Adopt, Adapt and Ask Lots of Questions

Transcript:

00:00 Introduction: Welcome to Tech Talk, a podcast featuring employees and leaders discussing all things tech at Mutual of Omaha. Join us to learn what tech professionals can gain from a career with us. Let’s talk tech.

00:12 Brian Poppe: Welcome, everyone to another episode of Tech Talk, a podcast sponsored by Mutual of Omaha. I am one of your co-hosts, Brian Poppe. I’ve been at Mutual of Omaha for 14 years and currently lead one of the business units. I’m joined today with Maura Ramsey. Maura, how how’s it going today?

00:28 Maura Ramsey: Hi Brian, I’m doing good, how are you doing?

00:31 Brian Poppe: Yeah. Doing great today.

00:32 Maura Ramsey: Yeah, I heard you finally had the chance to start that new Jury Duty show. What are your thoughts? Are you finding it pretty entertaining?

00:41 Brian Poppe: Oh my gosh yes, thank you for the recommendation! So Jury Duty is on PrimeVideo. For those of you that are not familiar with it, the setup is that there’s one person who thinks they are a juror on an actual case and everybody else in this scenario is a paid actor. And given my love for trash TV, the show has been amazing so far!

01:03 Brian Poppe: I cannot wait to finish this season. It’s just some of those actors are pretty chaotic and I can’t imagine, they’re having to ad lib everything along the way, right? Like they’ve got kind of a loose script of what they’re trying to follow.

01:16 Maura Ramsey: Yes, there’s quite a lot of improve.

01:18 Brian Poppe: Yeah, so much, it’s amazing. Thank you for the recommendation.

01:23 Maura Ramsey: I ended up reading into it, learning about how they set it up. But you’ve got plenty of laughs in store. I embarrassingly admit that I’ve probably watched it already, about two times through. So, it’s light-hearted, it’s good for the end of the day.

01:41 Brian Poppe: Yes. Speaking of folks who know what they’re doing, we’ve got Jamie Fichter joining us today. Jamie, how’s it going?

01:48 Jamie Fichter: Good. Things are good.

01:51 Maura Ramsey: Well welcome Jamie. We’re thrilled to have you as a guest on our podcast. So, we want to learn a little bit more about you. We heard you started a new role, what is that role?

02:02 Jamie Fichter: Yes, I did start a new role. I’ve been at Mutual about 4 years now and within those 4 years this is the third job that I’ve had. I started off as an Enterprise Architect in the Enterprise Architecture group that when I started at Mutual.

I rotated, moved into a Director of Information Services over this group that we call the Common Technology Platform where we were enabling the public and private clouds for tech modernization activities, the big initiative that we have going on for application and technology modernization. I did that for about 3 years and just recently, as you mentioned, I moved more into the Application Development space so, supporting one of the strategic business units in Application Development.

It’s a new role for me within Mutual but something, I’ve done similar things in the past.

03:04 Brian Poppe: That’s great! I’m glad to hear there’s more than just me taking advantage of the rotation here. So glad to hear that you’re doing that. And I don’t think I can quite match the three roles in four years. So well done Jamie.

03:16 Jamie Fichter: Well, I worry sometimes that I have ADHD because I like to do different things. I like the change. But anyway, Mutual is good for rotating people through different things, different experiences. I think it’s a really good thing to have within the company.

03:36 Brian Poppe: Yeah, our long-time listeners and watchers of Tech talk, I would hear that as a common theme. So, I’ve heard you’ve got an employee that works for you named Joe Developer. You want to tell us about Joe?

03:48 Jamie Fichter: Yeah. So, I mentioned that when I was kicking off the common technology platform, the public and private cloud enablement group, we had a ton of work in front of us. We had these tech modernization goals. We wanted to enable ATI, we wanted to enable Amazon Web Services, so on and so forth. And there’s a ton of complexity underlying that statement. You have to have paved a lot of the road to make this happen for the organization. And we were struggling a bit with the messaging of what we were even trying to accomplish and getting alignment with that. So, this story about Joe Developer and the MVP application, and by the way when I call her Joe Developer it shows how I’m not very imaginative in naming things apparently because the name Joe Developer isn’t all that interesting.

04:48 Brian Poppe: I just thought it was a really coincidental last name, but now you’re telling me she’s not a real person!

04:54 Jamie Fichter: We’ll talk later Brian.

But the jest of the story is that Joe can think up an application, a small application admittedly but, think it up in the morning and have enough tools and processes at her fingertips to get it rolling and in production by that afternoon. Roughly in the story it’s about a six-hour change that she does to get her application into production.

As with most organizations of any size that is a tall order, you have a lot of change management and other things you have to get into place before you can make an application change like that. So, we had a lot of path to pave to make that to be true.

05:42 Jamie Fichter: So, this story goes through and talks about her journey through that day about what she does. And, what it helped to do was to solidify the story within people’s minds about what we were trying to accomplish. Really, it’s a persona-based development activity where we use Joe as the persona.

And since that point in time, it’s been an interesting thing to watch, that she as expanded beyond just a purely technical space. She’s been interviewed for a TechMod newsletter, she has shown up in engineering assessments for evaluation of skill sets that you need. So, if Joe needs these skillsets than these are the skillsets, we need for our modernized engineer mindset. And we also used the story as we further developed it into a journey map that we utilize to develop features for the ART for the group to create.

So, she started off as a story to explain things to people but really turned into a guide for how we view modernized cloud-based activities. So, it’s been a great adoption of the story at Mutual.

07:09 Maura Ramsey: So, it’s sounds like Joe’s story is quite the example of what we’re looking for in candidates interested in applying for jobs at Mutual. What other skills or characteristics are you looking for in candidates interesting in working in your space?

07:24 Jamie Fichter: That’s a great question. I think, when we look forward into the new world and the pace of change that we have in front of us in the technology space that the people that are going to be most successful have a couple of traits that come to mind. One of them is curiosity about, in general, everything. How do things work? Why does this thing happen the way that is? How can I do things better and make it more efficient?

When you have that mindset, you’re going to get better over time, your application development activities are going to get better over time. So, I think that curiosity is a core skillset for an engineer.

08:08 Jamie Fichter: Also, I like to call this my version of systems thinking is that the most valuable employees are people who understand that we’re not just building applications for applications sake we’re building an application to enable the business. Maybe we need to make a payment on an insurance claim, or maybe we need to process an insurance application. Those are the business activities that we’re enabling. We’re not just coding to code things, it’s not a science project in other words. So having that context of what we’re doing within the organization, that’s my version of systems thinking.

Those are the two things, curiosity and systems thinking are the two that come to mind that would be great things for employees to have.

08:57 Maura Ramsey: So, for those listeners out there that those characteristics kind of resonate with them, what advice do you have for applying at Mutual and going through that process?

09:07 Jamie Fichter: I think that one thing is to portray the energy and the curiosity once again that you have for things and ensuring that you ask questions. How does this work? Why do we do this this way? I think this shows some analytical thinking that portrays your curiosity once again. So, I think that’s a good thing, just show how you’re thinking about those things and ask those questions about how it fits in the world and what you’re helping to enable.

Also, I mentioned that the pace of change of the technology, showing you have the ability to learn new things is a key skillset for the future. I think it may be the skillset for the future, especially in our space is how do you adapt and adopt quickly to new things. The pace of change is not going to slow as I mentioned. If that makes sense.

10:15 Brian Poppe: Yeah, that’s some great advice and a good thing to end on right? It’s only getting faster from here. So, thanks for joining us today, Jamie, and thank you all for watching. So, on behalf of Maura, myself, and Mutual of Omaha, have a great day, everyone.