Transcript
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0:00
Venky Ananth
Welcome to PaceSetters. I'm absolutely excited and honored to have Marv Richardson join us today. Marv is a veteran technology professional. He's a seasoned industry player, has deep experience in health care, and in fact, multiple verticals across insurance, banking, capital markets. And he is actually a big proponent of being digital, and I'm absolutely excited to have him here. He was a CIO of HCSC till recently, and before that, worked with Alliance Chase and Royal Bank of Canada. Welcome to PaceSetters, Marv.
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00:42
Marvin Richardson
Thank you. I'm honored to be here.
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00:43
Venky Ananth
Awesome. First off, I want to really cover digital, and you are being a big proponent of being digital. And if I look at the kind of time that you spent in the last few years, particularly you spend a lot of time conceptualizing, actually delivering digital. You reimagined customer journeys for a fairly large health plan. You kind of looked at how to deliver improvement on Net Promoter Score, customer satisfaction. How do you bring in kind of a digital first kind of paradigm in every member interactions with the enterprise. So share with us some real world wisdom. What are the gotchas out there? What are the strategic, operational and execution challenges that one faces in the field, and how do you actually overcome them? Any nuggets of wisdom would be great.
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01:46
Marvin Richardson
Great. Okay, well, that's a tall order, but I'm happy to tackle it. I know that being digital or digital transformation, I think we constantly see it on the list of CEO's top priorities. So it's still there at the top of that list. And it's kind of interesting that it's still there because being digital isn't new. I always like to tell people, and I brought a prop with me just to show it is. This particular book, Being Digital by Nicholas Negroponte, who is the chair of the MIT Media Lab, wrote this book, wonderful book that really talks about what it's like to be digital from a society and from a systems point of view. It was written in 1995. That's the same year I got married. My wife reminds me that's 27 years ago. And so that's a long time for this same topic to fit at the top of any agenda. And so what does it mean today versus what Nicholas Negroponte wrote 27 years ago, versus what we just generally think about as digital? So from a CEO perspective, I think the best way to figure out what CEOs want, or for anyone listening, what their CEOs want is what's the outcome they're striving for.
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02:52
Marvin Richardson
And the first thing they're looking for is highly satisfied customers. The second thing they're looking for is highly responsive and predictive products and services that are delivered to those customers. And they want all of that on top of a value chain that's highly adaptive and efficient. And so those are the three things. When a CEO says they want digital transformation, they're going after those things. They don't really care about the word digital, the word transformation in their minds, it's been locked in that that's a way that they can deliver on that promise. So what does that mean for us technologists? Does it mean that we digitize all the processes that are out there? Well, I think we did that with ERP probably as long ago as this book was written. So it is that, but it's much more so is it connecting to the customer digitally? So, yes, but we've done that. We've connected to the customer on the Web for 20 years. We've done it on mobile platforms over the last decade. So we've got that. So it's that, but it's more. And that gets a little bit now to the kind of Net Promoter Score thing that you mentioned.
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03:58
Marvin Richardson
What do you do that takes that digital process, or digital value chain, takes that digital connection with the customer and then really, injects learnings from that into the rest of your ecosystem, I'd call that a digital nervous system. So a digital nervous system is taking that feedback from a Net promoter score and really understanding it, analysing it, figuring out what you can do to improve it, structuring those into work that your teams can take on whether it's work on the actual customer interface or whether it's work deeper in your value chain and then quickly doing that work, measuring it again. It's that cycle that changes your company from something that's kind of efficient because you've got a lot of digital stuff into something that's adaptive, flexible, and really tailors itself to what customers care about.
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04:50
Venky Ananth
Now, you spoke about the digital nervous system, and honestly, in my opinion, data covers that digital nervous system, but data is everywhere. It's of no use by itself. But when you move that from a data to a value continuum, then you start to begin getting insights, then drive next best action. And so in your world, and I know, for that matter, you in your recent past drove a massive data migration program onto an Azure platform. And then from there, you actually drove programs like price transparency. You drove care management. How do you drive customer 360 degree view out of that data asset that you built and essentially drove that data to value program? What's been your experience and what is your advice on how you tackle such complex programs? And again, what are the execution challenges one faces, and what do you look out for? How do you get ahead of them and be successful with it?
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06:00
Marvin Richardson
Right. Yeah, if I can tackle that kind of I'll talk about it broadly, but give you some specifics. Thank you, too. So I want to be sure that I'm representing my own personal experience, but also I spend a lot of time with other CIOs of healthcare payers, and we've all wrestled with some of these same challenges. So some of the lessons that I have maybe to share come from that whole set of colleagues. The first challenge is when you're trying to get your data organized and you want to get it to be more accessible, the cloud can be a great solution for it. The cloud is something though, that often your CFOs might think, hey, that's a place I'm going to save some money because it's a kind of a popular notion that the cloud is cheaper. But in general, if you're just loading up stuff and storing it there forever or and you have regular processes that just run every day, kind of same load, the cloud is probably not that much cheaper, if at all. And from what we're seeing from people, the big tech companies like Google and Microsoft, Amazon, ETC. Is that they're having higher financial demands placed on them by their shareholders and they're probably not going to be in a place where they are having price reductions at the same way that maybe we've seen in the past.
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07:21
Marvin Richardson
So you need to be really sure of why you're putting your data there and what you're going to do with it. So it's not primarily a cost led thing, with one really big exception that's really important for turning data to value. When you have analytic models, you want to run whether it's big machine learning models or et cetera, and you want to run those periodically, you want to surge to a huge amount of capacity, run them quickly, and then come back down in that kind of a mode, then getting your data in the Cloud is the path to value, because there's no way that you can afford to do that yourself. And so I really recommend that people and what I've seen other companies do, people really focus on understanding how they're going to use it and making sure they're getting that great fit.
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08:06
Venky Ananth
Fantastic.
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08:07
Marvin Richardson
Yeah.
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08:07
Venky Ananth
Now I couldn't agree more with you.
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08:09
Marvin Richardson
Sorry, I was going to add on to something because one of the returns we talk about a lot in healthcare is Next Best action, which is a very general concept where what's the next best thing for a patient to do for a person in a contact center talking to a patient to do? For a doctor to do? I mean, there's a lot of places you can use this. All those places are well informed by this kind of approach where you take the data and you do two things with it. One, you analyze your historic data and see what kinds of next actions in any of those kind of use cases were most effective. And then you train based on that information and then you suggest those actions in the mode. So you're telling your contact center person who's talking to a member that you should suggest also getting your dental appointment or whatever the next action is. But then you track that and you inject that back into the data. Again, the same thing I was talking about with being digital, if you just calculate your next best action and do it without measuring it and measuring how effective it is, trying it in different ways, A/B testing and seeing what's more effective.
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09:18
Marvin Richardson
And injecting that back, if you just do it one time, you're not really being digital, you're getting data to value and then it stops. If you want to get the kind of exponential value from data, then you've got to be improving it along the journey.
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09:29
Venky Ananth
Makes sense. Mark, just on that, I have a question. You speak about using feedback loops to kind of feed that back into the teams so that they can kind of build on that. But the question is, do the teams really have time to take those feedback loops? Because there's already a huge backlog of user stories to build. Everybody's racing against time. How do you really kind of balance feedback loops and the information that you're getting from customer feedback acts and consumer feedback back into the user stories that you're building and grooming? Plus you have a whole lot of backlogs that you have to deliver on. So how do you do that balancing act?
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10:12
Marvin Richardson
Yeah, that is a really insightful question because it's spot on. One of the biggest issues. Almost every product team I know has more to do than they can do, and they generally get a lot of that feedback from inside their own company. You've got business users, customer representatives, all kinds of people who have great new ideas for what they want, whatever the product is, to what they want it to tackle next. So just take it as a given. There's going to always be 200% more work than you can do. But if you don't prioritize the customer feedback, then you're building to the wrong North Star. The customer feedback is the North Star and so you've got to reserve. And this takes organizational discipline, which is in sometimes, depending on the company, can be advancingly short supply. But organizational discipline to say, I am always going to reserve at least 20% of my capacity to address customer feedback issues and test them and then get more feedback and keep making those changes and keep that loop going. 20% is a minimum, should never drop below that. And in cases where in a market where perhaps your customer feedback is your customer sat, is lagging your competitors, you should be a lot higher than 20%, but you should never drop below that because you will fall behind your competition.
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11:31
Marvin Richardson
The digital world evolves quickly and it is not the kind of thing where you can set it and forget it and think that customers are going to be as happy a year from now as they are today. They will not be.
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11:42
Venky Ananth
Thank you. That's a great nugget of wisdom from the trenches. I can see that. Thank you. Shifting gears. Marv, one of the most or the least talked about is what I call a tech debt, right? And most large enterprises, fortune 500 firms have this massive challenge of how do you balance business priorities, driving business value, and at the same breadth, how do you maintain the health of your product portfolio? Right? Most of enterprises have shifted to a product paradigm and how do you continuously ensure that you're driving refactoring and ensuring that technology and technical debt is reduced and refactoring is a continuous programmatic strategy. From a technology perspective, how do you balance these two? And you've done that again with a lot of success. Anything that you would like to share on how you manage to do that balancing act?
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12:49
Marvin Richardson
Yeah, definitely. I think it's a great question and a hot topic as well. A lot of boards, I've had a lot of board involvement and a lot of boards talk about tech debt. Kind of amazing that nontechnical people are talking about it. So that concept has really landed in the Csuite and at the board. Importantly, you have to measure it. That's the fundamental starting point. So you need to devise a way to measure tech debt. So, for example, you can look at your portfolio of applications, of systems, of all the pieces that you've got as part of your technology ecosystem, say which ones are on your kind of your future state, which ones are not in your future state, and then measure what it would cost estimate what it would cost to move those into the future state. And that could be your tech debt. That's one example. There's other techniques you could use to create a measurement, but if you don't measure it, then all these people who are talking about it, the board, the C suite, then you're going to lose them. You got to be able to show that you're making progress over time.
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13:50
Marvin Richardson
At the same time, more tech debt kind of accumulates each year. It's like maintaining the streets. You might fix all the potholes, but next year there's still some potholes, right? So you've got to go and fix those as well. So thing one, measure item two. If you're in an organization that has not done a lot with tech debt in the past, then you probably have a backlog that's pretty substantial. And once you can measure and talk about the financial cost of it and talk about the impact to being digital and connecting directly with your customers, then you need to work with your Csuite and your board to get some investment for it. I really think that that's the only way to attack all a big backlog is to make an investment and start burning down that tech debt. But there's one other way to go after it. If you've done that already, you need to slow down the pace of new tech debt accumulating. And so this is where your architecture team is really important. The architecture team needs to be connected with all the different products that are being developed and helping to ensure that some of the choices that are getting made are going in the future direction.
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14:59
Marvin Richardson
And maybe not as much in the old direction, because all the stuff that you keep investing in, that's not in your future state, you're just building that debt up for later. So I think the AR team is really foundational, maybe even to measuring, but certainly to addressing.
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15:15
Venky Ananth
Fantastic. Let me shift to a topic that I know is very close to your heart, which is really around talent. Talent enablement. I know you and our relationship has progressed really from a professional to a true, friendly relationship. And you also founded Driving Forward, helping students, graduating out of colleges and moving into the corporate world. What is your view on how enablement of talent for the next generation of challenges that we have, especially with AI becoming mainstream? What are your views on how can this culture of innovation and digital first? How do we sustain that? How do we ensure that the next generation of talent actually gets skilled and stay relevant in the worlds that we live in?
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16:15
Marvin Richardson
Yeah, this is a great question, very near and dear to my heart. Driving Forward is a nonprofit that I co-founded a couple of years ago during the Pandemic to help. At the time, college students who were impacted by COVID lost their internships to give them a way to get experience in that path to the workforce. Over time, we focused it on first generation college students. So people who don't have a network where they can easily contact somebody who happens to be a product manager at a company because they don't know someone like that. So how do we help trying to create that sort of network for people, The benefit of that kind of approach is that it helps inject talent into the let's focus on the technology area, into the technology field. And often, especially in healthcare, I find that the workforce has been aging over time. And we talk about wanting to be digital. We talk about wanting to be cloud native. Digital native. Well, you know who's kind of cloud native and digital native today's? College students. They're already there. And so it's really important for organizations when they have they need to increase their workforce, not to just get into this kind of round robin game where you post for five year, ten year, 15 year experienced folks.
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17:43
Marvin Richardson
You try to hire them from your competition, and then they try to hire them from you, and then eventually you're just all swapping the same people. You need to be bringing up that fresh talent, not only because it helps you get these kind of cloud native, digital native folks, but we also talk a lot about equity. We talk a lot about diversity. The college graduating cohort is more diverse, is more equity than the current workforce. So if you just go after the college market and bring that college market in, then you are going to increase your equity and diversity in your workforce, which has additional benefits besides just digital native and cloud Native, of course.
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18:18
Venky Ananth
Awesome. Thank you so much, Marv. Truly appreciate that wide range of topics that you covered. Thoroughly enjoyed it and hopefully you enjoyed it. And this tradition of PaceSetters with Marv, we kind of covered digital, we covered data to value, we covered technical debt and we covered talent enablement. So it's been a wide range of topics, real world experience, audiences from Marv. Appreciate it and hopefully you enjoyed it too. Thank you.
