Brad Bodell is SVP and CIO at Trustmark. Prior to joining Trustmark, he was CIO at CNO Financial Group and held IT leadership roles at MetLife. He has a BS in Industrial Engineering and a master’s in Management from Northwestern University. He spoke with Novarica in early 2021.
What are your top priorities for the next 6-12 months?
The top priority is cybersecurity. We have several programs that we’re strengthening, including ID access management, multi-factor authentication, limiting internet traffic from countries we don’t do business with, and other initiatives. We’re also automating the credentialing process for both internal and external users.
In terms of business capabilities, we’re investing in our digital channels and experience, leveraging microservices to stream data out of our mainframe, and moving toward an omni-channel experience. We’re also investing in data quality and in our analytics team.
Organizationally, we’re focusing on improving our software engineering process and capabilities. We just consolidated our IT organization, and we’re hiring a new VP of software engineering. We’ve had our internal engineers doing too much maintenance rather than new development. We’re still a buy-rather-than-build shop, but we are investing in our teams’ skills for key platforms like our CRM, data lake, and core systems. It’s important that we can control our own destiny for these platforms to drive future success. As part of our reorganization, we’re also creating new job families for all roles and personalized training paths.
We’re drafting out future-state architecture and working on portfolio rationalization. We have hundreds of applications, including multiple implementations of the same platform in some areas—just like most insurers. We’re strengthening our enterprise architecture function with the goal of being able to reduce run-the-business costs and invest in new capabilities and innovation.
We’re also continuing our Agile journey, moving from projects to products. Our business units really like Agile; they like having the relationship with the product owners and working together to set direction, and we’re able to move more quickly. We’re working through the funding model for the durable teams now.
What do you think has been the biggest impact of the pandemic on your technology strategy?
It has really accelerated digital adoption. We now get almost half our claims through digital channels. We’re facilitating auto-adjudication where appropriate, and we’re continuing to invest in other digital capabilities, like billing.
The pandemic has demonstrated the importance of moving with clarity and purpose on omni-channel capabilities. With Agile, we can move faster than we think we can.
Like Satya Nadella at Microsoft said, during the beginning of the pandemic we had two years of innovation in two months. The sense of what’s possible has changed—for our customers, our distributors, our team members, and our executives.
How has the relationship between IT and other business units evolved over the past year?
IT got a lot of kudos for enabling our transition to a virtual work environment. One of the things we did that has really strengthened the business-IT relationship was that we created an IT buddy system for people who’ve never worked from home before. We took our application developers and assigned them each ten employees to support during the transition. Not only did that make the transition go much more smoothly, but we built stronger personal relationships between developers and business stakeholders throughout the organization. Along with Agile, this has really strengthened the bond between business and IT.
We built a lot of organizational trust through this process, which has made it easier to get the resources we need.
What do you see as some of the biggest challenges ahead?
Cybersecurity and ransomware are going to continue to be a threat for everyone, but beyond that the biggest challenge is to ensure we have the right talent and skills to execute efficiently and effectively during this time of rapid change.
Which emerging technologies are you most interested in and excited about?
We’re already doing a lot with robotic process automation—we’ve got 100 bots in production. We’re exploring opportunities in low-code/no-code and enabling citizen developers, and we’re exploring the possibilities of leveraging AI and machine learning.
How have you and your team leveraged the Novarica relationship?
We’ve used Novarica to help choose our core system, and it went really well. It was the first time we’ve used an outside consulting group for a process like that. I talk with Novarica’s leadership team regularly, and our digital team is actively engaged with both the research and the advisory team. The great thing about the Novarica relationship is that it’s not restricted, and anyone in our organization can take advantage of it.
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