Kim Pfiffner is Vice President and Chief Information Officer of US Insurance Solutions with Principal Financial Group. She joined Principal as a developer and has held many leadership roles, including leading Data Services, Enterprise Architecture, Application Development and Support, Information Services Project Office, Enterprise Data and Applications, and Group Benefits. She is a Fellow of the Life Management Institute and earned her bachelor’s in marketing from Iowa State University. She spoke with Novarica in late April 2020.
How has the pandemic changed your company’s technology priorities?
We recently did a review overall of operational plans and high-level initiatives to evaluate potential shifts. From a planning perspective—the majority of our initiatives are continuing as planned.
There are pieces of our portfolio where we’ve accelerated the things we were doing, especially in digital. For example, we had the use of electronic medical records in underwriting as part of an innovation program, but we accelerated that due to pressures on the medical community and to help our customers mitigate the need to obtain labs and medical records from their doctors.
And there are projects that we said we should slow or shift focus. Now is not the time to be reaching out to small businesses to gather their feedback on new ideas as they are focused—rightly so—on taking care of their employees and running their businesses.
In that market, we are asking, “How can we help our clients in this environment?” We deployed resources on our website to help them understand some of the legislation and navigate the situation. We’ve also done a lot of proactive outreach to let them know we’re there for them. We’ve done things like extend grace periods, support new provider delivery models like teledentistry while waiving the frequency limits for those visits during the crisis, and other things to make it a little easier for them.
How do you think your customer engagement model will change in the aftermath, especially with regard to digital business processes?
If you look for the silver lining, one thing to come out of this is that we’ve accelerated everyone’s comfort level with interacting digitally. When face-to-face is taken away, people are embracing things that might have had a slower adoption rate. I think digital interactions are here to stay. We’re going to see continued use of virtual meetings, leveraging online applications instead of paper, and our use of electronic medical records. I think this is going to accelerate and create more demand for digital services as a default. From a technology standpoint, our job will be to make that engaging for our customers. I think we’ll see it in new segments that weren’t demanding as much before.
I’ve kept a list of bright spots during this to stay focused on the positive through all of this. One of those for me has been hearing recognition of some of the digital investments that we’ve made in the past 3-5 years and how much they’ve paid off. For example, we didn’t have to scramble to get the organization set up for work from home. There has been a better understanding of how those investments helped us pivot.
How do you think this will change the business/IT relationship and working model?
Our teams are all Agile teams. What we’ve valued is co-location of teams. We’ve had remote employees, but co-location was a big part of our working model. It’s been interesting to watch those strong teams pivot to not being together. There’s a difference between one remote individual in a co-located team, and 100% remote teams. It’s actually easier when everyone is remote.
We’ve created extremely strong relationships between product managers and owners and engineers. That strong relationship was already there, and it’s been foundational to being able to pivot in this time. I think building those relationships remotely in the future may be more challenging, but we will figure it out.
I think we’re going to learn a lot with our internship program this summer. Our teams value the ability to pair or mob, but they’re figuring out how to do that remotely. We are committed to making it an engaging and productive experience for the interns.
There’s a lot of ways of working that we never tested because we didn’t have to, but now we have made them work. The structure is really going to depend on how long this lasts and the potential for additional waves. Will we be comfortable putting six people around a mobbing station again? It’s too early to tell.
How have you and your team leveraged the Novarica relationship?
I have a great relationship with Novarica; we touch base regularly, and it’s always engaging and insightful. I’ve hugely appreciated the weekly virtual calls during this time. I’ve been joining every week. Listening to insights from others helps broaden our thinking and stops us from focusing too much on our internal world as we make plans for the future.
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