Patti Kliegl is an Assistant Vice President of IT and CIO in the Retirement and Income Solutions Business Unit of the Principal Financial Group. Kliegl joined the company in 1995 and has held a number of different positions within the IT organization. She was promoted to her current position in 2014 and currently has responsibility for the information technology areas that support the Annuities, Individual Investor and Principal Bank businesses at Principal Financial Group. A military brat, Kliegl has lived all over the United States as well as in Europe. She earned her bachelor’s degree from Drake University in Des Moines, Iowa. Patti was interviewed for the Novarica Update in 2018.
What are some of your key initiatives for the next six to 12 months?
We’re on a platform modernization journey that we believe will have a transformational impact on our organization. Not just because we’ll have a new administrative service platform, but also because of the anticipated impact the new platform will have on our business processes, staffing model, skillset needs, etc. It’s a significant investment for us and one that we’re excited about.
We also have a lot of focus across the enterprise on our direct-to-consumer strategy. Principal® is investing heavily in this strategy, and annuities are certainly included in that vision. We remain committed to our third-party distribution model and to the advisors who sell and service our products. And we believe there is a growing segment of customers who don’t work with advisors but are still interested in the protection that guaranteed income can provide.*
The other thing we’re experimenting with is Robotic Process Automation (RPA) and AI/predictive analytics. We’ve had some successes, and have learned the importance of picking the right use cases. We’re just trying to be really thoughtful regarding where and how we leverage these technologies.
How do you see changes in the business environment affecting your IT priorities?
Today, our portfolio consists primarily of product development and product enhancement initiatives. Unfortunately, these initiatives take a ton of IT time because of our current infrastructure and service platform. One of the reasons we’re moving to a new platform is to get IT out of that critical path. Implementing this change should help us modernize our infrastructure into one that’s more configurable than the current platform. This shift means that efforts requiring IT staff today won’t require nearly as much IT staff in the future. That work can be done by our internal business partners, which should free up our IT staff to focus on efforts that are not product specific.
So, while it may take just as long to get a new product on the market, IT shouldn’t be the critical path like it maybe is today. Plus, IT will then be able to better focus its work on creating self-serve capabilities and a much more modern customer and advisor experience.
Additionally, our business is also increasing its demand for data for decision-making purposes. This means we need to make sure that the data is available and consumable as well.
What do you think are some of the biggest challenges for IT leaders?
I believe our biggest challenge is talent acquisition and management. Technologies are changing so quickly, it’s hard to keep up! In the past we’ve looked for very specific skillsets—such as a certain development language, or business analysis skills, testing, project management, etc. Today, we want software engineers who can do it all, or at least have the capacity and mindset to try to do it all and to step in wherever help is needed to get the job done. That is a very different model than what we’ve had in the past.
Of course, security continues to be top of mind. It’s a challenge to keep up with the bad guys. It can be difficult to balance “easy to do business with” and the need to keep access to our customers’ information and money safe and secure, but it’s a balance we work to strike every day.
Finally, continuing to find time to innovate and experiment can be a challenge. There’s so much work to get done that it’s difficult to carve out time for innovation and experimentation. We have to figure out how to get better at that.
What new technologies or methodologies do you think have the biggest potential to have a positive impact in the short term?
We’ve been a scaled agile shop for a few years and have seen some good success with that. It’s really positioned us to make better decisions about priorities and be able to pivot quickly. It’s also created transparency around work that’s needed, which has proven to be very valuable.
We see a lot of opportunity in technologies like RPA, AI and predictive analytics. As I mentioned earlier, we can’t assume these technologies are the solution for everything, because they’re not. Selecting the right use cases and being willing to experiment and fail is critical to long-term success.
How have you and your team leveraged your Novarica relationship over the years?
We teamed with Novarica on our policy administration journey. They validated the need for a new platform and helped us identify our critical success factors. They also facilitated the entire vendor selection process for us. Leveraging Novarica and their structured selection process was a key enabler in terms of bringing experience and market expertise to the table.
We also find a lot of value in leveraging Novarica’s online research library as part of our day-to-day work and have gotten value out of attending the roundtables and special interest group meetings. We’ve developed stronger peer relationships as a result.
In recent years we’ve really started to take advantage of our relationship with Novarica. We’re grateful for the very helpful and positive relationship.
* Guarantees are based upon the claims-paying ability of the issuing insurance company
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