娇色导航

Hi, good afternoon and welcome to 娇色导航Leadership Live. I'm your host Maryfran Johnson, CEO of Maryfran Johnson Media and the former editor in chief of 娇色导航magazine and events. This video show and podcast is produced and sponsored by cio.com.

And my friends in the digital media division of Foundry, which is an IDG company. We're streaming live to you now on LinkedIn and to our 娇色导航channel on YouTube.

And because we are live right now, we most cordially invite our viewers to join us in today's show and send in questions of your own. We have editors watching the chat streams on both LinkedIn and YouTube, and they're ready to pass along your questions as they come in.

And my guest today, I'm very pleased to welcome to the show is Jeff Sippel. He is the Executive Vice President and 娇色导航of Northwestern Mutual.

He leads an organization of about 4000 technologists, and is in charge of the company's tech architecture, infrastructure and cloud services, as well as its information risk and cybersecurity operations.

Jeff joined Northwestern in 2019 as the vice president of client planning experience, where he was leading development of the company's proprietary financial planning platform, but in May of 2022. That fun job came to an end when he was promoted to 娇色导航at $36 billion in revenue.

Last year, Milwaukee based Northwestern Mutual is one of the three largest life insurance companies in the US right alongside New York Life and metropolitan group.

Founded in 1857 166 years ago, this fortune 100 company provides an array of comprehensive financial planning services to nearly 5 million customers through life, disability income and long term care insurance and annuities, as well as brokerage and advisory services.

Before he joined this massively large insurer, Jeff served in numerous leadership, Business and Technology roles, including CTO and Chief Strategy Officer at Acorns, which is a fin tech company best known for its micro investing platform.

Before that, he was the CTO, CTO at Ido Interactive, another financial software company. And then earlier in Jeff's career, he spent 10 years in engineering and product strategy roles at Orbitz Worldwide, where he wrapped up as VP of engineering. In many ways.

Jeff's career path to 娇色导航at Northwestern reflects the considerable impact of combining deep technical capability and understanding with strong business strategy and equally strong customer experience focus. So delighted to have you here, Jeff, to talk about all these things. Welcome. Well, thank you for having me, Maryfran.

Okay, let's dive in first and talk about this unexpected job you took in your career path, coming in to the client experience VP role at Northwestern with a lot of technology depth in your background, but no actual 娇色导航experience on the job, and how you're in your first 娇色导航role now at this $36 billion dollar insurance company, talk about how that transition happened for you.

Yeah, well, it was a really exciting opportunity to take on the 娇色导航role here.

I mean, in some respects, I would say, work all the roles that, you know, you've highlighted I've had really helped prepare me for the opportunity to be a CIO, you know, when when you're at a smaller an all digital company, you have to deal with things like cybersecurity architecture, you have to figure out how you're going to manage all your workforce tools, there isn't anyone else or that's a collaborative decision.

So I think a lot of the domains that 娇色导航has at a fortune 100 company like Northwestern Mutual, really lend themselves to some of the things that I've done in the past at the same time.

One of the neat things about us as an insurer and ensure it really is an information company. You know, we take in information, we connect that we assess risks, and we provide products on top of that information.

So it's really a great opportunity for someone who really has a deep understanding of how all the systems are connected.

And for me, that intersection of that plus our product and our strategy worlds I think has really helped me be an advisor to not just in Lee Not just leaving the 娇色导航function, but really being an advisor to our senior leadership team and the CEO.

Okay, well, when we say VP of client experience, that is that's a loaded term that carries a lot of interesting job duties with it. How is that so important at an insurance company that it actually catapults you into a 娇色导航role?

There was something more going on there than marketing, I'm sure, right. And client experience here, if you think of the lifecycle of how our clients interact with our advisors, and the company at large, all of that is inside of client experience.

So we think about what you know, marketing really talks about how do you learn about Northwestern Mutual? How do you have your first contacts you recognize the company learn about and start trusting it, but then you move into talking to an advisor?

My background on the financial planning side, we lead with financial planning.

So the big part of those initial conversations is, you know, how do we create a financial plan for you and recommend solutions to some of your problems, whether it's I want to retire at this date, or I want to buy a house, or I'm going to have kids, all of those are things that we can help you, you know, as we highlight in our mission, you know, free you from financial anxiety, those are really stressful decisions, our client experience helps you helps work you through that process.

So at the end of it, and one of my peers, he talks about saying, Am I okay? As a client, that's really the question that everybody asks, and that's really what our client experience is trying to answer is, am, am I going to be okay?

If something bad happens, if I want to retire, if I want to? You know, for me, if I want to jump off of a company at Orbitz where I've worked for 10 years and go really work at the ground floor of another startup?

Am I going to be okay, with the rest of my family? At that point? I had small kids, that was a risky decision, or could have been a risky decision. I wish I would have had a plan like I have now at Northwestern Mutual. Yeah, well, this is.

And I know, we're going to talk more about it. But this is very, based on a financial planning tool. And I mentioned in the intro, that it's a proprietary tool. Don't all insurance companies have these kinds of planning tools?

What is so special or so unique about the work you undertook at Northwestern when you were doing that client experience work with the financial planning tool? Yes.

So um, one of the neat things about Northwestern Mutual is, as far as I'm aware, we are the only insurer or really, you know, only, I would say, wealth manager that has its own proprietary financial planning tool.

There are many of these in the market that, you know, independent insurance, investment advisors, or broker dealers, or anyone like that may use, but they're really focused.

Our observation is they were focused on wealth management, and how do I retire answering questions about things like your IRAs, IRAs, 401, K's or how do I save up? Your whole financial picture, the risk side of it? How am I going to protect against bad things happening?

How do I make sure you know, whether that's I get disabled, I get sick, or you know, someone in my family passes away, those are all parts of that conversation. And we just weren't seeing a tool that could have that holistic conversation.

And so, you know, we we did some acquisitions on that space. Plus, then we spent five plus years building a tool that right now all of our advisors in the field utilize to have that conversation and really brings together insurance investment.

And, you know, ultimately, where are you trying to go in your life as a client, and really provides a full picture so that you can be comfortable?

Again, what I said earlier, am I going to be okay, yeah, well, it's interesting, the description of a tool that is that broad, to me with having talked with so many CIOs over the year, years, it sounds like that kind of family jewels that you find in ERP systems or the you know, like the systems of record, because this is involving a lot of your systems of record as well, right.

This is probably a very complicated setup with a tool like this. Well, one of the neat things that we've been able to do by having, you know, our own tools, we can connect it to all our systems like you've highlighted.

So we have, whether it's policy, admin system or system of record on our wealth side, we can make sure those are seamless connections to really bring that data automatically into that financial planning process and make it as seamless as possible.

And there's a large portion of our engineering team He's dedicated to making sure that we're constantly improving that product, while also making sure it operates as seamlessly as possible. Yeah. Do you now as the CIO?

Now, you're probably not as deeply involved in working on that tool, but you probably still keep track a bit. So what is your role overseeing the work on that now?

Yeah, at this point, well, we make sure as my role, I mean, besides being a cheerleader, from the sidelines, and I would say, at this point, my hobby is financial planning, I love for myself, I, the product managers have that product.

If they're watching, they will know that I care about them deeply. And I'm talking to them all the time.

But what we do is we make sure, from a 娇色导航standpoint, you know, that tool, because it's so essential, we need to make sure it's highly available, highly reliable, it meets the very highest cybersecurity standards, because you're trusting it, if we're going to do good financial planning, we need you as a client to trust us with some of the most important information you have, which is your finances, your health, whatnot, in order to do that, so we need to make sure we have the very best cybersecurity.

And then we need to make sure it fits in with the ecosystem of the larger environment. So does it meet the standards of our technology?

Is it aligned to what we call our target state architecture, all those pieces just like we do with every other set, application or set of tools, many of which we build ourselves. We have to make sure it's aligned so that really all these building blocks work together.

Otherwise, we can't build that promise of it being seamless it having all the right data at the right time to make the very best decisions. Yeah, well, and you'd mentioned too, that this is not a one and done. This is something that got worked on for five years.

And now there needs to be constantly new versions of it. Yes, yeah. I think this is the one thing that I take away from building products on the digital side. And that startups is, you know, a, a technology company, there is no dot there is no project.

We we build capabilities that we then enhance.

And our CEO, John schlocky, he loves to talk about how our financial planning tool and many of our tools are like the iPhone, at some point, there was, you know, a version 1.0 of iOS, and now we're on, you know, I can't remember versions, right? Yeah.

Well, I'm 17. Yeah, yeah. But every year, there's another major version. And often throughout the year, there are minor versions that have security fixes and updates and improvements.

We operate the exact same way where we are doing major versions every year, every quarter, and then we're constantly watching our advisors, how they use it, how they react, our clients, what have they reacted positively to, and we're constantly enhancing it.

So that requires that consistent care and feeding. It's more unlike building a building, I guess it's more garden, right? You are constantly making sure that all your your efforts are rewarded. Yeah.

Well, now, as I mentioned in the intro, this interaction of digital products and strategy and the 娇色导航and technology, it has become so central to the 娇色导航role. But if I didn't, but that's been going on for a little while, for several years now.

And if I'd asked you five or 10 years ago, oh, are you headed to CIO? That you will would have probably said, No, that job that job looks impossible to do. So having found yourself in it, how did you how did you make that transition?

What how did your field of focus have to widen? Yeah, I mean, I think this is one of the one of the things that I've really been proud of in my careers, I've been able to operate, you know, really at the intersection of technology, product strategy.

And I think as time goes on, the 娇色导航role really needs to take on more of those capabilities, you need to truly understand what the business strategy is, so that you can assess whether the technology you're bringing in, whether it's off the shelf, whether you're building it, whether you're making that buy versus build decision, that you can really make sure it's fit for purpose, both now and knowing where the whatever company you're with is in the future.

So I think having that combination is really, really essential. And one of the, when, you know earlier I talked about being that advisor to our senior leadership team on the flip side, they really look to me to give them intuition on what's possible.

I think this is one of the things that I really see as a as a big part of my job is is to kind of open up and expose the organization to what could be possible, what tools could we utilize?

What concepts could we take on to really address whatever market problems or strategies we have? It goes both ways.

And I think at the center of that is, is something if you while I went to probably expected to be a 娇色导航at a fortune 100 company 10 years ago, if I would have said, Do you want to? Do you think you can?

Or and would you want to sit at the intersection of technology and business strategy decisions? I would have said, Absolutely, that's exactly where I want to play for the rest of my career. Okay.

Let's talk about let's pivot to the kind of big picture impact that Northwestern business and customers have gone through over these last few disruptive years.

As you know, we mentioned when we talked earlier, you've had the, the quote, unquote, luck to be there through the big business crisis of the pandemic, and then the aftermath of it.

So tell us, tell us about the customer base, how this has all affected them, what has changed in terms of that relationship between Northwestern and it's those 5 million customers that you have?

Well, I think one of the things, maybe I start with one thing that really hasn't changed, and that's this essential role of our financial advisors in that relationship, we have about 7000 advisors out there, that human connection to our clients is one of the really important things that I think drives good decision making for our clients, and really gives them the confidence in their financial plan.

That what we've seen over the course of the past few years is the advisor as a kind of counselor on someone's finances has become really the central connection. Now, what we've what we've been able to do is really add in quite a bit of digital technology.

So when everyone had to go remote are advisors who were accustomed to running around the city, meaning meeting clients, at their office at Starbucks, you know, in their homes, potentially, to really work through these challenges, they're now able to do that digitally, through conversations like this.

That did two things. One, it made it so they could become more productive. Now, if I don't have to drive 30 minutes to Starbucks to have a meeting, I might be able to have two meetings. That's fantastic.

In addition, what we've been able to see them do I get really deep on certain areas, if I'm great, and I understand the incentives and motivations of I don't know, let's say doctors, or, you know, any industry, I can get really deep no matter where they are in the country, I can now service, a much broader population, I think that's really helped us gain expertise.

I think the other piece that we've been able to do is look at all the interactions, this goes back to the client experience side, all the interactions that our advisors or even our customer support folks.

It on the corporate side have been a have, and we've been able to really build efficiencies into there, whether it's really, you know, supercharging, our mobile app, so that when you have a question about your plan, or your finances, or what's next, oftentimes you can answer that directly.

If you need to do things like change your beneficiary or change your address or things like that, we can do that through our digital tools.

And then other anything is all those things provide signals to our advisors, if you change your address, as an advisor, I really want to know about that, because maybe something else is changed. Maybe you bought a house because you're about to have a baby.

Well, that's a conversation that we really need to have. And I'd love to be able to have that so that I can help protect you or help make sure that we're aligned, and that I'm adding value every step of your life journey. Yeah.

And you mentioned earlier that one of your roles, especially, is to be that viewpoint on the industry and the things that are coming in the changes possible. How do you go about corralling that information? And then sharing it with the CEO and the rest of your senior executives?

Do you have something like monthly briefing you just slip it in and conversations? How do you go about, you know, sharing that kind of in, you know, curating it and then sharing that information with them? Yeah, that's a great question.

I mean, I think it's both formal and informal communications. We do have things like an innovation incubator that's constantly doing briefings to our leadership team about areas they're exploring.

Those are kind of more longer term horizons of innovation, but Even as the markets and as our the technology, world of technology changes, those are things that we try to keep our organization abreast of either through.

Like I said, those informal conversations, we also try to connect the entire leadership team, to outside experts, whether that's consultants or research firms, or you can imagine in financial services, there's all sorts of folks that are able to provide you kind of signals and intelligence on where the world is going.

And we try to make as many of those connections as possible. Yeah. Well, in that early in your career, you were at Capgemini, and another one of the big management firms doing that sort of thing.

How do you think how has that advisory strategy advisory role played into the job that you have? Now? What do you what do you think you do differently maybe than CIOs who come from surely tech backgrounds?

Yeah, that's, that's a great question that I, you know, thinking about it, I think what it probably does is allow it's, you learn a way of thinking in the consulting world to think about, really center your views on the problem that someone is trying to solve.

I don't even want to say client, but like, yeah, it allows you to be curious in a very focused way, and do things like really understand problems from first principles.

So I think that is probably the biggest area where I can apply it as I, I've been able to take a step back, really look at things from a first principles view, and then ask, could we do something different given, you know, the new ingredients, if you will, that we have in the mix of technology?

I think this is I think, everybody right?

Now, you know, we haven't talked about AI, but everybody's kind of doing this work a little bit on the AI side is like what, you know, what fundamental assumptions do I need to change in a world where I have a new tool in my toolbox? Yes.

Well, in funny, you should mention that because AI is absolutely next on my question list.

These days, whenever I hear the word productivity, I asked about AI, because Gen AI, I knew had mentioned it, I think you have something going on with some text assisting or something that you're using Gen AI, but talk a little bit about that.

And is it part of your innovation incubator area? Or has it been spreading throughout the various data analysis work and your chief data officer kind of things that are going on there?

Yeah, I'd actually say it's much broader than even now we have a group effectively, like an AI counsel that tries to look across all of the businesses is not just technologists, as technologists, as business leaders, where we're trying to connect, you know, the tool in the toolbox analogies, kind of the A good way to think about it, there are lots of areas in the business, like Northwestern Mutual, where we can apply AI, both traditional AI and kind of generative AI.

So on the traditional side, you know, finding ways to do more predictive modeling, leveraging things so we can make better decisions. We've been doing that for years or decades. You know, ostensibly, you can think of actual aerials.

And that whole process is kind of the early precursors to that. On the Gen AI side, really anything where we're predicting conversations, or summarizing conversation is an opportunity to utilize that.

And so you brought up, you know, our text areas, really, you look at summarization of conversations, one of the early places we experimented with that was in our tech, customer support was really easy place to implement, because it's on my team, we can implement and then what we saw was, we learned very quickly how to make it, and how to scale summarization for using Gen AI so that we could leverage that put it back into our contact center Tools.

Then, at that point are the folks that ran our contact centers for our clients, our claims process, all of these folks have very similar processes, they're for different purposes.

But you can start leveraging the learnings you have from one area and put it in in another and then take that to the next level.

You think of any place I need to summarize our conversation, whether it's this conversation or you know, a conversation with an advisor, you can see those same tools can be used, and I think we repeat that type of process where we try to get as many learnings quickly about a particular avenue of exploration, and then try to scale it as wide as we can.

That's really proven to be valuable for us. And you need all those, you need all the business leaders engaged and involved so that they can connect the dots. Not on a technology problem, but on a process or people problem.

They can look and say, Oh, I have a process that looks a lot like that. Could I use it here? And then the technologists who are also in the room?

You know, you absolutely can and probably should, A-ha, I know, they might be tempted to say, you're not doing that already.

Or, or that or that, or that, because actually, one of the things a lot of people find out software engineers is that they just kind of, they do cut right to the chase, kind of like, why aren't you doing that? Now? You know, sort of thing.

One, I wanted to follow up on one of the things about moving the Gen AI and other AI processes you're using, you had mentioned, when we talked earlier that it really highlights how important it is to have your customer data in good order.

And so talk about the kind of work that has been going on with you now as CIO, and perhaps even before that, to do that, because, you know, you've been around for 166 years, you know, Northwestern has a good amount of customer data, you were probably one of the first customers of IBM, you know, back in the day.

So and that's I'm sure that's true for banks and insurance companies across the country. So zero in a little bit on what, what that entails today getting customer data in good and better order, and how you involve your business colleagues in that as well.

Yeah, that's a great, that's a great question. And I, we were in fact, one of I think IBM is first mainframe customers, and what that that's both a blessing and maybe a bit of a curse.

Because you know, wind back to 1960 ish, the insurance industry was largely an industry that sold insurance policies.

Yeah, and the way that I like to talk about it is if I won't back to that there were probably someone who had a form in triplicate, with a policy application number at the top and that, you know, getting technical, a tiny bit technical for a second, like, it would be natural, as you were digitizing these systems to make that the primary key of all these records.

Well, what that meant is 40 5060 years later, you end up with the policy ideas, the center, the central concept of your data. But our company and our strategy has moved so that customer not policy is that or even household is really the center of our client relationship.

And so we have to shift with that. And really that been the big change that I've been championing is, let's move to a customer centric data model.

We really been working over the past couple of years as part of our broader text technology strategy to build a centralized customer record. And these aren't new concepts. So this is not like we're innovating on the concepts themselves.

But moving 100 As you highlight 160 odd year old company, to something that's very, where the data model is, as client centric as our business strategy has been a trick and a challenge because it's not like I can rewrite everything, stop business, tell our advisors, you know, go take a nine month vacation while we rebuild all the systems we have to operate while we do this, and, and that migration and change has really been it's been an amazing challenge, amazing opportunity and the team's.

I think one of the neat things that I've seen is that the teams at Northwestern Mutual immediately understood why we needed to do this.

In fact, many of them had been championing this concept for, you know, years, they saw the writing on the wall, we just needed to listen to them and let them execute.

We've just seen amazing progress on us connecting you know, from our CRM systems, to our policy administration systems, and then to our financial planning tools. And we're starting to we're really starting to see the benefits of where, whereas we might have cobbled together client centric things.

If I change an email address on a client, it might need to go to 20 different systems because we store the email address in each one. And that might take batch cycles and hours or even a day for it to propagate. When those things happen instantaneously.

Everyone from the advisor to the client to our support teams see the benefit. They're like wait, that just happened instantly. I no longer have to do all the things or explain away all The reasons why it was slow, I just know it's fast and done.

For, you know, the CIOs and people listening that don't have that kind of led legacy of challenges, you know, the only thing I can say is just wait a couple of decades.

And I think you'll start to see this, it also means that it's really important to have a good sense of where you're going, because you can do this along the way.

And I think one of the debates we have in the technology community is how do you manage that constant care and feeding and communicate that to the larger leadership? So you get to do this, and you get to constantly be with the business team not catching up? Yes.

Well, and if you're not talking about it in business terms, you'll have a lot of eyes crossing pretty quickly. Yeah, yeah. Let's wait.

We've been skirting around that that whole issue of legacy systems for a minute or two here now and I'd like to dive into that a little bit more, where are you in the technical debt journey, or whatever it may be, you call it modernization there, it may be a move to the cloud.

When you think about that, you know, that core, you probably somewhere in the company still have one of those original IBM mainframe. So where is Northwestern in that journey? And how, how are you getting there?

And I ask all that with the understanding that legacy is never ever gone. I mean, I've had a lot of CIOs tell me that, you know, Microsoft systems they put in seven years ago are now their legacies.

So you know, with all that in mind, what is your journey like there for the company?

Yeah, I like to think of it really as and this is why we talk about target state, because really, it's just the the distance between current state and target state is what what we get concerned about, or what we evaluate, and the further you get from that, really, then you just have to evaluate how impactful that is, and what limits that's putting on your aspirations as a business.

Within that context, you know, we're a few generations removed from those original mainframes.

But and to be clear, there, there are a lot of processes that a mainframe does really, really well, that's one of the things that we actually have to keep in mind is for incredibly cheap batch processing mainframes, like kind of are a great tool.

That's what they were built for. They work really well, the challenge is not are they inexpensive, or reliable or things like that. It's is the business logic embedded in those processes? Is that valid? Do we want to reuse that in a wider set of domains?

Do we need to make it? Do we need to reuse it in a real time fashion? These are?

These are questions that we ask that that those are really the impetus for maybe modernizing those particular avenues, I would say like, our goal is to really understand what are the opportunities? And what are the risks that we have with something that's very distant from our target state.

And that's how we prioritize. We also have really tried to tackle these problems kind of incrementally. You know, you I think, when we talked you you had talked to I think at one of your earlier shows someone had called the kind of like strangulation, right.

That's a that's a pretty common term on the on this where we, we identify ways to insulate our overall systems from the areas that we want to modernize, build interfaces in front of it that we can that are modern, and we can rely on and then eventually, we just modernize the business logic behind it at the pace that it makes sense, we've actually de risk the process along the way there because we have a modern interface in front of it.

Now what we're doing is removing the risk of like legacy tech that maybe has, maybe it's hard to find engineers for or maybe it's not aligned to our cybersecurity principles that we have all of those safety reasons why we do it, but we've done it in a way that maybe is safe for the rest of the organization.

Yeah. That is a I don't know Jenga puzzle type level of analysis that are in my enterprise architecture team. They think about that every day.

And they say like, what's the next little, I guess, wooden block if we're using that analogy that we're going to pull out to make sure that we keep moving alongs but doing it in a way that the whole tower doesn't fall?

That's actually a Very good analogy of what is it is like, because you could move a piece out of there and have a little bit of a rock slide somewhere else in the organization, you had mentioned that you've got a good portion of your infrastructure in the cloud now, do you find that are your vendor partners and your suppliers?

Are they urging you to go even more to the cloud is the ultimate, it often seems when I listened to the vendor community and what the tech industry is saying, They want everything in the cloud.

And that has never seemed realistic to me, for companies that in insurance and banking, and you know, with that enormous amount of customer data, especially from a cybersecurity standpoint, so what do you hear from your suppliers about that? And how much does that influence your thinking?

Well, I mean, I think if you talk to the cloud providers, they would, they're almost obligated to tell you that they should, you should move everything to the cloud. So they're obligated to lie to you then not necessarily lie. But like, that's their incentive. Right?

They are running a cloud business. And I think there will we get to a world where almost everything is in the cloud, that is potentially a future.

You know, you look at the flip side of it, are we going to be operating small to medium sized data centers inside our office buildings, I think we've probably sorted out that that's not a future that anyone anticipates the scale and innovation that these large providers can bring.

Whether it's colocation companies, or cloud is really, you know, difficult for even a fortune 100 company, like we just, we're not investing billions of dollars in data centers, Microsoft, announced in our neck of the woods here in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, that they're investing several billion dollars in a number of data centers that they're going to build over the course of call it six months, that is a scale of investment, that is just that we have to find a way to leverage it's a huge opportunity.

And I think even on the cybersecurity side, much of the innovation in the cybersecurity world is happening in SaaS providers and cloud providers. So I think you're seeing this as an avenue and an engine of innovation.

Great thing for us, like we are able to take advantage of that. Now along the way, are we forcing ourselves to move things to the cloud, because we like, you know, the term cloud versus on prem datacenter? Yeah.

Like, that's not why we're doing things that allow us, you know, really to be able to be more productive, run things at a either really run things more more cheaply, that could be like a lower base cost, it could be that we can take advantage of kind of scalability to deal with, you know, flexes in our demand.

And then also really aligned to talent and skill sets over the long term. So that we make sure we have the right people working on these things. And, and that can happen in a variety of ways.

So I'd say we hear from folks, they have opinions all the time. And in a lot of cases, we're we are partnering and innovating alongside whether it's cloud providers or our partners in a variety of ways. Yeah.

How are you finding, especially since the pandemic years and all the changes that had to happen in a lot of tech organizations? Are you finding that it is easier to establish a partnership kind of relationship with the tech suppliers in the vendor community?

Or is it kind of the same old issue about you know, like, this is gonna save you so much money, but it will take 10 years, you know, I mean, there's always a lot of, I guess, enthusiasm and promises in any kind of new technology.

I think we're all seeing that with AI these days. So are you finding more opportunities for partnership from the tech suppliers? I think our partners at at least at Northwestern Mutual have been very collaborative.

We try to keep good relationships and really focus our relationships at a strategic level. Make it so that we are as much of the time we're not talking about cost and delivery, although those are important considerations.

We want to understand where are they going and how aligned is that to where we're going? And the overlap of where our strategies kind of align.

And we've seen this in a number of places where as we start talking, we realize that There are opportunities that maybe we didn't anticipate. And I think those having those constant conversations at a strategic level really help us uncover the places where we can work together.

So it's, we really and, look, you can't do this with every partner you have, but the ones that are big in our strategic, we really try to keep it that level.

Because I think you brought up earlier, how do we bring in information about the state of technology or AI? Be, you know, one of the avenues is seeing where our suppliers are moving?

Understanding where they're moving gives us a lot of information on what's the future going to look like. And you had mentioned that innovation incubator. Tell us a little bit more about that. Is that do they bring in kind of people from the research labs at big tech vendors?

Or do they travel around a lot? I've heard so many CIOs talk about taking their entire leadership team out to Silicon Valley, you know, and wandering around for a couple of days meeting with, you know, startups and that kind of thing.

How much of that do you do at Northwestern and is that what the Innovation Incubator folks are busy? Our incubator, I mean, they are constantly talking across not just Silicon Valley, but any place, there's where we can bring ideas and innovation into Northwestern Mutual.

And really looking at it pretty far out from a horizon standpoint. My teams are at various points talking.

They've done trips, not just to Silicon Valley, but we you know, we have one of our big offices is in New York, and we are able to bring in some of the best of, you know, interesting startups, but also innovation inside of larger companies as well, to really identify where we can, and where we should move forward.

I think this is really a to maybe answer your question, like we encourage, and I encourage all of our teams to have connections to the research community have connections to the wider technology industry, because you never know, like, it's not just one person's job to find out where that next area of innovation is going to be.

It's kind of my team's job. Yeah, well on it, as I think you pointed out at one point, when we were talking that technology is always a team sport. So it is that kind of thing.

Let us let's pivot over to talk about I mentioned the 4000 or so technologists, you have the in the tech organization at Northwestern, what is the scope of an organization of how you've got all those brilliant folks working for you to deliver the value that you need to to the rest of the business?

Talk about that a little bit about kind of the size and scope and how you how you have everybody organized? Yeah, so we, um, we really have that split into kind of two main areas.

We have our delivery organization, this application developers, product managers, whatnot, they're in a group that is really focused on delivering the code the application capabilities. And, and that's led by actually a peer of mine.

And then on the technology side, you know, as we talked about earlier, cybersecurity, Enterprise Architecture, infrastructure, workplace, and then all the feedback mechanisms, whether it's like customer support, or application support, or reliability, all those areas are we have together and we really run as one unit, because all of those areas all feed into each other.

You know, as we talked, we just spent a bunch of time talking about the cloud. And as we move more things to cloud, it has to be architected, we have to understand what the right architecture is for a cloud based application.

And then we don't just lift and shift things into the cloud, we make sure that they're ready to be cloud enabled, if we're going to move it that requires all those teams working together, and also communicating to our business partners on the on the other end that this is all happening.

Because you know, if we really talk legacy applications, there's a period of time where we were loading applications onto people's laptops. That's probably the 1990s era windows. Yeah. Or there's a few of those in Northwestern Mutual that we're, you know, we're not going to cloud enable that.

But we are going to rebuild that into a platform that makes more sense.

And so I think all of those folks come together that's generally how we have an architect that we have the organizational structure to manage, you know, What is, you know, in some ways the engine of the of an information company like an insurer? Yeah.

And do you with a team that large Do you have essentially, kind of a second level of CIOs that are more directly they report to you. And they report also maybe into one of the business unit presidents do you do that sort of structure.

So one of the unique things about Northwestern Mutual is we have, we really have one p&l, we do not have divisions that have their own p&l cells, which is, which is very cool, it means we can run a very integrated strategy.

What that means is our the organization is actually divided function. There's a leader for cybersecurity, there's a leader for infrastructure, there's a leader for application engineering and development.

And those folks own the entire scope of the business for that domain, which means we can really take advantage of scale, but they need, that's why I highlighted they each need to coordinate very closely with with each other, cybersecurity RC. So for example.

So for everything needs to work with each of the areas to make sure that they are they are maintaining the highest level of security or meeting our standards and policies in that area across the board.

For us, because our business is also organized that way, it's worked really, really well. Yeah, and I think you mentioned too, that the you've worked at like an Orbitz was a global company, as the VP of engineering, you were dealing with teams all around the world.

But you said one of the benefits at Northwestern was that you've only got four time zones to deal with instead of 12. To be clear, our business is US based. So our advisors, our leadership teams.

Most of our employees are in the United States, we do use some providers who are outside of those four time zones, but it really does allow us to focus and get really close to the business and connect to the problems at hand.

So that's been the coordination has been a little bit simpler here. Yeah.

Now as we're heading into the remainder of this year, and then 2025, which sounds like such a huge, futuristic number, you know, when you think about the way times houses, what are your most pressing, talent acquisition and retention strategies?

How are you approaching this future that you've got so many moving parts to deal with? Yeah, it's a great question. One of the things that I think we're seeing is we're really focused at this moment on talent retention. Yes.

Versus I think you've you rewind a couple of years, and really talent acquisition and getting the right people who had those skills was essential week, for the most part, we have great folks that are aligned to our strategy on the team right now.

And making sure we can retain them, we can grow them, give them a career that they really value and appreciate is, and that challenges them is essential for us here at Northwestern Mutual, one of the neat things that, you know, to take a something that we've done, that I've done in other organizations is we've implemented a technical career track here.

So that has, I think, really given a home for someone who is a great engineer, or a great cybersecurity person or a you know, an amazing product manager, but doesn't want to grow by building a team.

And man, you find out afterwards that your, your primary job is to manage a team. There's some people I love, personally, that team building management.

But I know a lot of folks and earlier in my career, I probably thought I was one of these who I just want to be a leader of technology. Yeah. And that's something that we've been able to implement here.

And that I think has been received really well from those, you know, technology, those technologists who do you want that to be their career path? You see this at Google and Amazon and when we were at Orbitz, we did the same thing.

And I think that's a that's really an essential part of having a great technology, culture and organization is you need people who can be those aspirations for, you know, the person straight out of school who's like, I love writing software, or I love building infrastructure.

What can I do and you see someone who's been doing it for 20 years loves it and is focused on being the best technologists they can. It's a really cool thing and we've seen that really pay dividends already in terms of engagement and retention.

Yeah, when you'd mentioned to at Northwestern, you have a couple of years. Probably four generations of workers that are at the company. I mean, there's the there's newbies, there's kids out of college all up to people that have been there for 40 years.

The how, how do you approach bringing in outside talent to that? It's I mean, it's great to have on your base and your best in Milwaukee, I imagine how much of your team is remote now working in other.

In other areas, we actually have a sizable number of remote workers, especially on the technology side.

And this is a challenge, I think this is really going to be one of the peak human resource challenges of I mean, years is we, with the, you know, pandemic with our digital tools, we were able to attract and make productive folks no matter where they were just like our advisors, no matter where they were in, in the world, in the United States for us.

And then the question is, how do you give those folks a sense of purpose, a sense of belonging, a career path within your company, and you have to make sure all these things that were kind of embedded and implicit become an explicit?

And you know, do I think we have this totally figured out? Absolutely not? I think we recognize it's a challenge. 100%.

And I think one of the, you know, one of the neat things we have going for us at Northwestern Mutual, maybe this is just like a Midwest thing is having lived outside of the US outside of the Midwest, is this really notion of collaboration and relationship building is really strong at Northwestern Mutual.

Yeah.

And I think that connection, and that, that need to be connected, I think helps us when we bring in remote folks, when we identify gaps in talent, that I think that's one of the reasons we've really understood that we need to identify talent, not just in Milwaukee, not just in New York, but like across the United States and the world, is there simply things that we need done that there, there are skills that don't exist in the markets we're at, or at least don't exist yet.

And we need to find the right people to work. And then we need to make sure they're engaged and aligned to where we're trying to go as a company.

Well, you know, in a lot, I've seen this happen a lot with technology professionals, where the great big corporate entities, it becomes too difficult for them to feel deeply connected, you know, to their mission and their purpose. And they head off to startups.

I mean, very much the way you did when you join different financial planning companies, software companies, how do you take what you learned from working in those collaborative environments and apply it to a tech organization with 4000 people in it?

What are some of the approaches that you've introduced that, you know, kind of bring that feeling to the greater the much bigger organization you're now? Yeah, I think I'm just having that.

And I think this is one of the nice things about having the mix of folks that have been here a couple years, folks that have been here 40 years, people from inside the organization and outside is really trying to I try to just highlight and bring in concepts that help us move towards whatever strategies we have.

In as, as just the world becomes more digital becomes more aligned to kind of how technology teams work. It really is a team sport. And so I think really bringing that notion into the company and thinking about how we the implications of how we might work differently.

That's really been an area where I've tried to be vocal about it. I think one of the nice things is, you know, when I brought up the collaboration or relationship, nature of our culture, people have accepted it with open arms. There's not like a hesitation to do this.

That's really great, because I think they see, well, this is how I wanted to operate anyways. I'm now just seeing that I can.

This is an opportunity for us to tweak how we organize and really be that really make it a team sport, whether it's at the senior level or at the individual, you know, Scrum team level, if you will.

Yeah, that just sound like a very coach like kind of attitude. As a technology leader, Have you always had did this sort of coach team sport approach?

How has your leadership style grown or changed as you've gone from advisory roles strategy with like Capgemini, and then on to engineering and now into the 娇色导航role? Yeah.

You and I thinking that it's impossible that you'd be the same type of leader, you were 15 years ago as you are now. So what have you learned?

And what would you like to advise others who are interested, maybe getting more interested in a path to CIO, I think there's probably two big learnings that I've had over my career that have helped me, you know, the first one is, I mentioned this earlier, at some point, you know, if you are a technologist, like your aspiration, probably at least it wasn't Mike case, to just be the very best technologist I could be.

And that kind of singular focus on being a great individual contributor, and just being great at my job that worked in that fashion.

But if you want to expand your leverage, and you want to be a great manager, you want to run a great team, you have to invert that. And you have to figure out ways to get your team members to be the very best they can be.

Everybody has their own style there. But I think, at least being aware that you have, like getting over the hurdle of what your job is, that was a big hurdle. And that, for me, happened relatively early in my managerial career, I guess.

The next hurdle that I think really was the thing that you realize, when you become a 娇色导航or as you you really are a business leader. First, you happen to run a technology organization, I think it's really helpful to have a solid foundation in technology, concepts, engineering, etc.

So that that is not the thing you have to learn.

Because you have to expend your energy and your time on the peers you have, whether it's the CFO or the CMO, or you know, the heads of various business lines, and whatever context you have, those are your peers.

And those are the folks you need to make sure you understand the challenges you have, and understand the challenges your business have and connect the dots because they're going to help you achieve all the things you need done so that your Pearson is so different, that learning how to talk in their language.

We've talked about this, and you know, a number of times here is that that business strategy side, I think, has really been the thing that I've had to lean on most over the past two years. Okay.

Well, when I think of all the many hundreds and 1000s of articles that were written in technology, media and those kinds of publications over the years, it was always about technology, people learning about the business, and the almost with all the popularity of AI, and the fact that we're walking around with little supercomputers on our cell phones now, I almost feel like the paradigm has reversed itself a bit.

And then people on the business side are really open to learning more about technology and taking part in these kinds of discussions like but I don't maybe I'm being a Pollyanna about that. It sounds like you might be seeing that kind of effect at Northwestern.

I think you really can be that wilderness guide, if you will. Sometimes I use that. We all know where we want to go. But you need sometimes some help getting there.

And yeah, as technology as the guy to help show you the way I think I think you're onto something there. Okay. All right. Well, that's very kind of you. And it's been really great talking to you today. Jeff, thanks so much for joining us.

Okay, if you joined us late today, you can watch the full episode later today here on LinkedIn, but also on cio.com and on our 娇色导航channel on YouTube. Leadership live is also available as an audio podcast wherever you find your podcasts.

And I hope that you enjoyed listening in on this conversation today with Jeff Sippel, who is the EVP and 娇色导航of Northwestern Mutual. I'll be back again later this month on Wednesday, June 26, with 娇色导航Marty Menard of Pacific Coast Companies.

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Thanks so much for joining us today and thanks again to Jeff and everybody take care and I'll see you here in a few weeks.