. The greatest turnoff, the great complexities always underlie the simple ideas.

I've had so many conversations with CIOs about how complicated it is to simplify things, yes.

But I also I admire the fact that you have partnered up with your CMO, because one of the areas that, especially in the past, IT leaders would very, they would admit that they were falling down on this as they were not marketing it very well, even inside the company, even getting people from the different business units to come over.

Fortunately, I think it's gotten a lot more attractive in the last few years. But there's still the problem of IT. IT people in general, being too willing to just work and solve the problem, and not brag about it at all.

And if there was one quality of it, people that I would want to change, it was like blow your own horn a little bit more.

Do you do that with I know that you get out in the industry, and you do a great job of that just you know, being public and talking about what PFG is doing. But do you have something like an internal newsletter?

Or do you have special sections on your website where everybody can kind of see the cool things going on in it?

So first, I will say Mary Fran, my communications and public relations team is the ones who encouraged me to be out there more, it is not natural to me, I assure you. I know I know, to don't do a lot of bragging.

In fact, we we did this sort of some of the leadership traits of the of my leadership team. And we all share that in common that we don't need a lot of recognition. And so we have to be very focused on it. Right?

How do we recognize our teams, we have a huge technology conference every year, again, globally, where teams can set up sessions to share what they're doing.

They can have booths, like we have booths, both here and in our, in our global team in India as well, you know, for several days, so employees can learn about all the work that's going on. Certainly we try and tell our stories externally.

I try to do recognition in in all of our, any of our town halls, if you will, yeah. Because it's for a couple of reasons.

A, I think it's really important for people to see themselves get recognized, but also to help them understand oftentimes, the engineers or even our IT community doesn't see the connection of how we're really helping with the strategy.

And so being able to do both of those, you know, give recognition and tied to the strategy, I think is really important. And then we also I have this regular meeting with my team. It's called Coffee with Kathy, it's sort of this open discussion forum.

We talk about any kind of issues that might be on the right mind, but we also do gratitude. What are you grateful for, you know, recognize one of your teammates, so it's more informal, to really drive that culture of, you know, to your point, bragging?

Well, and bragging makes it sound like something negative thing. That's actually not what I mean, it's more about, you know, I'm always I'm always haranguing the CIOs I talked to I go, and I look at their LinkedIn profiles.

And, you know, you're actually doing a pretty good job on yours. But a lot of them are just so perfunctory. And when you talk to them, though, these incredibly involved executives that have such vibrancy going on in their organizations, and you're not seeing any of that.

And so the but the, the PR and the marketing help, I think is so vital, and it's so nice to see it being more recognized as part of the importance of how you develop and extend your IT organization.

One of my favorite interviews some years ago with the He's He's now retired from Cargill, but the Cargill CIO, Justin Kershaw told us I think it was on Stage at one of our events about how he would take his senior leadership team off into I think it was Minneapolis, St.

Paul. And they would do a week long improv class where everybody learned how to tell stories. I mean, they weren't going on to become comedians on the circuit. But the idea was that they would get up and learn how to engage their audience.

And there's so much about storytelling. That I think I mean, I've seen CIOs, especially ones who have come on this program with me, I see you all getting better and better at it. And it's, it's wonderful, because I think it's so important going forward.

When let's talk a little bit about some of the technology to kind of pivot back to some of the tech topics, what are the areas that with the company strategy in place and the changes you've made already?

What are the areas that have risen up on your priority list? Sure. Well, I would say top of our list is data, data and analytics. And I mean, this was even before Gen AI became a thing, right.

But as you're changing a strategy, and you need to learn about your customers, and serve them in ways that you hadn't in the past, and you need to understand their journeys, and you need to understand product and impact and what's going on externally that, you know, can help you better serve, yeah, have to have really good data, you have to have it easy to be accessed only by those who should access it, you have to make sure it's, you know, secure and private.

But it really is the new gold, if you will, leveraging it well, to draw insights to run the company better to serve our customers better.

And a lot of the analytics investments that we've made as well, and we are still on a journey, and it, you know, kind of varies by the organization based on the problems they've had to solve.

But I would say that has been big, building a customer data platform and enterprise data Foundation, like I said, cleaning up the data, and then being able to do analytics, Gen AI, all of those types of things have been, I would say one of our bigger ones.

I talked again, about some of these enabling platforms.

So again, you know, if you, you know, making sure you have all the capabilities needed in a, in a cloud tenant or tenants, so that it is easy for your teams to build in a secure and safe way with automation so that they're not having to create environments on their own and learn.

You know, I think making that easy and supportable is really important. We've been doing a lot there, Tim, you know, to mature that as we've been on this cloud journey.

And then a lot of that things like the Salesforce service now, like those kinds of platforms, the SAS platforms, making sure we understand how we take advantage of their capabilities with our partners are, have been areas of focus as well. Yeah.

And I've heard you mentioned that customer data platform in other interviews. Tell, tell, tell me more about that. What is a customer data platform? Is it up and running now? Is it something where it's going to be another enormous platform like your big SAS platforms? Talk about that?

Yeah, so this is, and you know, it, it is a it's words that are used out there, but I'll tell you what it means for principle, right is, again, as I joined, and we were changing this strategy, one of my closest partners is our chief marketing officer who is very focused on customer experience, and how to serve them and but one of the things that was lacking is, again, knowing everything we need to know about our customers, right?

Each business area had a lot of information about their customers, but we didn't have it for principle. Right? You would have to go across these organizations to get data to stitch it together.

And so if you think about how you want to serve holistically in the future, you have to know who they are. You have to know what business we you know, we do with them. We have to know the journeys they might be on.

We have to know things about them that help us serve them better, if you will.

And so that was the start To the customer data platform, building all of that, so that marketing, again, even all the businesses can understand what they need to about the customers to serve them better. Okay, and it is ongoing, we built a lot of it.

But again, as we get more and more journeys, digitized are going through that, you know, the digital digitization, if you will, it starts to highlight where you need more data, what we didn't do is just mash all this data together and say, oh, you know, they'll come, we definitely only put data in that is needed to solve a particular problem, because it's a concern about privacy and getting too much exposed to the people that maybe shouldn't have access.

Well, and I think it's also learning back from the days of data warehousing where, or even data lakes, right, if you just put all this data in and hope that it'll be useful to somebody, it doesn't really pan out.

And so making sure that you're getting the right data to solve the problem at hand, is how I find that the data becomes really useful. Well, and that's, that's a really good point, too, because I've never thought that the term data warehouse sounded like a very friendly place.

You know, that sounded like one of those cold, scary warehouses where you walk in and you realize that you've entered the wrong door. The, the let's, let's pivot now to talk about innovation ecosystems.

And I've been I've been fond of that word ecosystems lately, because it just seems like so many parts of it in the business working together creates more than the ecosystem, not just a separate project or a program.

So are there any changes in how you and your technology organization and your business partners are approaching just that great, big amorphous topic of innovation?

Yeah, so one of the things I'll say is, again, as I joined principle, had an innovation group, you know, innovation strategy, if you will.

And so it wasn't like I had to invent this or anything, I took advantage of the innovation teams, again, you have teams within the businesses focused on trying to find innovative ways to solve problems at hand.

And then, and then we had teams who are looking at more futuristic technologies and things. But we also have been looking at, you know, what is changing? You talked about ecosystems.

And we had been, we have looked at, you know, you have companies who are building technical ecosystems and ways to, you know, get different technology products, if you will, but there's also ecosystems that are being built to serve customers differently, right, partnering with maybe companies, you never would have partnered in the past.

But by building an ecosystem, you're able to serve your customers differently. And out of our innovation, you know, we're really came this idea about serving our business owners better.

So we serve a lot of SMBs, or biggest set of our customers, they fuel to the country, if you will.

And a lot of times business owners are the CEO of the CFO, the head of HR, you know, they're the order the accountant, and they don't have a lot of time.

And oftentimes, there's all these ways, you know, different solutions for serving an SMB, not necessarily the business owner themselves.

And so we started a startup called elevate by principle that emerged from this after talking to a lot of different business owners and understanding problems that they have and help that they need.

And it is truly that it's an ecosystem, again, partnering with different companies that we normally wouldn't, given who we are. But by understanding the problems they have, looking for partners that could help solve it as part of the Elevate ecosystem, if you will.

It's really starting to help businesses. Our goal is to help business owners enable their businesses to grow and prepare, you know, for their futures.

Yeah, well, and I took a look at that too, because you can hunt you can google elevate by principle, or I'm sorry, yes, elevate by principle, and it is it's got a lot of great information. I mean, I run my own business right now, but it's just me.

So I wouldn't need all of that. But I could see how companies that are 3040 50 employees and up cut, there's something like 75,000 of them aren't there in the US.

And one thing that I thought would attract everybody's attention, you know, they can join a free group purchasing organization, and do that sort of thing. And there was no joining costs or fees and access to popular products.

And this whole idea came out of one of your study groups or out of the innovation efforts. I mean, it's just as why wasn't it?

So I'm trying to think back, it wasn't one of the study groups, it was definitely through the innovation work that was going on, right? Because we're always looking at sort of core adjacent types of innovations, right. And this came out of that work. Okay.

Now, I wanted also to ask you about AI. One of the you've been interviewed a few times about your tech modernization strategy. And, you know, unlike AI, which is always sexy and fun to talk about, when you think about dealing with the legacy.

I had one 娇色导航on stage years ago said it's when he talks to his business, his business colleagues and other people. He said, it's like a giant iceberg.

And the tech modernization needs are that ugly part underneath the water, whereas on top of the water is all the fun stuff like revamping the websites and doing digital business transformation. But he said, then there's this dark murky stuff of battle.

And any company over what five 10 billion in size probably has a legacy that they're having to deal with. When you establish the Enterprise Business Solutions. Talk a little bit about that. I saw reference to that.

And some of the articles where you'd been interviewed, is that geared just to the tech modernization, or is that kind of bigger role? Oh, no, that organization, I mean, it has a lot of the corporate functions.

And then also, these I talked about all the different enabling capabilities that are needed to build across, it has that I would say the modernization, it's actually heard of all parts of it, if you will, right, because you have the business unit CIOs who have things that are customer facing unique to their business that we have to deal with.

And then we have these things that are cross cutting. And so again, as we were aligning technology to our business strategy, it just became really apparent that there were things that just were not going to be relevant in the future.

And then we had different businesses, I mentioned that, you know, some had been moving forward with the roadmaps and modernizing, and then we had other ones, that because of what was going on in their business, we did a huge acquisition as an example.

And so when you focus on that, you start to, you start to put, you know, things like modernizing and replacing off to the side, while you're getting that all integrated.

And so, you know, a couple things came to a head is we started seeing things that were no longer going to be relevant, we had to take action on those and put a roadmap together.

And then things that we need to build that will be cross cutting, had to also be considered in this journey, right. And so you can't build any of them on their own without understanding the impact they have on each other. And so that's what modernization came to be.

But it's really all parts of it, if you think about it, because you're constantly having to think about that because everything is so interrelated anymore.

Well, it sounds to a lot of times one of the biggest problems in any transformation effort of almost any size, is that you have to think about the business objectives and how they need to change first, and then the technologies to enable all that kind of come into play.

How how has that? How have you approached that at principle? Do you have the I know you mentioned that it was a real benefit that the strategy never changed dramatically. I mean, you kind of everybody who everybody was marching in the same direction, strategy wise.

So how did that have an impact? Yes. So I, I think it's it has been more about the order of how we get this work done. Okay. And it was on having to make these huge which sales, right?

And again, if we can align to what the business problems are, or the growth targets that they want to get more, you know, the customer experience that we want to be able to serve our customers with.

And you could show how different technologies either building new, having to sunset and replace will help get that. It's a much easier conversation. You know, I'm not a proponent of just saying, oh, we need to get rid of this stuff, because it'll be cheaper.

Oftentimes, it's really not cheaper, right? Because if you're just replacing something, but not thinking about how we are going to work differently or serve differently, yeah, you've just cost the business a lot of money with very little, you know, new capabilities.

And so that's what we were focused on. It wasn't modernization, first, it was more, making sure we understand the business problems, the strategy, making sure we understand the fit that the current technology had, and then figuring out how to solve for it.

And it just so happens that to do that it's this multi year journey. Yes. I remember one time, asking a 娇色导航on stage, I think it was probably the 娇色导航of General Motors. And he had been interviewed a lot about business transformation.

And the question was, well, are you done yet? You've been at it for six years. And you know, like, if have you reached, you know, like, Are we there yet. And he just burst out laughing.

And he said, the minute you stop transforming, you die, you die on that, on that battlefield. I want to segue back just for a second to the study groups, because I'm fascinated with that. A lot of companies do that sort of thing.

I love that they're called study groups. Because it sounds it sounds more fun than being involved in a task force, I guess. The language is nice. And that was actually chosen by your folks that we're setting them up that that was a brilliant idea. It was.

And I think it's a more inviting kind of name to write.

Because if you're curious about something, but you have to admit, gosh, if if I need to know a lot to join this group, you're not going to join, and yet you might have this great problem that could benefit from being solved by that study group, right.

And so they named it, they just called it a study group. And it really was started as let's just learn together. So it kind of took the barriers down of anybody, you know, you didn't have to be a technologist, you know, but you all end it.

And it also invited all the different areas that might be nervous, like legal, and compliance and privacy and security. Right. And it was just everybody was, is learning together.

You know, so it started with, let's learn about all this stuff to help put some policies in place and figure out what the right guard rails are.

And then again, you know, now, it's just been this ongoing meeting every Monday morning at 7am, where people are sharing, use cases, solutions, different companies, and or global companies. So you gotta make time for Asia. Right? So, yeah, so at 7am.

But the conversations are great, because now they out of that has come solutions that we build, but I just think it's a great template moving forward for any of these types of things. Because, again, people really want to try and solve these problems.

And, you know, oftentimes, I think there's this worry of leaders saying, well, if, you know, if Sally goes into the study group, she's not going to get her job done, what you find is they're so excited that they do their job even better, because they're excited to be working in these other opportunities.

And the motivation is changed. And so, and I think everybody figures out how to balance that, right? Well, it's it's such a cool idea. And it's so welcoming. I mean, it's so like, you know, cuz that can be the problem.

I mean, if your tech people were like, Let's all talk about data architecture, right? You know, there would be you know, anybody, as you say, in legal and compliance, or your marketing group would be like, Oh, well, I don't have anything to contribute to that conversation.

But when you're actually just talking about business problems in the way different technologies, and of course, everybody knows how to Google their little hearts out right. So you can come in and ask all those questions.

What I wanted so we wrap up here I wanted to ask you kind of a two part question, how do you keep yourself kind of on the leading edge of all the things you want to know about both technically and in the business as a CIO?

And what have you learned about your own leadership style? How has it changed or adapted in the last few years, you've worked in a lot of very big places, and it's a very big job you have now.

So how do you keep on top of everything you need to know? And how has that affected your leadership style over the last few years? Sure. I'm the first one of court.

So I'm an avid reader, I have tons of feeds that I get, you know, and, and so for sure, I do a lot of reading, I'm not afraid to reach out to my network, I have a great network.

And if I don't understand something, if I need help with something, I do not feel like I have to solve it myself. I know, it's probably not a unique problem that anybody has that I have. And so certainly getting help.

And then also my team, there are so many really smart people that I do not hesitate to reach out to say, Hey, I know, you know something about this, can you teach me right?

And so I think all of those things are helpful to also, you know, I try to attend some conferences, things like that, so that you can continuously learn.

Again, I will say, if I expect my people to be continually learning, and I'm not role modeling that it's hard to have that expectation. But again, I think it's critical for my job.

On the other front, I will say, you know, I have made tons of mistakes in my career, and being willing to admit it, learn from it, pivot adjust, get help. I think these are all things that have helped me.

You know, what I learned sometimes is some people have a hard time admitting they're wrong. I don't have a hard time with that.

Because I know, you know, when you have an organization this big, not everything is going to go well, and making it safe for people to say, something's not going well, I just had a conversation today with somebody on one of my teams who said, I think you need to look at this, I don't think we should be doing this anymore.

So we're going to look at it and say, you know, what, if we need to pivot, we're going to pivot, but it sets it sets a culture of, of showing that, hey, you can be vulnerable, you're willing to learn so that everybody else is too.

Now, do I get it right all the time? No, there's moments where I look back and say I could have showed up so much better than I have. But being focused on that, I think is really important. Yeah.

And so that and you have, so you have kind of felt that change in your own leadership style, starting in instead of getting more big boss, like you're actually trying to be more open to those conversations that can be hard to do because people aren't sure if it's some kind of a is this a trick question?

Is she sincere? Yeah. If she's the EVP in the CIO, she probably knows how we should be doing this. Yeah. I had one 娇色导航tell me that he discovered he kept having all these people agreeing with him in the meetings.

And he discovered that his mistake was that he was stating his opinion before anybody else had a chance. And he said, that just kind of like dropped this big kind of concrete ball in the middle of the table, sort of like, here's what I think we should do.

Now. What do you think? And then just reversing that process was great for him in terms of the things that he found out? And I have to catch myself to being more extroverted, you know, you want to answer something quickly.

So I do have to catch myself sit back as well. Because I do want to understand everybody's perspective, because they're usually better. I always say, I'm the furthest from the problem, right?

If you look at my age, you all know the problems way better than me and how to solve them. So yeah, learning listening is critically important. Great. Okay. Well, thank you so much for all of your time today.

You've got a very big, huge job, and I really appreciate it. You're taking all this time to talk to us today.

I wish you a very lovely summer and I hope it's going to be I hope everything's going to be going swimmingly for you and Principal Financial over the next few months. Thank you, Mary. Fran, it's been a pleasure, really appreciate it.

Okay, you've been you've been a pleasure to talk to as well if you joined It's late today. You can watch the full episode later today, right here on LinkedIn. But also you can catch it on cio.com.

And on CIOs YouTube channel, where leadership, the leadership, live shows are all available also as audio podcasts wherever you find your podcasts. And I hope you enjoyed today's wide ranging conversation as much as I did with 娇色导航Kathy Kay, of Principal Financial Group.

We will be back again in two weeks on Wednesday, May 29, at noon, Eastern with a special technology industry edition of 娇色导航leadership live, where I'll be talking with Eric Helmer, who is the Chief Technology Officer and SVP of Rimini Street, which is a global provider of enterprise software support products and services.

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