Jose Martinez is SVP and CIO at OneAmerica, where he is accountable for all IT planning, program delivery management, cybersecurity, and support functions for the organization. Prior to joining OneAmerica, he held roles at Interactive Intelligence and IBM. He earned a bachelor of science and master’s degree in mechanical engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology and completed an advanced management executive program from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. He spoke with Novarica in late 2020.
What are your top priorities for the next 6-12 months?
With the pandemic, our most recent priority was getting the whole company fully productive in a remote environment, which we did. We’re at +97% remote, and we did it in less than four weeks when this all started. Over the next six to twelve months, our main priorities are enhancing key business capabilities like virtual enrollment, accelerated underwriting, and improving our automated engine for evidence of insurability.
Security is also top of mind, of course, with a focus on both assets and data in this more distributed and mobile environment. Application migration to the cloud continues to be a big focus, as does data architecture modernization, and we’re continuing to enhance our web experience and also provide a mobile experience.
Finally, we’re accelerating our RPA practice. We’re in our second year with RPA, and we have a nice pipeline of opportunities throughout the company. We have about 10-15 robots deployed, mostly in operations, to enable straight-through processing, eliminating a lot of manual tasks and increasing accuracy. As an example, in our employee benefits and enterprise operations areas, we streamlined segments of onboarding and claims processing to reduce human intervention requirements. We’re expanding heavily into our individual life area now.
What do you think has been the biggest impact of the pandemic environment on your technology strategy?
The demand for IT was already there, but it’s skyrocketed with the pandemic. It’s intensified our need for digital capabilities such as virtual enrollment, for example. It’s created more opportunity for IT to partner with the business and provide critical value.
Our technology team not only made the company highly mobile, but we’ve digitized a lot of the processes that people never thought would be digitized. We’ve debunked a lot of myths along the way. There were many fixed ideas about the necessity of our office-based and paper-based processes. As a company, we’ve demonstrated what we can do with a remote workforce and virtualized processes. For us, it’s not about work from home; it’s about work from anywhere. That allows us to recruit and attract talent from a broader pool, gives more flexibility to our associates, and it makes us faster in all we do.
How has the relationship between IT and other business units evolved over the past year?
IT built confidence, which led to more trust, and that trust has allowed us to be more creative, more collaborative, and more open with each other throughout the enterprise. There’s a closeness now because of everything that happened and how IT showed up to support the company and ensure we remained productive in this virtual environment. There’s a real invitation to collaborate on solutions, and it’s an immensely positive shift.
What do you see as some of the biggest challenges ahead?
The war on talent is amplified. If we can hire anywhere in the nation, that means our people can also work for anyone else, anywhere else. We need to remain focused on our associate experience, development paths, and opportunities for mobility within the company to continue to retain and attract our very best talent.
The demand for IT was already high, and it’s increasing. That forces us to manage differently; we have to source differently and work with our strategic partners more closely. The intensified demand also puts more pressure on our planning and governance processes. Our strategic portfolio has increased in size tremendously. We’ve always had good governance and alignment, and we’ve made our processes more iterative and agile with more frequent communication.
Cyber activity has seen elevated activity in the last five months, and that’s not stopping. Bad actors are taking advantage of the situation now with increased phishing, malware, ransomware, etc. We are seeing increased activity and sometimes impact to our partners and customers we work with. Cybersecurity and overall IT risk management is always top of mind for me.
Which emerging technologies are you most interested in and excited about?
We’re focused on data modernization—getting data to the fingertips of our business users faster and making it easier to consume. That’s a key goal of our cloud and data platform strategy. We’re not looking at AI yet, but I’d see that on the horizon in the next couple of years.
How have you and your team leveraged the Novarica relationship?
I’ve been joining the virtual meetings, and the entire team is engaged in the research library. The way Novarica is structured specifically for the insurance industry is very powerful for us.
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