敏捷性、人工智能、自动化和员工晋升是 Soni 企业战略的关键支柱，旨在推动增长、提高运营效率并快速增强客户体验。
Deepa Soni 的 CIO 故事是一个关于牺牲、突破舒适区和建立重新定义可能性艺术的信心的故事。在IBM、KeyCorp、M&T Bank和BMO等公司的职业生涯中，她多次“响应号召”，最近担任The Hartford的首席信息官，负责业务技术、网络、数据分析和数据科学的整体战略、愿景和执行。
在最近一期的 Tech Whisperers 播客中，Soni 和我解读了她的领导理念和以业务为中心的技术方法。她还分享了她在承担风险、驾驭复杂性、培养创新文化以及在整个企业中产生重大影响方面学到的一些经验教训。
之后，我们花了更多时间专门关注 Soni 围绕她所谓的“@scale、@pace 4 个 EA”的力量的观点：企业敏捷性、企业 AI、极端自动化和员工（技能）提升。接下来是那段对话，经过编辑以增加长度和清晰度。
Q1：推动增长、提高运营效率和增强客户体验的重要性最近变得更加凸显。企业敏捷性的力量在您实现这些必要条件的努力中扮演什么角色？
迪帕·索尼（Deepa Soni）：我们坚信，企业敏捷性和上市速度是关键的竞争优势，也是我们目标的关键租户。我们专注于敏捷，而不是“做敏捷”。我们敏捷性的第二个方面是，我们坚信企业敏捷性——业务、技术、财务、人力资源，所有职能部门齐心协力，真正改变了我们交付技术的工作方式。这是我们工作方式的关键基础，它为我们提供了实际采取下一步变革的基础，即下一个 EA，这是企业 AI 的力量。
Q2：作为企业 AI 支柱的一部分，您可以使用“信息优势”一词来表示利用数据、高级分析和机器学习为企业和客户释放价值的战略。你能详细说说吗？
迪帕·索尼（Deepa Soni）：当我们考虑在推动 The Hartford 的业务成果和竞争优势方面的下一步变革时，这实际上是我们以 AI 为主导的转型。作为一家保险公司，我们的数据非常丰富，那么我们如何利用这些丰富的数据，并在决策者的指尖大规模、快速地将其转化为有价值的见解？我们把这种整体现象称为信息优势。
摆在我们面前的机会是将高级分析和人工智能的力量带到第一线——我们的理赔员、我们的服务专业人员、我们的销售人员、我们的承保人——为他们提供所需的信息，使他们的工作更轻松、更快捷，这样他们就可以在无摩擦的体验中响应客户。这一切都是为了获取原始数据并将其转化为由 AI 提供支持的见解，并将其交付给一线。
这就是我们所说的信息优势。这是一个简单而强大的概念，但很难做到。但我们相信，我们拥有实现这一目标的所有要素，并为哈特福德提供竞争优势。
Q3：作为极致自动化支柱的一部分，您正在简化和现代化应用程序和数据资产，以提高速度、敏捷性和创新。这种方法对 IT 组织本身有何影响？
迪帕·索尼（Deepa Soni）：当我们考虑在市场上竞争并创造竞争优势时，交付速度至关重要。如今，IT 组织拥有许多流程，这些流程可以通过自动化获得很大的优势。因此，当我们谈论业务流程的数字化时，极端自动化的故事是将我们的 IT 流程数字化和高度自动化，以便我们可以加快上市速度。
这将改变 IT 的面貌，包括我们的工作方式、谁在做什么事情以及我们将精力集中在何处。这确实简化了开发人员的体验，并简化了我们工程师的体验，这样他们就可以专注于交付业务功能，而不是在技术上辛苦工作。
这自然而然地将我们引向了员工技能提升的力量。在这些其他支柱的背景下，很明显，人才确实是支撑一切的支柱。
完全。当我们承担转型的这些关键支柱时，员工晋升才是真正关键的。这个支柱是关于投资于我们的员工，投资于我们的供应商和我们的供应商资源，并真正让他们为下一代技能做好准备。这将确保，随着我们实现极端自动化并更多地利用人工智能、数据和分析的力量，我们的员工将准备好迎接这一挑战，并成为与企业合作的核心合作伙伴。这就是为什么最大限度地发挥人才是哈特福德战略的一个主要要素。
Q4：您能谈谈 EA @scale、@pace 意味着什么，以及它如何成为 The Hartford 的差异化因素吗？
迪帕·索尼（Deepa Soni）：每个人都在做所有这些事情，但我认为对我们来说，一个重要的区别在于我们在整个企业范围内做这件事，这是@scale。我们正在@pace做这件事，这意味着我们的移动速度可能是我职业生涯中见过的最快的。我们有内部和外部基准来表明，转型——我们从起点到现在和要去的地方的方式——是快节奏的。
Q5：当你展望未来时，当你到达另一边时，这是什么样子的？EA的愿景是什么，EA@scale什么，@pace使组织能够以不同的方式做事？
迪帕·索尼（Deepa Soni）：当我们展望保险业的未来时，新的风险正在出现。这些变化与技术颠覆相结合，从根本上改变了风险格局。客户要求并期待更数字化的保险方法。流程的简化和数字化将继续是我们的首要任务。我们的愿景是建立一个技术组织，不卷入非以业务为中心的工作，而是主要专注于以业务为中心。EA @scale 的强大功能，@pace为我们提供了最先进的技术组织，可以推动业务的创新、敏捷性和增长，从而支持这一愿景。
英文原文：
The Hartford CIO Deepa Soni on transforming at scale
Agility, AI, automation, and employee advancement are the key pillars of Soni’s enterprise-wide strategy to drive growth, improve operational efficiencies, and enhance customer experience at speed.
Deepa Soni’s CIO story is one of sacrifice, breaking through comfort zones, and building confidence in redefining the art of the possible. In a career spanning such companies as IBM, KeyCorp, M&T Bank, and BMO, she has “answered the call” many times, most recently as CIO of The Hartford, where she is responsible for the overall strategy, vision, and execution of business technology, cyber, data analytics, and data science.
On a recent episode of the Tech Whisperers podcast, Soni and I unpacked her leadership philosophies and business-centric approach to technology. She also shared some of the lessons she’s learned about taking risks, navigating complexity, fostering an innovative culture, and creating significant impact across the business.
Afterwards we spent some more time focused specifically on Soni’s perspectives around the power of what she calls “the 4 EAs @scale, @pace”: enterprise agility, enterprise AI, extreme automation, and employee (skill) advancement. What follows is that conversation, edited for length and clarity.
Dan Roberts: The imperative to drive growth, improve operational efficiencies, and enhance customer experiences has become even more heightened of late. What role does the power of enterprise agility play in your efforts to achieve these imperatives?
Deepa Soni: We strongly believe that enterprise agility and speed-to-market are key competitive advantages, and they’re a key tenant of our objectives. We are focused on being agile, not ‘doing Agile.’ The second aspect of our agility is that we strongly believe in enterprise agility — the business, the technology, finance, HR, all functions came together to really change our ways of working to deliver technology. That has been a key foundation of how we work, and it’s given us the foundation to actually take the next step change, the next EA, which is the power of enterprise AI.
As part of your enterprise AI pillar, you use the phrase ‘information advantage’ to signify a strategy of leveraging data, advanced analytics, and machine learning to unlock value for your business and customers. Can you expand on that?
As we think about our next step change in driving business outcomes and competitive advantage for The Hartford, it is really our AI-led transformation. As an insurance company, we are quite data rich, so how do we take that rich data and convert it into valuable insights at scale, at speed, at the fingertips of our decision-makers? We call this whole phenomenon information advantage.
The opportunity in front of us is bringing the power of advanced analytics and artificial intelligence to the front line — to our claim adjusters, to our service professionals, to our salespeople, to our underwriters — giving them the information they need to make their jobs easier, faster, so they can respond to the customer in a frictionless experience. It’s all about taking raw data and converting that into insights powered by AI and delivering it to the front line.
That’s what we call our information advantage. It’s a simple, powerful concept, but hard to do. But we believe we have all the ingredients to make this happen and deliver a competitive advantage for The Hartford.
As part of your extreme automation pillar, you’re on a journey to simplify and modernize applications and data assets to drive speed, agility, and innovation. How is this approach impacting the IT organization itself?
As we think about competing in the marketplace and creating competitive advantage, speed of delivery is critical. The IT organization has a lot of processes today that could have a big advantage by being automated. So while we talk about the digitization of the business processes, the story of extreme automation is digitizing and extremely automating our processes within IT so we can accelerate our speed-to-market.
This is something that is going to change the face of IT in terms of how we work, who works on what things, and where we focus our energy. This is really streamlining developer experience and streamlining our engineers’ experience so they can focus on delivering business functionality and not toil on technical stuff.
That naturally leads us to the power of employee skill advancement. In the context of these other pillars, it becomes clear that talent is really the pillar that underpins everything.
Exactly. As we take on these key pillars of transformation, employee advancement is the one that is really critical. This pillar is about investing in our employees and investing with our vendors and our vendor resources, and really preparing them for the next generation of skill sets. This will ensure that, as we do extreme automation and leverage the power of AI and data and analytics more, our employees will be ready to take on that challenge and be a core partner in working with the business. This is why maximizing talent is a major element of The Hartford’s strategy.
Can you talk about what EA @scale, @pace, means and how that’s a differentiator for The Hartford?
Everybody’s doing all of these things, but I think what’s an important differentiator for us is we’re doing it enterprise wide, which is @scale. And we’re doing it @pace, meaning the speed at which we’re moving is probably the fastest that I’ve ever seen in my career. We have internal and external benchmarks to show that the transformation — the way we’re moving from where we started to where we are and where we’re going — is fast paced.
As you look to the future, what does this look like when you get to the other side? What’s the vision, and what does EA @scale, @pace enable the organization to do differently?
As we look at the future of insurance, new risks are emerging. These changes, along with technological disruptions, are combining to radically change the risk landscape. Customers are demanding and expecting a more digital approach to the insurance. Simplification and digitization of processes will continue to be at forefront for us. The vision is to have a technology organization that is not embroiled in the non-business-centric work but is largely focused on business centricity. The power of EA @scale, @pace supports that vision by giving us a state-of-the art technology organization that can drive innovation, agility, and growth for the business.
