Reimagining How Technology Can Fuel Growth

Did the colleagues have a sense of urgency, were they customer-centric—and if not, what was the best way to inspire them to step into this new world of technology?

But my main focus was on building micro-services on the MercerOS platform and creating content standards, best practices, and components to serve our customers. The platform uses an open source stack that allows us to plug and play. The goal is to eventually build 60 percent of our solutions from components already on the shelf.

I wanted our Global Technology team (we don’t call ourselves IT) to be strategic partners to our business, bringing real value. To do so, MercerOS had to be built for innovation. I wanted an architecture that would encourage people to be creative, allow them to try out new things, and be innovative. Say a team member has an idea they are teasing out or have created a prototype they want to test. Well, if it works and they want to commercialize it, they don’t have to hit a reset button because it’s been built on a common platform.

Data is the lifeblood of any organization. At Mercer we call it the Knowledge Fabric because it weaves together information across our businesses based on a common taxonomy. Our data storage and access on MercerOS has been designed with privacy and security in mind. With a comprehensive data lake and streamlined data pipeline, we could learn more, take smarter actions, and provide our clients with better service in a different way.

I compiled all that information into our port for the CEO, COO, and the leadership team. Experience has taught me a few things when speaking to people on the business side of the ledger. First and foremost, they want to know how your proposed project will lower cost, enable growth, and provide a compelling experience for our customers. The other is to not ask for money but rather ask for their support to free up money for reinvestment company-wide, including technology.

My management style is to lead by example. So I rolled up my sleeves and jumped in. But I knew I couldn’t do it on my own. I needed buy-in from my managers—but not just buy-in. I needed them to be as excited about my vision as I was. So I chose people who had energy and passion, pointed them in the right direction, gave them a gentle push, and got out of their way!

While MercerOS was being implemented we had to continue developing platforms that delivered solutions to each of our verticals while also maintaining the knowledge from those verticals to be able to leverage and reuse the services across the company.

So I had to think creatively about how we could create more speed while standing up MercerOS and maintaining legacy systems. To do so, I got outside vendors to pitch in at their own expense through innovation contests, pilots, and proofs-of-concept for real business problems. That provided an opportunity to establish strategic relationships with our vendor partners as well as test drive some of their new technology capabilities, like AI and robotics.

Perhaps the biggest challenge was how quickly we could move our legacy applications into services on a new platform. Rather than waste years trying to unravel the spider web of applications, I decided to stand up something right beside it.

The challenge was figuring out how to tackle an application-obsolescence problem but not to focus exclusively on how to remediate it. So I flipped it. I acknowledged the issue and proposed a balanced risk approach that would take care of it iteratively, driven by business value with investment from the dollars we would free up. It worked.

Of course there were other challenges along the way—and yes, we did shed a few tears. But we also had a ton of fun. And thanks to a group of dedicated technology team members and other colleagues, I don’t think I ever felt that my hair was on fire.

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